This weeks Waatea news column – Housing Summit – a conference of despair and desperation

This weeks Waatea news column –
Housing Summit – a conference of despair and desperation

The horror, pain, desperation, hurt, despair and social damage being perpetrated by this Government in state housing was stripped bare at the Housing Summit in Auckland today.

The only media there to cover it was myself on behalf of Waatea News and Mike Treen from Unite.

I’m not sure what was more terribly saddening, the stories on display or that there were so few media bothering to turn up.

The reality of National’s draconian state housing policies collide with the cruelty of WINZ and astounding incompetence of CYFs and the media’s focus is on Inky the bloody octopus.

John Minto, Prue Kapua, Efeso Collins, Tamaki Housing Group, Vanessa Kurangi, Vanessa Cole, Dr Innes Asher, Darryl Evans, Dr Huhana Hickey, Rachel Goldsmith, Danielle Bergin, Rev Uesifili Unasa, Rev Michael Blakely, Rev Kereama Pene, Syd Keepa, Mike Treen, Robert Reid and Phil Palfrey highlighted the suffering state house tenants are being exposed to in dreadful detail.

It was beyond sobering, it was rage inducing. That the most vulnerable amongst us should be forced to live with such appalling processes should lead every news bulletin.

It won’t.

The poor, Maori, Pacific Islanders, working classes and the disabled lined up to give witness to their experiences and they were horrific. The disabled lesbian who has to defend her lifestyle to religious agencies who now own her home, the poor who have to answer to corporate Iwi instead of the state, the rape victim who was forced to live next to the place she was raped in, the children who are dying early because of disgusting houses and the fear that the stasi like State Housing and WINZ create is despicable in a country that likes to think of itself as a liberal democracy.

State Housing was once a means of empowering those most vulnerable in society, the most staggering shock from the conference was the total lack of hope the privatisation agenda run by National has generated.

The conference split into groups and they worked on ideas and strategies to fight back, refusing to allow their pain and experiences to be for nothing. If only Bill English and Nick Smith had been there to hear the torture they are passing as policy.

It seems the state house dream of Michael Joseph Savage has died, but what is most distressing is that so few NZers have turned up to the funeral. We must not and can not allow these courageous souls fight on their own.