The government’s intention to sell up to 2,500 state houses in Christchurch can expect to be met with a vigorous community campaign to stop the sales.
There is a desperate housing shortage in Christchurch so it’s not enough to grimace and accept another savage blow to this community by the National government. We can analyse their policies to death but unless we are prepared to act against them then we are complicit with them.
This policy is designed to continue the biggest privatisation of state assets ever undertaken in New Zealand – our $18 billion of state houses.
It is deceitful for Minister of State Housing Bill English to claim that one in five Housing New Zealand properties in Christchurch are “under-utilised.”
We have families living in sandhills, parks, cars and under bridges across the city.
There is a huge demand for state housing which the government is walking away from.
It is similarly deceitful for Social Housing Minister Paula Bennett to say the sale of state houses in Christchurch will “improve the quality of service to tenants”
I have read the sale/purchase contract between IHC (through its subsidiary Accessible Housing) and the government for the 1124 state house the government wants to sell in Tauranga and nowhere is there any requirement for better services for tenants.
Bennett’s statement is a public relations lie to appease a public deeply concerned about the housing crisis.
In taking on the people of Christchurch the government will find it has taken on more than it can chew. Our community will reject this policy and we will campaign to defeat it.
Is IHC buying the houses in Christchurch, too?
It seems WINZ still offer their $3,000 to Christchurch package, encouraging people to move there and take up work:
https://www.workandincome.govt.nz/look-for-work/work-programmes/3k-to-christchurch/index.html
Add the immigrants called in to rebuild the city and to do other work, no wonder there are housing pressures in the second largest city of the country.
These sales plans will simply be more of the same, I guess, offering homes to “social housing providers”, who will then make deals with developers, to use some of the land for redevelopment and building not that cheap homes for new buyers, while a few homes stacked on top of each other in blocks of apartments will be offered for low income earners to live in.
We are seeing a trend to re-house the poor in the ghettos of the future, nothing else.
National are probably hoping the Christchurch city councils new housing trust will cough up the billion national wants for the tax cuts next year. Hence why they picked Christchurch.
Take IHC’s charitable status away. They’re a bunch of profiteering right-wing fucks who’re helping Key wreck this country. They’re totally despicable.
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