This is NZ poverty in 2017

By
Carmel Sepuloni
-
51
256

Another example of how desperate the housing crisis has become and how quickly situations can escalate to homelessness for families.

This is a makeshift tent where a couple and their 2 children are living in my electorate.

The father was working full time sand blasting but his safety gear was not adequate and he had to stop because he has major issues with his eyes.

He is on the waiting list for an operation to repair them.

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On losing his job they went to WINZ for help – got on a benefit but being in overdraft their first payments were taken by the bank.

They were then evicted for not paying rent.

They are now living in this make shift tent at the back of someone’s house.

We are in contact with WINZ and HNZ and are now being told they will get them housed (we had contacted them urgently on the day they were going to be evicted but there were no motels available on the day so yhe family had to set this up – follwing that winz found a motel but the family were fearful of going in to debt with the motel emergency housing cost).

Again – how bad do things have to get?!

 

Carmel Sepuloni is a Labour Party MP

51 COMMENTS

  2. This shows just how ineffective Bills social investment approach has been the motel owners are the winners and we the tax payers are paying for people down and out to stay in motels cause bill is selling our sate homes to the rich so they can increase there wealth

    • Rich people are getting richer through government payments – that would be a huge success in National’s terms.

      • Bloody National Government criminals for allowing things to get so bad here in our once proud egalitarian NZ now just makes my blood boil when I see this in regional NZ like in Napier and GIsborne you can see this all the time also.

        Shame on you Bill English you will pay for your sins.

  3. “Again – how bad do things have to get?!”

    That’s a good question. How bad do things have to get before Labour propose a decent state housing policy.

    ‘Affordable housing’ does nothing for this family in your electorate.

    Aiming for 10,000 state houses a year would be a good start. Get back to your roots Labour!

    • Maybe she should offer to house them in the Labour electorate office until they get a place?

      If their plight was due to losing their job due to sickness and being in debt. What about ACC?

      A good reason for extending the working for families to beneficiaries. Have to say I think there are better options – like a completely overhaul of the social services into a UBI type system – but they need to do something to keep the next generation out of this situation as people are losing their jobs and having to rely on WINZ who seem to be trying to make life as difficult as possible.

      Anyway very sad, and this type of poverty is something we never saw under a Labour government.

      Vote everyone.

      • Save NZ what about ACC where have you been living I suggest you google ACC Lawyer John Miller he has been very busy fighting in the courts for many NZers who have been railroaded by the gnats and their ACC polices trying to tell people their injuries are degenerative and denying them there entitlements

  4. New Zealand has had housing crises periodically since the Maori Wars, when English were hurriedly brought here to bolster the number of men at arms and had to live in tents, with their families, for up to 2 years.

    The only times NZ did not have a housing crisis was during the brief periods when more people were leaving than arriving.

    With the collapse of the global economic-political system underway the chance of more people leaving NZ than arriving is approximately zero (only a major eruption of volcanoes on the Auckland isthmus would drive people away) and we should expect the housing crisis to be made progressively worse, whichever party is in power.

  5. It would be good to see Carmel Sepuloni explain how this situation will be reversed under a Labour Government.
    Will 5000 state houses fix it?
    Will the chance to by a $500,000 ‘affordable’ house fix it?
    Will further subsidising landlords to get their houses up to scratch and subsidizing their over the market rents with more accommodation allowances fix it??

    Unless the housing market is killed off the only answer is State Houses for ALL working and retired ‘poor’ and low-middle. Otherwise we will end up with half the population trapped in a life long scramble to avoid having their household sitting under a blue tarpaulin.

    • Nope, Labour’s plan is out of date and will not solve this affordability crisis, we allow even many migrants to come here and work, AND buy houses, AND look for rentals, that are already unaffordable in places like Auckland, Christchurch and now also Wellington.

  9. I’m guessing the extent of the housing crisis has become obvious to anyone who bothers to visit this site (except maybe the trolls). This family’s plight is appalling, but no more so than the families we saw living in cars last year. The question is, as always, what can we do?

    It’s in the opposition parties’ interests (and Carmel’s) to convince us that the solution is a change of government, just as it’s in the interest of National to convince us that more of the same will work. But there’s no point putting energy into electoral change unless there’s good reason to think a new government will actually do something different, rather than serving up business-as-usual noodles with a different flavour sachet.

    As Fatty and others have pointed out, the housing policy Labour have produced so far is not even close to addressing the extent of the problem. At present, it remains the same weak-kneed “leftish” window-dressing that arguably lost them the last election (by failing to engage the registered non-vote”). But do they really have any choice? Is it really possible to promote the radical solutions that are clearly needed and win an election?

    The history of electoral politics in Aotearoa suggest not. All of the major periods of social progress, and social regress (eg the neo-liberal coup in 1984), were driven either by extra-parliamentary social movements creating a clear public mandate that allowed/ obliged the governing party(s) to act, or by governments who talked about one thing on the campaign trail and did another once in government.

    If we want more radical or class-based policy from the current opposition parties, especially if they become a government, we need to organise a more radical extra-parliamentary opposition. One that articulate and embodies cross-identity class politics. One with teeth, not just Twitter accounts. The question we need to ask is not “what can Labour do?”, but “what can we do?”.

  10. Doesn’t it just make you proud to be a NuZullner! (/sarc – just in case the Natzis and Thiel don’t get it)
    We’re just such an fair-minded, tolerant, egalitarian, 1st world nation that punches above our weight

  11. Oh…. by the way – did you know Bill English apparently has strong Christian values? or so I heard some media commentator say on our media. It could have even been on Noin ta Noon with that sage Mathew Hooten.
    I’ve seen better and warmer tents in the 3rd World

    • see Andrew’s comment above re “other people’s MONEY”

      It’s easy to spend other people’s humanity too whilst you’re counting those ‘hard earned’ bits of paper.

  12. How can someone say $500,000 is an affordable home, a $400,000 mortgage at 5% is $20,000 in interest alone let alone principle which would be another $20,000 a year on a 20 year mortgage that $40,000 per annum after tax in principle and interest payments.

    So say you earn $20 per hour for a 40 hour week thats $800 pre tax or say $600 post tax, your earnings of $30,000 per annum still do not cover the mortgage repayment let alone feeding and clothing the family.

    The NZ Housing Market and House Price Inflation has been purely driven by offshore speculative funding and I am not dog whistling.

    • It looks like no one has contacted you so I would suggest getting in touch with Carmel Sepoluni either via fb email or twitter. I don’t know if she has an out of hours phone number but all the rest is available if you go to parliament website.
      Good for you – hope you manage to contact them.

      • So no doubt Carmel will be telling Labour it needs to reintroduce the special benefit that it abolished under urgency in 2004? I doubt it, somehow.

        It’s great Sepuloni is highlighting the horrendous problems in her electorate and elsewhere, but I can’t stomach the hypocrisy in that Labour contributed hugely to this through its assault on social welfare during the Clark years, and at the same time make absolutely no effort to acknowledge that. Labour is truly sickening when it comes to the poor and what they did between 1999 and 2008.

        Acknowledge that, Carmel, apologise and address it, then maybe we can take you seriously.

        • NZ Inc has indeed a “good record”, one at PRETENDING to do something for the poor and vulnerable.

          We have governments that pander to the interests of those that have properties, that strive to get into properties and up the “property ladder”, that have jobs and that are desperate to get into any job, to “work their way up”, and become the “middle ground”, which includes the upper middle class, whose votes they are so keen on. Those are the only ones that really make an effort voting, the truly disadvantaged are commonly shat on, e.g. by English and Nats, always going on abut “the first benefit increases in 40 years”, which due to limited entitlements to parents on benefits (who have to jump through endless hoops to get any benefit support), and due to abatement regimes, will end up like nothing much at all in people’s pockets.

          Lies, lies and endless lies, that is what we get, it is time to start the revolution, that is, if anyone out there is prepared to actually start making REAL change here.

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