Congratulations NZ – our homelessness now worst in OECD – just don’t pretend to be surprised

By
Martyn Bradbury
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17
47

Well, well, well – how’s our rock star economy going?

According to this Government, magnificently.

Fake growth built upon record immigration, a speculative property bubble and rebuilding from natural disasters however doesn’t do anything other than exacerbate the poverty for this at the bottom, and for them National’s Rock Star Economy is the death rattle of hope.

Look at this and feel shame…

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NZ tops list of developed countries with most homeless

Yale University has released a list of developed countries ranked on the number of homeless people per capita – which has New Zealand at the top, followed by the Czech Republic and Australia.

It found about 40,000 people are either living on the street, in emergency housing, or shelter considered sub-standard.

…and while our homelessness explodes the Government have the audacity to claim they were slow to move on housing, despite the fact they’ve spent the better part of the last decade throwing state tenants onto the streets and privatising state homes…

…and while the homeless freeze and while 1600 NZers die each year from the cold, Kiwi baby death rates are not improving because of poverty.

The budget to house the homeless has blown out directly because of National’s mass immigration policy and State House privatisation agenda that has used any pretext to throw state tenants out of their houses and leave them to the mercy of the market.

This homelessness is a direct result of National Party policy, they can not pretend to not know they created it and fostered it. When the Salvation Army criticised John Key for suggesting MoD staff joined them to visit the homeless in their cars, it was because these neoliberal welfare state agencies now terrify the poor so much and are seen as such a large part of the problem that Kiwi’s would prefer to sleep homeless in cars than risk any interaction with state agencies that fine them, punish them and enslave them into debt. The Salvation Army were lashing out because news that Government Agencies were visiting alongside them risked the reputation of the Salvation Army to help the most desperate.

That’s how frightened the poor are of our neoliberal welfare agencies.

As the homeless start to freeze to death on the streets of our main cities, we must acknowledge the brutal murder and grim burial of egalitarian NZ. The middle classes have walked away from their traditional role of holding the worst elements of the right in check at the ballot box because this right wing Government have given them a decades worth of untaxed capital gains on their properties.

We have become the Land of the Wrong Uptight Crowd.

 

17 COMMENTS

  2. It appears we are heading back to the 1920’s right before the big crash. Social conditions based on inequality levels were similar. Maybe we are heading into a great depression…

    • 1000% yes JONO,

      We are headed into the storm of the deepest depression the world has ever known.

      The banks are creaking with debt because of the loss of low low interest rate drops being close to zero now so we are in an effective “negative interest economy.

      Ask any economist and they will tell you it won’t work and will crash when the banks go broke.

      Classic last rung towards a depression sitting right in front of “our titanic” but few out there can even see it yet.

      The master engineers of “The new world order” has stated they need to remove a third of the global population before we can save the world from climate change and world wars.

  3. SAdly I think you are exactly right Martyn. This situation is repulsive and we got here from selfishness. This government is a government for the self contented at the expense of the (increasingly) poor. The campaign add that Chris Trotter critiqued plays to this: “I’m alright jack”.
    The cult of the individual has destroyed our egalitarian society because we (as a country) vote for it.

  5. @ CB I do too wonder how, with such a small population, fertile land and surrounded by ocean bounty – we have such poverty… You are right – all of us, including the farmers, have been screwed over – big time – NZ has gone down hill over the past 30 years ( quickest in the last ten ) time to turn the tide and head up hill over the next thirty… That’s if climate change, water shortages ( stop giving our water away for pittance you numbskulls ) hunger or nuclear war doesn’t get in the way first.

    • US Fed buying sovereign debt on the international bonds market in NZ since S&P crises. Financing political agenda since 1989 (Links availible upon request).

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