While the children of the white middle classes are being looked after with Kiwibuild, the poor continue to rot on the streets…
Mother raising four children in tents after being unable to find home
A mother and her four children have been roughing it for the summer, but not out of choice.They’re living in tents and a car near Palmerston North and the novelty is starting to wear off.
Sharon Baker and her four children, aged from 9 to 17, spent seven years living with Baker’s uncle, Robert White, at a property in the city.
The landlord decided to sell and Baker and her family had to leave by October 28. After a brief stint camping at Tangimoana Beach, the family have been living at the Ashhurst Domain campground for 28 days in a group of tents, and White sleeps in a car.
…the reality will be dawning upon Jacinda that none of her politics of kindness means a thing when the public service is as toxic and unaccountable as it is. She can flash wonderful smiles but it doesn’t stop that WINZ worker gleefully cutting off a welfare cheque, or MSD spying on sexual assault victims or a Corrections Officer double bunking sex offenders with vulnerable prisoners. The cultures of these public services are poisoned to the core and the neoliberal Wellington bureaucratic elites know they just have to wait it out before National are back in charge again.
Only an immense shock can give Jacinda the political capital to purge and rebuild the public service.
Unfortunately the poor living in cars and tents must wait for the system to melt down before they will see a better dawn.
Yea/Nah ……. Never mind @ Martyn. WINZ will soon be able to ask MBIE to get a profile on this dirty filthy bennie
(/sarc)
( https://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/379727/mbie-seeks-training-on-managing-fake-online-personas )
When you think of today’s Public Service, you have to wonder why it is that increasing numbers of these fiefdoms seem to want to set up their own little Police forces and how that fits with kinder government.
Thompson and Clark (that was unacceptable), – then demographic profiling (that was unacceptable), and now this (yea/nah …. not really as bad eh?).
I suppose they’ll be able to get a caring and sharing public servant to go around to the tent wearing a stab-proof vest to sort it all out and wrap around some services going forward in this space.
yes I see this happening now Martyn in our Hutt valley community where national sold of many blocks of land with state flats and are building half a million dollar homes in the bronxs areas. These are the areas they allocated to Maori, PI and some of our poor pakeha whanau. Now we cant even afford to live there and the current government needs to fix this now. To make matters worse when I spoke to the builders they told me Asian people had brought all the houses so far this made me f..n angry and this is not right or fair.
Why is it that ‘social services’ cannot sort out these situations immediately. Is it because they don’t vote or they are not the party’s constituency. It is a disgrace that in a country of plenty anyone is having to live like this.
Apparently the most common group in poverty is pakeha parents on wages.
“The research evidence points to the most common household in poverty is a Pakeha couple with children living in their own house (with a mortgage) and being dependent upon wages”
https://www.pundit.co.nz/content/invisible-children
So your race, class based rant is a bit of hyperbole because the Labour policy is not helping the white middle classes as you seem to think.
I’m against Kiwibuild, because it mostly helps corporate welfare and is a transfer of public assets to the private sector and all to help richer first home buyers aka you have to be on double the average income to be able to afford that Kiwbuild affordable house!!!!!!! Crazy!!!
Not a lot for renters with Kiwibuild and not only that, the focus for construction is on building unaffordable houses of circa $800k+ often nearly an hour by public transport (if there is any) outside of city centres or overprice apartments.
The flawed housing approach, as well as increasing pollution and congestion is forcing more price rises on the poor with petrol tax rises and cheaper houses and options being demolished.
Now the poor compete with the satellite families and wealthy new home owners in the new poorly thought out housing estates.
Under Kiwibuild practically everyone except construction is worse off.
A lot of the Kiwibuild offerings seem like the same prices as the private sector! Because essentially it is the private sector offering them in a PPP without the name with government.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting the best for each other. The problem is wanting extra for those at the top.
In the real world Kiwibuild enables
1. new homes continue to be built when the property market has peaked in value.
2. ensures the property market has peaked in value.
There is no other way to guarantee a sustained (affordable to government) boost in supply of homes (the government cannot afford the same number of newly built state homes).
NZ Inc is a sophisticated PONZI SCHEME, I am sure you know it. Having a steady flow of new immigrants and also overseas investors keeps the Ponzi Scheme fed and alive, so that is why this double standard government does what it does, and does not what it said it would do.
Nothing changes because govt does not change……
Sorry Martin, but it is inconsistent to rail on about having to get a 51% majority, so lose the identity politics and focus on the real economic issues … and then oppose efforts to help people into home ownership while there is a homelessness problem. To win 51%, a government has to focus on both.
As to homelessness, the approach applied after the Christchurch earthquake needs to be resorted where this problem occurs – short term emergency solutions. Temporary accommodation, the trailer home/small home park.
@SPC, seriously what planet are you on, if you think homeless people are on $100k income and can afford a $500k one bedroom apartment and the associated costs of rates, insurance and Body corporates or $600k 3 bedroom house and qualify for a bank loans for the money as under Kiwibuild?
No point increasing housing supply at great costs, when you don’t stop demand and increase it, on steroids. Last year we allowed in 129 000 migrants for a population of almost 5 million. That is an astonishingly large amount of migrants and a short term and stupid approach which negatively effects everything from housing to hospitals and government immigration policy causing most of the problems!
On top of that we have 150 000 international students and workers with temporary work visas and almost 4 million tourists visiting us each year.
The competition for houses is not some accident, it is a state run exercise of stupidity. Especially when the migrants who paid no taxes previously (and are often of small incomes) need to use the hospitals, schools and roads and will qualify for super in many cases and most migrant workers gaining residency under the working wages either need welfare top ups for their salaries or pay a minuscule amount of tax if they make the working wage. All while putting locals on the dole and lowering wages when they can’t compete with people paying for a job and a network of migrants and offshore based multinationals sponsoring other migrants for work rather than employing locals so you are getting a Ponzi going.
All you need to do is get on tinder, marry someone or have a kid to help the process immigration process along! No wonder the midwives are straining under the loads.
The migrants as they are coming in under government policy are mostly costing the taxpayers money in subsidies and are of a much lower skills/educational standard than even 5 years ago. That isn’t even allowing for the rise in ‘masters’ degrees of dubious quality, which presumably increases the educational statistics but are at much lower quality of degree, some might even call them fake degrees if an equivalent standard was applied along Masters or degree programs and they had to sit the same exams.
The state houses are not being increased in any real numbers, in fact they are being demolished and the state house land sold off, so that a few ‘lucky’ state house tenants get a middle class, brand new, state house at extreme cost, instead of renovating ALL of the state house stock within 6 months which would be a better outcome as well as KEEPING state house land.
Kiwibuild should be building houses with the state, employing and training locals with hands on training under registered builders, and training school leavers and unemployed while they build them.
Habitat for humanity rely on the actual homeowners to help the build so you don’t need to import in cheap labour when you already have it in NZ in spades and they could be upskilled at the same time!
The state can then benefit from RENTING out more state houses them to increase the state house numbers which the RENTS will pay for over time while solving the housing crisis!
While Labour, Greens and NZ First might be attempting to do something with housing, sadly they are taking their advice from the construction industry giving them free public land and social lobbyists who are clueless!!!!
They are not increasing the housing supply at great cost because they are on-selling the homes.
As to increasing the number of state houses, the problem is land cost. The current practice appears to be to demolish homes and build an equivalent number (or a little more) of state houses on part of the land and finance the cost by selling off the rest of the land to private owners.
I suspect there might be a case for just moving some of the older houses and renovating them for use in Northland (where there is a real need).
Yeah sure they need to to get immigration levels down if they want housing success, and do this without slowing economic growth (not easy given their less than 30% of GDP spending restraint).
@SPC, The cost is long term because they are selling off the land. As our population increases they will either have to buy back the land at market rates to build state house on, or they will have to pay market rents.
It became laughable in the UK when they also did a state house sell off under Thatcher and then had to pay millions of dollars to buy back the land they sold for a song.
In NZ if we remain a social democrat country (against going towards the zero welfare state like Asia) our politicians will see their folly within their own lifetimes as they have to pay to keep the state house model with increased population and our immigration policy is geared towards a low waged economy not a high skill, high wage economy so more migrants as well as locals will need and qualify for state housing.
What happened in the UK…
Tory council spends £90m buying back the SAME council flats it sold off for a fraction of the price under Right to Buy
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/ampp3d/tory-council-spends-90m-buying-5634579
“Meanwhile rents for remaining council tenants rose with a new alacrity. By 1991 they were 55% higher, relative to average earnings, than they had been 10 years earlier. “If it were not for the right to buy,” conclude Jones and Murie, “the council housing sector as a whole would have generated huge surpluses [from rental income] and the rise in real rents … would not have been necessary.” Or to put it more directly: home ownership was made possible for wealthier council tenants through discounts paid for by their poorer neighbours.”
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/aug/26/right-to-buy-margaret-thatcher-david-cameron-housing-crisis
The defence force in the UK sold off their defence houses and now they have massive private rental bills to house their own defence force!!!
Yes, ideally they would have doubled/tripled the number of state houses on the state house land.
But they followed the National pathway of mixed rebuild, (to finance the new state house builds) placing in Kiwibuilds for private buyers. To do otherwise they had to either
1. give up the 30% GDP spending restraint
2. re-prioritise spending – keep the $3B they give in super to those still working (a billion into state housing, a billion into health and a billion into education).
3. fund it out of public issue of finance
4. change their debt target and borrow
The problem is accountancy based policy is not practical and costs more on the long run aka if they did true projections (if there is even the expertise in Wellington to do that, which I seriously doubt because the are just into ideology) when looking at population projections and welfare projections, housing and so forth, they will realise they are in big trouble.
129,000 migrants last year, probably most of them on average to low incomes, they will qualify for welfare as soon as they have their first child. So 129,000 migrants having 1 child turns into 258,000 migrants and having 2 children turns into 387,000 migrants and that is per year… supporting 2 aged parents into NZ makes that 516,000 migrants of which the children and parents and probably the workers all qualify for welfare… need health, education, roads and public transport built…
They need brains in Wellington not accountants and neoliberal flunkies…
The other day a 79 year old migrant who was sponsered into NZ by here decided to marry a 60 year old after an 11 day romance and a $10,000 contribution. Probably both the 79 year old and the 60 year old will never pay any taxes but will still qualify for super and health care.
https://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/376220/10k-11-days-and-one-failed-deportation
Then we have the Sroubek example who without having residency managed to get his Russian wife residency with a job in their import business that later he was jailed for importing in drugs. So far cost maybe more than $500,000 to NZ taxpayers in jail costs and justice costs alone… Would not surprise me if Mum, is there too, trying to get in on the residency too and rumours were in spite of the 2 million home he was somehow getting legal aid…
Not sure why the house not seized under the proceeds of crimes act???
They are ‘adequately housed’, are they not, a tent provides shelter from rain and weather, and they will have access to flowing water, and even electricity, at the campgrounds. Housing NZ told many applicants living in shit boarding houses and so, they were ‘adequately housed’, so will MSD do with similar circumstances, I suppose.
The government may have changed, the lingo may have changed, only little else has changed, I note, also MSD and WINZ making appalling decisions and mistakes, on a daily basis.
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