The rich and their cronies in the media have united against New Zealand families to trample them into greater poverty and homelessness.
At the spearhead of this latest assault on New Zealand families, is a propaganda campaign being waged to demonise renters, espeially state house tenants.
The purpose of this campaign is to continue, and even accelerate, the dismantling and privatisation of the state housing system, to push more families into the already overcrowded private housing market, to benefit the private landlords, developers, housing speculators and banksters who benefit from inflated private housing costs..
At the forefront of this vicious propaganda campaign is the New Zealand Herald.
The New Zealand Herald is appalled, that since the election of the Ardern administration, in 2017 there have ‘only’ been three evictions from state housing.
I am appalled that there has been that many, especially in the midst of a global pandemic.
The Herald and their right wing backers want to see many more state house tenants evicted onto the streets.
Make no mistake the motive of this propaganda war against state house.tenants, is the dismantling and privatisatioon of the state housing system. The NZ Herald are softening us up to accept the eviction of state house tenants onto the streets.
What is new, is this time the government is the landlord and state tenants are the target.
After decades of mass sell offs and giveaways of state housing stock, to the benefit of private landlords and developers, the state housing system no longer has the capacity it once had to cope with troubled families.
The wholesale clearance of previous state house suburbs, in Glen Innes, Pamure, Mt. Roskill, Orakei, and the gentrification of these areas, have seen privileged private home owners pitted against the remaining pockets of state house tenants.
To those private home owners who have benefited from the sell off and demolition of state houses so that you can move in to buy or build in previouos state housing areas, And who believe the Herald’s lies that State Housing tenants are “privileged”. You are the ones who are privileged not us.
And we were here first. If you can’t live with us, some of us, with problems and life experiences you will never understand, Don’t buy or build in our areas. If you have already bought or built where a state house once stood. You don’t have my sympathy for the troubles you are having.
If you choose to buy in a low decile area, where state and run down private rental house low iincome families, many who have suffered decades of insecurity and systemic abuse, it comes with the territory.
Do not expect them to move out onto the street, when you have the ability and economic privilege of choosing where you live. These families have no other choices.
Disclaimer: Pat O’Dea is the son of the late noted state house advocate for state house tenants James O’Dea. Pat O’Dea grew up in a state house, but currently rents from a private landlord in a low decile South Auckland neighborhood with state house neighbors some of whom display the same sort of behaviours that the Herald is trying to use to smear all state tenants. We live with them and help them where we can. But we don’t think we are better than them. because we rent privately. Yes we have suffered some of the same incidents hi lited by the Herald, but they have been isolated and infrequent, we don;t escalate or continue these disputes. It doesnt mean we are door mats either. I admit to having to on occasion having to call the police or ambulance after witnessing some of the incidents of domestic abuse or violence.And even on one occasion being the victim of it..I don’t demand that my neighors move out so that the developers can move in.
Pat O’Dea is a unionist and human rights activist.
I think the point is, that some state house tenants are harassing their neighbours which is against NZ tenancy laws, but the state is allowing this to repeatedly happen making other state house tenants flee their state houses and feel unsafe and they often have kids too.
Not an easy situation because the anti social state house tenant has to go some where, but there is growing anger that certain violent segments of society are being left to do what they like with no consequences, and it’s getting worse.
Woke love to think that bad behaviour in NZ is just a one off and misguided. and the solution is massive amounts of social funding to private groups feeding off this. That would be fine if there was unlimited resources in NZ and the social provider model actually worked, but in NZ we seem to have worse cases getting most of the funding and help, while doing little to help others also needing help, while their victims have to move away.
Perhaps if Oranga Tamarik spent more time and help on the kids that need it, instead of their critical race theories and litigating their own foster/guardians https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2021/09/12/oranga-tamariki-critical-race-theory-demolished-by-judge-labour-must-be-so-grateful-to-delta/ (and then not being able to find suitable placements anymore) doing a good job.
There doesn’t seem to be much interest in a stable environment for abused kids, and instead a committee approach from poorly trained social workers who are allowed to embellish reports, and everyone gets a say and piece of the kid, is the norm to protect the abusers rights, not the child. Of course they all have their own lawyers billing, so no point in getting this done quickly, make it last for years we are seeing!
Some of these kids seem pretty frightened and OT seems to have no understanding of where they are going wrong and why they can’t find suitable placements! https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/staff-at-waikato-dhb-extremely-distressed-by-oranga-tamarikis-treatment-of-child/2XE7ELXTYTR37RSHESC2MFIVFQ/
Meanwhile there are tens of thousands of people waiting for a state house (often also with children) on the waiting list who can’t get one as the violent and anti social get away with not being evicted, often hiding behind their kids, who grow up and emulate the same violent and anti social behaviour.
“Some of these kids seem pretty frightened and OT seems to have no understanding of where they are going wrong and why they can’t find suitable placements!”
Well they’ve just appointed one of those ‘kids’ who has been through it all (along with his siblings), so I’m keen to see whether of not he’s listened to, or whether it’s simply going to be more of the past. (You may have seen John Campbell singing his praises on Breakfast not too long ago)
Yep but whether or not one child’s experience going through the system should be treated as the answer, (for example one child complained that they didn’t know the people they were placed with, but other than keeping them with the abusers, this is a likely scenario, needs to be practical!).
Where do you start, but maybe qualified staff and a proper plan that is practical and registered psychologists working out best scenarios to aim for, based on clinical research, would help.
Counselling! Counselling isn’t magic. There are a lot of people counselling can’t help. Counsellors are best putting their scare resources to those motivated to change who they can help….it is money down he drain throwing counselling at these people who likely won’t attend, even more likely will abuse the counsellor if they do. Show me one study which demonstrates the effectiveness of counselling for the individuals.
I agree, Anker – I just meant that the $100,000 that it costs to keep someone in jail for a year could be better spent elsewhere, if the reason they were there was due to poverty in the first place.
There is a cycle of poverty and crime, for which throwing someone in jail at a cost of $100,000 a year is all wrong and perpetuates the problem.
Let’s look at it this way. If landlords routinely evicted bad tenants, then bad tenants are more likely to become better tenants. Win/win.
Mental health issues are an entirely separate issue – but creating mental health problems for undeserving neighbours should be a no/no.
Remove the primary cause of the acute stress, desperation and anger, and the problem of tenants at breaking point will ease considerably.
Choosing food OR rent when you cannot have both
– by Ethan Te Ora
Long-suffering council housing tenants are asking for rent relief, and say they don’t have money enough for food after paying exorbitant rents.
Labour MP Paul Eagle says the Government will report back to those tenants “before Christmas” about access to an income-related rental subsidy (IRRS). At the moment, they can’t access the subsidy – and Eagle wouldn’t be drawn on whether that would change when the Government does report back.
Extending that subsidy would cost the Government $13.2m a year – money they have until now been reluctant to spend, despite mounting pressure from most sectors of society and impassioned pleas from cash-strapped tenants.
About 100 people attended a public meeting, on Saturday, organised by tenants – the crescendo of a months-long campaign called IRRS 4 ALL. Full article at the link
Some of the problem tenants are having parties with lots of drugs and alcohol so seem to have plenty of disposable cash… Amo ain’t cheap either! Baseball bats cost over $150. WINZ subsidy?
What is your solution?
If I could change one law in AO/NZ right now, just one under urgency, it would be the one to end this situation and to criminalise any who refuse to comply:
END exploitative Mega-Landlording in Aotearoa
Mega-Landording would include the state landlords, but besides that, that is what Labeen policy have been going for, giant corporate landlords with hundreds of houses and removing mum and dad investors… where have you been!
I am acutely aware of that, hence my comment.
Kheala Yes, this is more than a state owned property problem. I ‘ve had two-three years’ harassment from the property manager of a private rental. We first met when I asked him not to block our shared driveway without prior notice and he said, “ You’re just a pain in the bloody arse”. This is not breaking any laws. I think him a nutter, finally got legal advice. The property owner, member of a service organisation, also lives nearby, is also a bully We used to have a good community cop who I think could have been helpful in this type of situation, but they were abolished, and the local cop shop was closed down. The current tenant there, a young Indian guy, has witnessed the pro manager raising his voice and he throws his weight around too.
The other two problematic nearby rental properties owned by reasonable Chinese are currently under control because the tenants know they’ll.be evicted if they play up, and few other rentals are available. The previous disc jockey tenant shouted at me and slammed a glass door in my face when I asked him to turn his bass down. I had the police out and they were ok, but a senior officer who visited me apropos of a side-issue was a prick.
Prior to the disc jockey, my life was accompanied by Samoan drum music enjoyed by folk who chopped down established trees and shrubs to park their many cars on a once-pretty garden, reluctant to park on the street and walk down a long drive, and who burst like an atomic bomb upon the neighbourhood.
But they did not shout at each other inside the house the way that the Indians do. I wear industrial strength headphones weeding the shared driveway. My most civilised neighbours are two quiet Chinese owned and occupied households.
We don’t have decent noise laws in New Zealand, as eg Germany has, so that
communities do have a degree of social awareness and social expectations. City councils are often useless and subcontract out to a variable group of young males, interestingly, largely also now immigrants.
Several years ago I wrote to the Minister of Local Govt – I don’t recall which one but it will be in my paper files – with proposals about noise control regulations and enforcement, and I received an interim reply. That’s all.
( I still have an interim reply from Helen Clark when she was shadow minister of health, and I had no results from a procedure at Capital Coast Health, and I still await both the test results and Clark’s response.)
So there are a number of issues here, including governments deliberately creating and maintaining a housing shortage; mental and other major health issues in the community, including those created by or resultant from government policy; and politicians having zero interest in the quality of life for the social community apart from politically expedient bare minimums.
Did you ever consider moving to a quiet little town somewhere?
Good idea to have noise controls like Germany especially as they are determined to put everyone into close quarters going forward.
As for this idea of going to a quiet little town, these people are everywhere and apart from noise control, not a lot of enforcement to stop neighbours disturbing others 24/7 if they chose to.
Yes, true.
Mum and dad investor’s, pfft, where have you been!
I urge you to visit the Standard and read Swordfish account of what his elderly parents have faced with the state house tenants from hell. For four years. If you are so wedded to see the likes of these anti social people not evicted, then how about you trial living next door to them for two weeds. Seriously.
Please be aware that these anti social tenants who should have been evicted by lunchtime are harming the lives of our most vulnerable, ie the people who have no choice but to live is a state house.
Labour has neglected and ignored these people and I welcome the Herald highlighting this issue.
I wish these tenants all the luck against the govt whose policy of non eviction who has made their lives hell.
then how about you trial living next door to them
Pat has said elsewhere that they already do live next door to “them”.
What is your proposed solution to the problem, Anker?
Well Pat appears to have experienced “isolated and infrequent “. Episodes of the behaviour written about in the Herald. Most of us could deal with that. But the accounts I have read report unrelenting anti social behaviour, yelling swearing vandalism and abuse. Keeping people awake at night.
There are many scenarios being debated on the Standard at present. But I don’t see why it’s my job to come up with solutions for these people. Actually I don’t care too much about them. I care about the tenants they are abusing. I would set very clear expectations of behaviour, offer professionals to train them in behaviour like emotion regulation (up to them if they take it) and two warnings, then they are evicted. I don’t believe you can help everyone.
I don’t know, maybe offer them a tiny house in a remote part of NZ ……
I quite like your last suggestion 🙂
(It is similar to measures that were taken to re-home soldiers returning from WWI, who were often traumatised and wounded in more ways than one.)
If the govt treated the problem with urgency and an absolute determination to improve it, then they could do so.
Instead, as Bernard Hickey wrote (Mike Treen’s article), businesses who were already mega-wealthy have been given billions of dollars and made more billions in profit, while so many families have to beg for food. It is beyond disgusting.
The rich got richer in lockdown
A crisis of the system
My proposed solution is evicting these tenants
To where?
Where do they and their hungry children go?
How does that solve the problem for Aotearoa?
Well I did post above about that.
I don’t believe it is possible to solve all problems and the evidence is that it’s almost impossible to change people with anti social personality disorder. So he may well be a problem for Aotearoa for the rest of his life. Placing him in a state house next to the likes of Swordfish parents, doesn’t make him any less of a problem as his shocking behaviour is unrelenting. But he should be evicted and kids processed through Orangi Tamariki and placed with other relatives. Or even boarding school. The tenant can be homeless with vouchers given to courses for addiction, emotion regulation and any relevant courses to his issues. He can remain on the waiting list for a state house and even shift up the list if he shows signs of progress….
Meanwhile some decent family moves into his house and contributes well to a happy neighbourhood
Some of these people we will never be able to help and many of them likely heading to jail whether or not they are housed. We are better off putting our
You know that jail costs $100,000 per person a year?
That would buy enough food, rent and counselling for the whole family, with FAR better outcomes for society in the longer term.
Make that, “food, rent and support measures for whole families”
Only in your fantasy is a bad family moved out and a grateful good family moved in.
Have you driven through Glenn Innes lately?
Have you seen the acres of bare land cleared felled of state houses and being landbanked?
Have you seen the areas where what were once state houses, now worth over a million dollars are being left empty for the captial gains?
https://www.newsroom.co.nz/cat-maclennan-on-ghost-housing
If you have witnessed these facts on the ground then will know that when a family is evicted the house is privatised or demolished. No, ‘good’ or ‘more deserving family’ is moved in.
Up till now State Tenants evicted from Glen Innes, Pamure and Mt Roskill have been moved into state homes in South Auckland. (pushing those on waiting lists for a state home in these areas further down the list).
If they are so called ‘bad familes’ they are not.
The Heral authors know this and want to clear even more state housing areas. Now that the state housing stock has been run down so low, that there are few available tenancies to transfer state tenants evictd from Glen Innes, Pamure, Mt Roskilll, to, the Herald wants them kicked onto the streets.
This is the motive behind the propaganda campaign hi-liting instances of problem state tenants.
Given there have only been three evictions of state house tenants in recent times … it’s little wonder there is little evidence of others getting a chance to move in …
Couldnt agree more Anker. Id suggest put them in the zoo. Maybe they could even learn some simple tricks i dont know.
One arguement for not moving the rat bag tenants is they have children . Why are these children still there as all this does is perpetuate the problem. I can agree these families need a wrap around care but obviously it has not been done or if it has it has had no result. The writer talked of moving the bad tenants but this reminds me of the Catholic Churches moving on child molesters . It did not stop the problem but it did hide it and the church looked as though they cared.
Plastered concrete block construction (with batoning and fibrolite on the exterior side of the walls for insulation purposes); a sheet of steel on both side of the doors; double glazing with the interior glass panels wire netted; all in a little community set behind gates, and we could pretend we don’t do apartheid because we’re really suphusticated. Kind of like a poor man’s gated community without the kitsch McMansions behind the security gates. There must be a bit of spare land around Remmers or Mission Bay surely.
AND it could even give ‘them’ something to aspire to.
I have to live next door to predominantly poor little rich kid first year students. Their parents wouldn’t have a fucking clue what they get up to the moment they’ve left having helped them move in, and the slum landlord owner doesn’t seem to be that dissimilar from the parents.
Funny old world eh?
It looks like the solution for tenants causing problems is that they ben chucked out of the houses. Onto the street. Straight away. What will they do when they get there? Who cares.
It’s like the Rotorua motels emergency housing. Chuck them onto the street. And the motels can be motels again for all the visitors thronging to that city to be ‘entertained’ by marauding mobs of the homeless. Including children.
The problem is the extreme inequality in AO/NZ at this time. It is tearing us apart as a nation, but most who are comfortable just don’t want to know. And so it grows.
The system is close to breaking, and Mike Treen nails it here:
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2021/11/29/why-we-are-creeping-towards-a-crisis-of-the-system
The moral compass is pointing south. So much for humanism.
Given
1. a growing waiting list for a state house
2. an increase in the number of state houses and more planned
3. income related rent continues
I can see no evidence for the claim you make.
It’s simply about accountability of any landlord to their tenants, and that includes their well-being.
Nostalgia for a time of state housing (on 1/4 acre sections) suburbs is fine, but more private sections are being infilled at these land values and so should state house ones. More state houses result, not less. And it also allows some smaller sized Kiwi Build homes as well. It’s not gentrification if state house tenants have better quality places to live.
However like all intensification, it magnifies the neighbour issues – which is now a real issue that needs a better process than no evictions whatever …
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