Thank the little baby Jesus that Putin’s vile invasion of the Ukraine is managing to suck all the news oxygen out of the room or else this Kāinga Ora housing obscenity would still be leading the news headlines…
Revealed: Kāinga Ora spent over $24m of taxpayer money in four years on its own office renovations
Kāinga Ora’s spent $24,354,759 of taxpayer money over the past four years on itself on office renovation.
The biggest spend ups were in the last financial year:
-
- $230,661 went on signs
- $829,797 on a complete fit-out and renovation in Christchurch
- $5.5 million for a complete fit-out of the Newmarket offices
- $12 million on a total renovation of its Wellington headquarters.
…it’s just so outrageous!
There are 25 000 New Zealander’s waiting on emergency housing wait lists, we are spending $1million a day on housing the homeless in motels and boarding houses, 80% of State Houses don’t even meet the Government’s own healthy home standards, entire generations are being locked out of home ownership and rents are soaring yet Kāinga Ora have over $24million to spruce up their own glass palaces?!?!
There’s arrogant, and then there’s Wellington Bureaucracy arrogant!
When Kāinga Ora is failing on almost every single indicator, $24million to move their drinks cabinet 5 inches closer to Parliament seems a tad on the nose!
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Good point on the million dollars a day on motels, (and growing), disgrace.
This was a knee jerk reaction by National more or less to John Campbell’s probe into victims of the housing crisis living in cars. A quick sweep them under the rug until we can think of something better, temporary solution. But along came kindness in the form of the Ardern led Labour government. Surely now with Kiwibuild that nightmare will recede?
Nope.
Fast forward 4 and a half years and New Zealand’s housing market is now the most unaffordable in the English speaking world, motels are at bursting point with the displaced in squalid conditions, the MSD have turned Rotorua into a dumping ground of social dysfunction, so who post Covid would want to visit there, and Labour have for all practical purposes codified motels as a solution to our severely broken housing market. And that’s it! Seat of your pants band aid solutions. Oh, and the terminally useless Megan Woods still gets paid her handsome salary plus perks!
If there is one reason I suspect our PM has her eye on the door, it’s this monumental failure! Not the kind of thing anyone would want on their résumé! But it will be, in lights!
You can’t expect Kainga Ora staff to work in squalor anymore than the clients living in it. At least someone has recognised the first part!
Can we house the homeless in the Kainga Ora premises and get their workers to work from home like the majority of other workers doing office work, who seem to manage fine!
Yep, and when the tourists start coming back, wonder where they will stay?
I’ve heard from a reputable source the deal the govt made with the hotels when they signed up for MIQ lark, was they were to be gutted and completely re-fitted at our expense.
But surely this can’t be true or our savvy well paid journalists would be aware of this, they’d probably even have asked Grant where in the govt’s balance sheet this money has been accrued.
And then of course the old motels. With most of Fenton St now occupied by K O residents, and the hotels unfit for tourists, where will they stay?
Maybe Nash is not as stupid as he looks, this is why the tourism fund is for the South Is where they don’t have these issues.
No that can’t be right, that’s just my cynicism…
yup covid and KO have been a big earner for 2nd rate motels.
Labours slogan for 2023:
“Won’t someone think of the bureaucrats “
In the same way it’s somehow possible to evaporate 50 million dollars thinking about a bike bridge for the PMC.
But, But, But…..Megan said it was a sign of an organization that was achieving it’s goals and adding staff.
How over 30% of the general population still support this gong show has got me fucked. That said it’s the old countdown vs New World argument – there ain’t a lot of good alternatives at the moment.
The PM needs to do a performance review of her Ministers.
Some of them absolutely need replacing.
With who Kealakekua ?
When you give over public responsibilities to private contractors you get them throwing out their chests or whatever and nothing is too good for them, but wait, that nothing means infinity. possibly. I remember seeing written up in Metro or the like when there were the early changes in Auckland towards or about supershitty that there was an immediate interest in ‘what they have done overseas’ and an urgent need to go there and study what the other cities of world class had done. And someone and his wife were said to have booked themselves a hotel suite in one city at $2000 a night. This is completely unsubstantiated by links or proper references just my odd mind for retaining trivia, not necessarily gospel, about peculiar juxtapositions here and there.
Infinity here we come on our four horses of the apocalypse.
So how many houses/homes has KaingaOra built themselves, not with contractors or providers of social housing. How many has KO Inc built since 2017?
A. 12
B. 4000
C. Nobody really knows
DP A & C
Finally something I don’t think Labor can be entirely blamed for as I would imagine it would have happened under National also, although key would have been after blood after been made to look like such a turkey. I doubt Adern will do anything aside from crumple her face up in an attempt to so just how empathetic she is.
Imagine if they’d given all that money to the kiwibuild program! They would have been able to build ZERO extra houses!
private industry (in this case developers) are incapable of succeeding with public projects, and before anyone goes off on one….give me an example of just one that came in on cost, in time and to the required specs.
Let them eat cake.
I think they managed to build more houses for the poor than Kiwibuild though who privatised the land.
Natz/Labeen build, build, build strategy is not working….
Now we have plenty of warm, dry, new houses. Problem is nobody can afford them on NZ wages.
Apartment 2 beds, 2 baths, 80m2, 1 parking and Asking price $2,150,000
https://www.trademe.co.nz/a/property/new-homes/new-apartment/auckland/auckland-city/grey-lynn/listing/3507840035
Apartment 2 beds, 1 bath, 63m2, 1 parking Asking price $1,250,000
https://www.trademe.co.nz/a/property/new-homes/new-apartment/auckland/auckland-city/grey-lynn/listing/3498250626
Then there is the council rates, insurance and body corporate on top!
Average wage in 2020 was $34.14 p/h – 1/2 of employees received zero wage increase in 2020
“In the LCI, we can see that annual wage inflation is slowing as fewer employees have received wage increases,” Mr Downes said.
“Over the past year, more than half of the positions surveyed received no wage increase.”
In the year to December 2020 quarter, the proportion of employees receiving annual wage increases fell to 45 percent – the lowest proportion of increases recorded since the March 2010 quarter – with both public and private sector wage increases becoming less frequent.”
Source https://www.stats.govt.nz/news/average-earnings-increase-despite-slowing-wage-inflation
Strangely by 2021 when we apparently have a huge worker shortage they only increased wages by $0.76…
Median hourly earnings from wages and salaries increased by $0.76 (2.8 percent) to $27.76 from the June 2020 quarter.
By industry:
construction – up $1.27 (4.6 percent) to $28.77
wholesale trade – up $2.30 (8.6 percent) to $29.15
retail trade, accommodation, and food services– up $1.62 (7.9 percent) to $22.00.
(So under Covid wages increased 7.9%, for retail, accomplishment and food when there were no tourists). Tradies and construction workers are still on under $30p/h…..
To put into perspective. The average babysitting rate in New Zealand in 2022 is $19.64 per hour. https://www.babysits.nz/community-resources/1962/the-average-babysitting-rate-in-new-zealand-2022-edition/
So only $10 p/h more for qualified construction workers with families to support than 14yo+ babysitters in NZ….
I’d say the biggest issue in the construction expectation of what they want to pay workers and their lack of emphasis on quality workers and training people as they are ponziing their own industry by bringing in more low wage workers while building extremely expensive apartments that don’t suit most professional and working and non working people in NZ.
https://www.stats.govt.nz/information-releases/labour-market-statistics-income-june-2021-quarter
People who use the average wage as a comparison to social advancements really shits me. (not a personal dig just my opinion an average wage in general) Who the hell earns $34,50 an hour really? When a qualified tradesman is lucky to get close to $30 ph which is nowhere near the average there is something wrong. If you took out people who earn over say 1/2 million per year (which is likely to be less than 1% of people the number would be closer to $25-6 ph. How can including people who earn 5-6 million in statistics ever give a “average” unless you are a statistics wonk…. its just bulshit.
all of which SNZ underlines the need for a concerted state housing organisation both horizontally and vertically integrated.
None of it is accidental – the housing crisis itself is not a crisis for the 60% of NZer’s who won property.
crikes – just rezone and acquire land under the Public Works Act and start putting up prefabs – how hard can it be?
not at all hard, if labour had the will to do it…but they don’t
billid
How hard can it be? For like Megan Woods it’s a nightmare! It distracts her from eating all the free canteen pies and posing for selfies wearing a hard hat and doing vital ‘PR and Spin’ radio interviews with Hosking. But most of all, it means having to put in some hard work in return for that massive ministerial salary – now we can’t have that! Besides, why would you want a legacy like “Megan Woods – she got shit done!”…nah, too ambitious.
Yeah, it does not look good. But what is the alternative. IMHO, TINA!
Mr C Luxon on TV tonight shedding crocodile tears for our current poor mental health system.
Well who took ten years of government to make it so, Christopher? Check the last decade or two and you will see, if you want to be truthful about it, it was your party, the Nats!
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta announced today that New Zealand will provide a further $5 million contribution of non-lethal military assistance to support Ukraine, and are making available a range of surplus defence equipment to share with Ukraine at their request.1 day ago
NZ to provide non-lethal military assistance to Ukraine
http://www.beehive.govt.nz › release › nz-provide-non-let…
The public officials can spend $24 million on achieving their idea of what a private enterprise would provide for them – seeing as matching private is the name of the game. But out of the bottom of the cauldron we do find some millions for real suffering people – in Ukraine. This on top of other gifts already.
Desperate NZs could do a Popi. That was a film with a story about a single father with two boys working at three jobs trying to look after them but then they get picked on by a gang. He dreamed up a project where his boys got the same concern being given to Cubans arriving the USA by boat, running away from the communist regime. So he set his boys off in a boat with advice on what to do but it took ages for them to be found, then all went as well as he had hoped. But he was about to lose his boys who were to be adopted and he had to confess. One critic found it too sentimental, that’s like the detractors, neo-liberalists in NZ. But maybe the NZ government could rise and save the children and the parents, without them having to reach bottom and risk their lives to get assistance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popi
(Just a tip, when thieves went to break into their room, Popi would bark to scare them off. He couldn’t afford a dog, but these days you could use a recording device.)