Loafers Lodge fire: Council only inspected building twice in past decade
Wellington City Council only conducted on-site inspections at Loafers Lodge twice in the past decade, despite advice it would be more appropriate for such checks to happen every year.
The most recent check in 2018 found several problems including items being installed in an escape route that could combust in an emergency or block the fire exit.
Fire and smoke doors designed to prevent fire from spreading were also wedged open.
Wellington City Council chief planning officer Liam Hodgetts said the problems were worked on with the building owner over the following months and an infringement notice was issued.
There is a terrible grief at heart of the Loafers Lodge fire deaths and that is the lonely men who make up the death toll.
These are the men society had forgotten and contemptuously pushed away.
These are men who didn’t qualify for State Housing and proper wrap around services because those services are expensive and we refuse point blank to tax the rich more money to pay for that infrastructure.
It is far cheaper to house these lonely men in a squalid block exempt from proper fire regulations because that would cost money and these mens lives are not worth that investment are they?
It is a system that relegates lonely lost men into battery hen farms with the same apathy as we kettle beneficiaries with children into unsafe Motels.
There will be the performative art of grief expressed by Politicians and the humble thumbs up from community leaders for the outpouring of good will and how it brings out the best in us and thoughts and prayers and
and
and
and nothing will change.
There are 14 Billionaires in NZ + 3118 ultra-high net worth individuals with over $50million, let’s start by taxing them, then move onto the Banks, then the Property Speculators, the Climate Change polluters and big industry!
Our collective denial over how our underfunded social infrastructure fed a tragedy like Loafers Lodge is beneath the mana of the moment.
Tax. The. Rich.
Liam Hockings was a Facebook Comrade of mine. He deserved much better than to die alone in a fire like this for the men society didn’t care about.
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This is very sad. The fact that he had Hydrocephalus would have probably meant that health/social workers invariably gave him a box ticking diagnosis (probably the all encompassing schizophrenia or some other handy term) and left him to it. If we weren’t so beguiled by tv-land pop culture we perhaps would look after the real people on the ground better.
It’s the degeneracy. TV probably kept these people sedated while the parents where off claiming a child’s entertainment is not my responsibility.
or it could be no sprinklers and blocked exits…along with the council abdicating it’s regulation duties sam, more likely dontcha think?
Gin hag, some of these residents likely did have schizophrenia. It effects men more severely than women and it is the most tragic mental illness as it usually strikes in late teens early twenties. These are the men who were deinstitutionalised in the 1980s -90s and basically left to rot in shitty boarding houses.
One of the things that make me mad about the trans woke mob is their claim that trans are the most marginalized (especially when the likes of Shaneel Lal was giving Hipkins advice on the school curriculum).
Its such bull shit. People with schizophrenia most often men are the most marginalized.
You could also look at the WCC councillors, and behind them the ratepayers of Wellington, who thought arts festivals, visiting writers in residence, the feminist writer shrines, and preserving heritage buildings were all far more important than building safety inspections and prosecutions.
Even a Lands & Survey Department journalist, union official and friend of the P.M., was stuck staying at that dump?!
Reminds me of my horror when I discovered that an N.Z. broadcaster I had met, who appeared on national television every other day, wasn’t even given an apartment — and instead was forced to have roommates!
You might be able to hide dissent about your collapsing economy when it’s only the very poorest who are out on the street (because you sold off his state house, abolished full employment, and shut down all the mental wards he needed). Once it has become millions of working people with lousy housing and collapsing real incomes, it’s a recipe for angry mobs surrounding the Parliament.
Yes a grand revolt could be the result. It would scare the bejesus out the politicians and the business enablers. It could cause revolution.
Ada. As a long – suffering Wellington rate payer, I object to you dumping WCC’s inadequacies onto me. I’ve lobbied the damn council, met with mayors, addressed council meetings before they started closing them to the public, made submissions, helped stopped these bastards commercially developing the Town Belt, and preserve the lungs of the city for future generations.
There is nothing wrong with arts festivals or opera, or wonderful school choirs performing in festivals, or the preservation of heritage buildings, except to the barbarians at the gates and the mindless splodges with Soviet bloc mentalities despoiling a beautiful harbour with the ugliest museum in the Southern Hemisphere, or flogging off idyllic Shelly Bay for easy money, or canonising electric bicycles.
It doesn’t have to be an either-or-situation, and nor did we, the ratepayers, choose to have the tragic victims of a terrible sort of dying end their lives in horrendous the way which they did, so kindly back off.
Stop tarring us with the brush of the careless self-indulgent local politicians perpetuating student cafeteria politics, to the despair of the handful of responsible decent people on the WCC , and wailing about racism or homophobia or something similar when critiqued. That’s the way the whole country is now, if you hadn’t noticed.
Snow White. As a long-time voter in the WCC elections, you kept electing Councilors who provided all those lovely artistic things while promising to keep rates low, but they also neglected to have the water pipes maintained and replaced, or buildings like Loafers inspected, or allowing housing development, lack of which made Wellington an awfully expensive city to live in.
Who cares if you object!!!. It’s what happened..Someone has to take responsibility. . I know the do gooders will.wring there little hands of it like they always do lol.
Snow, I think Ada is making a valid point but the issue is Wellington itself and the PMC who have driven the disaster which is WCC.
Wellington proper these days is full of progressives, rainbows, single 20 somethings, the PMC whic these days tends to drive out anyone 50+ and I think that this is why the Green vote is so strong in the capital. Many of these people dont think past a blanket tick and assume that WCC is still back in the days of Celia Wade Brown doing great things for Wgtn. I have highly educated friends at Vic who still think the Greens are going to save Wellington. They pay no attention to politics but survive in an academic bubble with assumptions they made decades before.
For years now for economic and practical reasons people with families or just non PMC people have drifted out of Wellington and their views are quite different with the Wgtn vote being increasingly skewed by the progressives. (Although this is starting to change with the gentrification of places such as Petone, Titahi Bay and various others)
So Ada is right that Wellingtonians have continued to vote in people with dismal ideas and little commitment to basic services but the converse of that is that it is also true that people like yourself have in truth had little voice and have been effectively marginalised by demographics. To say nothing of the fact that it is relatively hard to find someone reasonable to vote for at WCC because it is the progressives that get the media inches and financial backing at election time and there are more of them to choose from than more bread and butter candidates.
with Soviet bloc mentalities – you are too kind, snow. they’re not that sophisticated.
Not to mention all the Rainbow blah, blah. blah
ps nothing against gays, this is about the tras cult
There is a presumption that any extra taxation income will be spent in the areas most helpful to the needy. Believe that and the nearest shiny bridge is yours to buy.
First place to see how the extra taxation will be spent is to look at the $1B spent on mental health has improved to lot of those in need of those services. Has it made any difference? No.
The government cannot even tell you where they have spent the money. What makes anyone think that any additional taxation income will be spent where it is needed most?
Dreamers will dream but the reality is this government would spent it on more consultants, reports and restructures than actually let the taxation dollars trickle down to those in need (especially elderly white males). Health being a prime example.
There is that.
That argument makes it all seem like a zero-sum game.
I do feel that the revenue gained from an Asset Tax could be used to provide more social housing and to build other necessary amenities.
It need not be particularly difficult to implement and I do feel that those with immense wealth ought to be willing and happy to pay tax towards some of these initiatives.
We do already have people housed, happy, and well looked after by the State, and these are people from all age groups, genders, and ethnicities. But there is still a significant housing shortage in this country.
I feel quite sure it would not be used for that.
Both major political parties appear happy to discuss changing the taxation system so that the wealthy pay more tax instead of legally avoiding their tax obligations.
Additionally both major political parties appear happy and keen to remedy the housing shortage in this country, going forward.
Out of idle curiosity, how would you implement an asset tax?
An asset tax would normally be directed at one particular asset, say housing or even shares. Every legal entity with more than a certain amount of the asset would be required to pay a nominal amount of taxation on the value of it, or on the profits generated from it to a greater degree than what they would normally pay on the profits.
An asset tax can be one-off or it can be applicable on a yearly basis. The aim is not to unduly punish the wealthy; rather, what an asset tax is all about is every socioeconomic class pitching in, in times of war, famine, economic depression, pandemic, or other such crisis.
As such many economists would argue that an asset tax ought to only be implemented in conjunction with rises in the tax rates of personal income, GST, etc. However, in times of high inflation like we are experiencing currently, it makes more sense to consider implementing the asset tax only.
Other possibilities are: a Financial Transactions Tax; a Comprehensive Inheritance Taxation. Neither of these would be popular with voters; and both of those options would disrupt the economy to such an extent that other changes would need to be made, some of them brashly.
Another idea is a Mansion Tax. Here you place a tax, normally as little as one or two percent, on the purchase price of residential real estate above a certain value, say, $1million, although I would argue the case for $1.5million given the prevalence of $1million homes in many of our major cities. The money raised here could easily be collected and redistributed into social housing.
Those men were kettled into one place in the inner city because the suburban NIMBYs make it politically impossible to put them in smaller residences out in the suburbs.
Here is the political math: 30 troubled anonymous men in one place in an edgy part of the city, or six residences of 5 such men in suburbs where most Mums and Dads don’t want them and are fearful.
Each residence causes political grief, and there’s six of them.
Don’t worry there are state trophy houses available at nearly a million a pop from Kainga ora’s shopping spree, but probably older, white men won’t qualify.
You have to wonder why with all their consultants Kainga ora don’t get better value for money. Money better spent on less staff at Kainga ora and actually bothering to upgrade existing facilities that apparently don’t have sprinklers for nearly 100 people including former arsonists living there.
‘Unique’ purchase sees Kāinga Ora buy $20m, 27-unit property in north Hamilton
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/131135304/unique-purchase-sees-kinga-ora-buy-20m-27unit-property-in-north-hamilton
Auckland flooding: Several Kāinga Ora houses lifted off their foundations
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2023/01/auckland-flooding-several-k-inga-ora-houses-lifted-off-their-foundations.html
“When they moved in Maria said she was told it was a million-dollar home.”
Meanwhile working families are paying market rents while not living in million dollar state houses. Housing in NZ seems more like an ideological lottery than a common sense approach.
Older white men have no chance of getting a KO place.
Labour put in place priority groups such as the Tangata Whenua, domestic violence victims, the disabled, and the mentally ill.
So when there is a shortfall of KO housing, older white single men are out of luck.
Just for once Aggie, just for once, can you try not to indulge in your labelling and habitual generalisations about situations which have evolved over decades in a world seemingly very different from your own cosy dell and bucolic indulgence? The burned are not and were not, “ those men”.
‘Nimby’ seems to be your current buzzword; ‘ kettle’ is another inappropriate one. The NIMBY issue is not as simple as you may think, and as politicians are starting to grasp. Nobody ‘kettled’ the tenants of Loafers Lodge. They chose an option from among the very limited options available when both National and Labour governments spectacularly stuffed up the provision of housing for New Zealanders. Other similar places exist in Wellington and throughout all of our cities. Some are grimmer. Bridge underpasses and park benches are also cold and grim. This is the way that the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.
Did I cut too close to the bone? Offend you, did I?
saveNZ. Agree. If a known arsonist was “ housed” in that building, by authorities, whoever they may be, then those authorities, should be called to account.
They won’t be. In a mature, adult, civilised society they would be, but this is 21stC New Zealand, where nobody is called to account. The miscreants scarper off elsewhere, or they give each other knighthoods, or cushy sinecures with directories fees which would water the eyes of a sphinx, treated like oracles at Delphi by the hopeless useless MSM who let us down daily.
We closed all the mental health institutions in Nz and opened the doors. Seemed like a good thing to do but we never matched the care once out into the community, that is the govt shame. ALL NZ GOVTS, still is and feels like always will be. If we don’t listen they will continue to not be heard. We suck.
I think that was all the big plan by the political class to remove cost to the healthsystem thereby removing.hospitals. Also because the victims who are thrown on the street are in a different world those that were instrumental in closing down the hospital did not care. It was part of the Neo liberal agenda probably.
Which arsehole came up with the name for this overpriced dump. Was it an attempt at humour or just outright contempt for the mostly vulnerable residents?
Martyn makes most of the points necessary so I don’t have to, apart from noting that the neo liberal state and local Government is expert at fudging accountability on virtually anything via the “multiple agency” tactic–“it wasn’t meeeee…” combined with cruel & sadistic under funding for working class needs.
It was a ex Bank turned into a back packers in 2007, before it got turned into a homeless shelter/emergency housing probably after Covid. So no, the name fits actually.
Same as the motels here in rotorua, they all have nice sounding names, but you don’t want to live in them. No mental health available for those that need it. No tenancy rights. No good places to cook. No wash machines, no playgrounds for kids. No fucking anything other then a room that would work for someone coming for a weekend who plans to eat out.
And motels have burned in Rotorua too, they just got lucky no one burned to death.
This is squally to lay at the feet of the bipartisan wankers who simply won’t admit that between National and Labour the homeless are fucked, the poor are fucked, the kids are fucked, the man are fucked and the bodies with female sex organs (we don’t want to upset males who want to call them selves women by calling these bodies women) are also fucked.
These death should be laid square before the government, the council and the independent inspector who declared this facility safe to function as a homeless shelter/emergency housing. The mental health crisis can be laid square before the government who spends money on a new layer of burocracy but can’t build a building with a few rooms and beds for mentally ill patients that would do better if they were housed with proper support. The need for emergency housing can be laid square before the government – current, and all those before them, because not a single on of these fucks in suits is able and capable to get much needed social housing build.
Excellent comment.
“aoteoroa”
LMAO
Loafers Lodge. The name says it all.
Many of those people called this home.
Others used the accomodation to transition.
In this instance we need to show that we care.
Wrong identity as some identities are better than others to get help in NZ. So unsurprisingly many vulnerable people are flocking to proclaim they are the ‘new’ funded identity and the copious amounts of funding (spending nearly a million a house for kainga ora housing) are aimed at trophy housing while those in lodge style living don’t even seem to have the basics.
As for men being cancelled, woman are cancelled too.
We hid in a broom cupboard: my mad day at Oxford with Kathleen Stock
It took police and three security guards to get her there — but this week the gender-critical academic spoke at the Oxford Union. Janice Turner went with her
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/oxford-union-kathleen-stock-trans-gender-debate-2023-zk85xm50l
“In her home town she’s left alone. But The Lesbian Project, which she recently co-founded to “stop women getting erased from the LGBT rainbow”, receives vicious threats and a protest at its inaugural event was led by Sarah Jane Baker, a trans activist who served 30 years for torture, kidnap and attempted murder.”
Is it crazy that many of these gender movements are led and joined by the criminal and crazy and somehow they have captured the left politicians as their ideal people to support and attack rights and supports of both men and woman to speak, in a post reality situation?
” I take the train, thinking about this strange, if amusing, waste of a day. A battalion of police, three security guards, a tube of glue and a broom cupboard. Just for one woman to state what most of us already think.”
Yes, well I was sickened by both the PM and the Mayor responding to the horrific dying of Loafers’Lodge residents by warbling about how diverse Newtown is, and how this diverse community looks after each other, in other words, this is the poor folks’ patch on camera, so let’s keep an eye on the PR and make the situation look better than it is and us look better than we are. It was the stuff of nightmares affecting the people who politicians prefer to forget.The survivors will never ever forget, and nor can they move on with the glib greasiness which politicians do.
What a difference it makes having money and influence, wherever it comes from, as Max Key finds out yet again, with his Knight of the Realm dad, dirty John, phoning the Justice Department on his behalf, answering the phone on his son’s behalf, and lying per usual, as that’s an easy, lazy, way to get through life. That dirty John is emasculating his own son won’t bother him a schekl, nor will the propriety of the situation, for propriety is not part of John’s repertoire. After all, it was other people’s offspring that John shrieked in Parliament for Labour to get some guts and send off to fight in other people’s wars. How disgusting he is.
Got a parliament which kneecapped the Commissioner for Children, for deprived children and for vulnerable babes in arms, then know that nobody can really count on them very much either.
And then you do exactly that what sickens you!
Johan T. No, not at all. Perhaps you miss the point, but that doesn’t matter.
I agree with you, Snow White.
Not a good idea to house a former, convicted, arsonist, in a high rise full of people,s with no sprinklers.
Sadly like Pike River, CTV building, illegal labour, there will be a lot of enquiry, hand wringing and then nothing will change.
We will still have people living in lodges and motels without sprinklers.
NZ officials, justice and woke seem to genuinely want to develop an antisocial society by enabling it and making huge amounts of individuals feel like clients and victims, thus it then becomes hard to stop them attacking their neighbours or society at large.
Shame on you for using this dreadful episode to hammer down on your message.
You are privileged to share your opinions on your blog site. Use it with care and kindness.
Try reason and debate.
Hammering down on one’s own logic is not an altogether unworthy exercise, particularly in today’s political climate where Election 2023 is shaping up to be one of the closest in living memory.
light touch regulation frees up businesses to kill their customers…yeaaaa go capitalism
Light touch regulations makes it cheaper for government agencies that need the lowest cost place to warehouse the troubled humans those agencies are funded to keep off the streets.
Light touch regulations reduce costs for rate payers. Even cheaper if they don’t fund prosecutions for breaches of the minimal regulations.
These men were the expendable cost of putting profit priorities ahead of people priorities which when your country as an unregulated neo lberal run liberal democracy then this is on of the callous outcomes you have to expect.
Six men have perished in this disaster. Who is standing up for them ? Its like they never existed at all.
100%
I agree with you here and feel that it is quite tragic.
Why are people so surprised we have known for a very long time single older men were having problems finding decent accommodation. We need to look after all NZers everyone needs a decent roof over their heads.
Who made it harder to be eligible for state housing, where are the homes for our ageing population we need to get our a into g now.
I agree but it will not be solved until action is taken by central government, not merely words spoken.
forget the state – lets get back to being a community.
I think you have just sumed up society today in that one statement. ‘Power to the Strong’ everyone else on our society and especially those like Mike the Juggler can go get stuffed or get burnt in a fire. Those with power as proven though there own actions don’t give a stuff
Totally agree Martyn. In wgtn, they have rounded up all the druggies and put them in one apartment building (Could be wrong but I think it may have been one emptied out before demolition). its causing hell in the city.
So they can do that but cant erect purpose built accommodation for the marginalised. What is wrong with higher rise accommodation where everyone has a decent room and bathroom suitable for vulnerable people. Non fall windows, fire resistant materials, low maintenance materials, sprinklers, fire doors etc as well as communal living areas and entertainment areas. Then staff it with a 24 hour concierge so they can help residents with basic issues (attending to maintenance issues, help with contacting social and other services, checking on people and contacting relatives when the people arent seen for a few days etc).
Low key so it isnt seen as an institution but is seen as a bit of basic help for marginalised people who want to feel they are living independently.
Hail to Wellington City Mission which has been advocating for a wet house for alcoholics so they can take in men particularly, who would not be denied a place because they couldn’t go ‘dry’. I think they will be watched and enjoy periods of companionship and be happy without overdoing it. It hasn’t been built or provided yet, so keep up pressure. (An old Yorkshire? saying dating back to the 16th century, ‘Fine words butter no parsnips’, sets a suitably obscure tone about this great idea.
Also it indicates a truth to the educated ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’.) So there is no shame in keeping on banging the drum for betterment which is needed, just change the tune and moderation so as to appear new and fresh!
This is from a report about houses and pensions for destitute and elderly in late 1800s.
The Old-age Pensions Act of 1898 thus becomes the major welfare advance of the nineteenth cen-tury, a source of considerable pride to its Liberal sponsors, and an important component in New Zealand’s claim to be a ‘social laboratory’. At the same time, there are always needs which are not adequately met by income maintenance schemes, and situations for which other forms of assistance may be more appropriate…
Members of the Ashburton and North Canterbury Charitable Aid Board visiting the Home at night were obliged to carry an umbrella to protect themselves from the bugs which dropped from the ceiling. The Home’s committee even considered erecting tents for the inmates to sleep in during summer when the problem was at its worst. Nevertheless, the Ashburton Home was not replaced by a new institu-tion, the Tuarangi Old Men’s Home, until 1902.,,
In Wellington the Benevolent Trustees boarded out their old men until the construction of the Wellington Benevolent Institution, or Ohiro Home, in 1892. Problems were immediately apparent, for the practice simply concentrated the old men in one place and exposed them to one another’s ill humour without the control and regimentation that could be exerted in a fully institutional setting. At least one of Wellington’s boarding houses had a central city location, far too close to public houses for sobriety and order to prevail…
When the old men were allowed to keep their earn-ings on condition that they buy warm winter clothing, they promptly spent the lot on drink and created a disturbance that the Trustees long remembered as an example of supreme ingratitude.(1890)
https://www.nzjh.auckland.ac.nz/docs/1983/NZJH_17_1_02.pdf
Noticeably drinking to excess was a way to achieve relief and some pleasure for exhausted, isolated men working in ‘the bush’ and without family or relatives. Alcohol to excess is still a way of men and women wasting their lives and money today despite efforts of women (WCTU) to prevent them being preyed on by those purveyors who are unprincipled.
The closure of places such as accommodation parks to make way for upscale retirement villages should have been under more regulation instead of it being yet another exercise in crony capitalism. Yes, there are people who wind up in these sorts of places, largely because all other viable options have been taken away.
too many overheads. dwindling returns. the fossil fueled generations are over. flotsam and jetsam. there is a better way.
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