GUEST BLOG: Bryan Bruce – The Very, Very Slow Fix
Cartoon by Chris Slane
In the week of the 2011 election TV3 chose to screen my documentary INSIDE CHILD POVERTY. The immediate reaction from right wing commentators was that I was a baised leftist journalist. I was making making a mountain out of a molehill. There was no such thing as “Child Poverty” the term made no sense.
Minister For Social Development Paula Bennett claimed even if it did exist you couldn’t measure it. In parliament (August 2012) she said there was no official measure of poverty and any measure was likely to be speculative because it was constantly changing as children could move in and out of poverty “on a daily basis” as soon as their parent gets a job.
Eight years later we are at least measuring Child Poverty but the problem is not going away because the root cause of it is not going away. Neoliberal economics and the free market approach to housing isn’t solving the problem.
Yesterday Stats NZ released its first report required under the Child Poverty Reduction Act . Yes it really is “ a thing” now regardless of what Right Wing bloggers said abojut my doco at the time and it sets both three and 10-year targets to reduce child poverty and hardship.
Rather depressingly Stats NZ have reported roughly the same figures I reported 8 years ago . Taking a poverty line measure of a household having less that 50% of the median disposable income we have about 180,000 children living in poverty,however once housing costs are taken into consideration you are looking at about 254,000 children (23 percent) of our kids living in poverty.
If you drop the household income to 40% of median income then its approximately 174,000 living in dire circumstances.
So one of the main problems remains affordable housing .
I my documentary WHO OWNS NEW ZEALAND NOW? I pointed out we have an obsession with home ownership as the solution – largely because it has been a way of making untaxed wealth .
I said we need to be changing the question from “How can everyone own a home ?” to “How can we give everyone security of tenure?” because once you get away from the obsession with ownership, then solutions such as long term leasing and group housing that I reported on from Germany become possible.
I remain highly sceptical of Kiwibuild. At best it is a top down solution. A few people will benefit from it. What we need is a bottom up solution which benefits the very many people on low incomes
We should be holding government sponsored architectural competitions for the construction of low cost healthy living and community environments within the city limits and along lines of existing infrastructure.
The more people we can assist into healthy homes at the bottom of the income scale the healthier the children who live in those families will be.
A focus on housing low income families first would also reduce the pressure on private rentals. The more rental properties become available the lower the rents will be and the more chance middle income earners will have of making ends meet and who knows- maybe they will be able to save enough to afford a deposit on a Kiwibuild home.
So looking back over the last 8 years since making INISDE CHILD POVERTY there is evidence of a bit of a fix but it has been very, very slow coming and there remains an awful lot to do.
You can find my 2011 documentary INSIDE CHILD POVERTY here.
And WHO OWNS NEW ZEALAND NOW? here:
Bryan Bruce is one of NZs most respected documentary makers and public intellectuals who has tirelessly exposed NZs neoliberal economic settings as the main cause for social issues.
9 years of mess and divisiveness cannot and will not be fixed properly with 3 years in power it will take at least 9 years and some to fix the mess we are currently in. Child poverty cannot and will not be fixed in one year and if you think it can, you are a dreamer.
In Asia people can sell goods on the street.
It is pretty impossible to solve child poverty if we keep importing in people who also need affordable housing on hundreds of thousands of work permits, have major social (Tarrent) or criminal issues (drug smuggling, visa and financial frauds) and also taking up the luxury market (Thiel) which developers have more profit on …
Commentators exploring this issue need to look at the bigger picture, as do commentators who in NZ, like to ‘avoid’ the issue of the rise of immigration and asset buying around the world that has exploded in the past 10 years.
(Not a peep out of the woke when Singapore and OZ nationals and anybody on a work visa are still allowed to buy up NZ property as exemptions and the OIA approval has never been higher to sell off NZ assets to foreign buyers. )
Global migration has been caused by the rise of cheap global travel and the Internet, and governments are able to make short term political use out of it (aka the Ponzi of new money keeps people feeling richer when productivity is down and wages are declining and masks harder issues to face ).
Look at the factors which that has created rapidly increasing child poverty in NZ over the past 10 years. We did not have the issue in the 1970’s!
So concentrating on ‘tax’ issues (that the neoliberals and woke like to contain it to) is just a red herring, Ignoring immigration factors just makes the research look biased.
Neoliberalism and over crowding of hot spot urban areas of the world (which then ripple outwards) are the bigger issues and it is happening all over the world.
In China they can’t afford to be buried… In cities like Beijing, the average price is more than 100,000 yuan ($14,000) for a burial plot.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/05/cant-afford-to-die-china-embraces-eco-burials-as-plot-prices-outstrip-housing
In Uk they also can’t afford ‘affordable’ housing…
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/davehillblog/2010/jul/12/shelter-low-cost-home-ownership-schemes-london
The planet is a finite place, people are living longer, there is much higher expectation of wealth and it has especially grown in new places of huge population growth such as China and India. That is putting strain on their own nationals who are getting poorer or the divide is greater. Meanwhile whose who do get wealthy there are increasingly using it to buy citizenship elewhere. All nations are seeing bigger inequality under neoliberalism, from the US, to the UK to NZ.
It is also spilling out around the world, as the rise of buying citizenship and nationality around the world grows with more and more wealthier, consumer driven lives in all parts of the world able to consume more outside their own countries, when also traditionally ‘tax’ laws are irrelevant as they don’t have to pay taxes like the locals due to various loopholes…
Then there are desperate people who utilise the people traffickers to trying to escape from South America, Asia, Middle East and Africa all looking to have a better life, which in modern times, means more money and safety as their countries assets are controlled by offshore corporations and militia take over the day to day running of society.
Climate change is going to make migration worse and housing shortages worse as our councils and government are focused in NZ only on rise of new building permits, not the overall strategy of ensuring people have long lasting cheap to run housing to live in. What is the point of building a house that then is unable to be lived in 5 years later as it needs extensive repairs with the rise of more and more complex housing with more and more going wrong very quickly with it.
There is no reason why there should not be more money and safety around the world as well as within individual countries. The causal factors need to be solved, worldwide and bigger picture factors (immigration/climate change/natural disasters) also discussed around housing because they are the main factors driving modern housing inequality.
You can’t build 200,000+ houses per year in NZ to keep up with amount of new people living here, as is the building of roads, transport, hospitals, schools etc for often people who have very low incomes and will can then access NZ welfare after a few years (or days) of gaining residency here.
NZ Laws need to be changed and urgently, because they are not fit for purpose in the modern world and NZ could end up as a basket case of satellite families and overseas retirees with the workers and all their assets hidden and untaxed in NZ and the Kiwis paying for their lifestyles and the hospitals, super and schools for them.
It is not going to be long before iwi enter into arrangements only to find out the hard way, how neoliberalism works aka the powerful make the laws and ensure the loopholes, the one with the biggest amount of lawyers wins the cases and if you can’t win, keep the legal fights going for years..