A transition to nowhere
It is not often I disagree with John Minto’s analysis and commentary but I do with that in his recent article ‘Prime Minister plays with red herrings while children sleep in cars’. John’s article is unfair and somewhat inaccurate I believe.
It is inaccurate because the Prime Minister’s claim, cited in John’s article, that in 2017 ‘not everyone could receive the emergency housing special needs grant, not everyone could make it onto a public housing waitlist and not everyone was moving into permanent housing’.is true.
In 2017, and under the direction of then Minister of Social Development Paula Bennett, a homeless family or person could not simply apply for housing assistance from the state and have their need added to public housing waiting list. Instead, they had to phone in and have their needs assessed over the phone to establish if they could even go into a Work and Income office to actually apply for assistance. This was the worst case of bureaucratic gate keeping I have ever seen.
I worked for the Salvation Army at the time and we did an OIA request of the Ministry of Social Development to report the numbers of such calls it received seeking housing assistance. Remarkably the Ministry didn’t record this information – such was the deliberate ignorance of the MSD bureaucrats. The best way to avoid having politically embarrassing data is simply not to collect it.
This all changed with the election of the Labour led government in August 2017. While John is correct in his claim that ‘the criteria for getting on to the state house waiting list has not changed since Labour came to government’, the process for even getting to ask for help became a lot easier. This improved accessibility is the reason for the explosion in the public housing waiting at least until 2020. Over this period the waiting list grew from 6,180 households in December 2017 to 22.521 in December 2020.
The Labour government did not create the homelessness and unmet housing need we see now. This was created by successive governments not having the courage to tax wealth and choosing not to see public rental housing as a mainstay of our social policy but rather as a residual in an otherwise private housing market. We have the housing system middle-class homeowners voted for.
The present Government suffers from this same lack of courage and vision. After nearly five years in office we should be seeing some turn in the housing crisis but we simply aren’t. Lower quartile rents have risen almost 40% in the past five years while the value of the housing wealth for the 60% of households which owns all the houses grew by $600 billion. None of it taxed of course.
It is difficult to know what is happening in terms of the stock of state housing and other social housing provided by so-called community housing organisations. As John says in his article the political spin only ever talks about the numbers of new state houses built and not the ones being demolished or sold off. The number of rental dwellings owned by Kainga Ora – the government’s housing agency, has grown by just 3000 since Labour came to power. Meanwhile the Government is selling off state housing land to pay for its rebuild in what amounts to state sponsored gentrification.
The Government is trying to address homelessness through its funding of emergency and transitional housing. The problem appears now that it is a transition to nowhere. In March 2020 the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development contracted to various NGOs to provide 3092 transitional housing places. By March 2022 this programme had grown to 5145 places. The 2022 Budget provided for spending of over $550 million for emergency and transition housing. Amongst this was a budget of $31.5 million which is ‘intended to achieve better outcomes in Rotorua for vulnerable families and whānau with children by contracting specific motels to provide emergency accommodation’. This budget is expected to assist 200 families meaning an average annual cost of $155,000 per family.
It is churlish to suggest that the Labour Government is not taking homelessness seriously but it is spending more and more money on band aids while it waits for the Kainga Ora to get its act together and start building more houses than it demolishes. This turnaround may not be far away given signs of what is being built in Auckland at least. Yet even when we get to 5,000 new state house builds a year, public housing will still remain a residual part of our housing system and taxpayers will still be paying $150,000 per year to house a homeless family in a shabby Rotorua motel.
What is more appalling than this prospect is the sure knowledge that a National led Government will do even less.
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I’m not sure what’s ‘compassionate’ about dumping all the homeless people in the country in Rotorua.
With the near 40 year neo liberal consensus amongst the main parliamentary parties there is a real blockage on so many social and public infrastructure needs. Monetarism basically says “leave it to the dog eat dog private sector and things will work out”–but they clearly have not for the bottom 50% of New Zealanders who own just over two percent of the wealth!
Most new Governments claim to represent “all New Zealanders” but some NZers have more power and more say and more influence than others–and they like it that way–e.g. Mr “7 pads” Luxon who likes to lecture the poor & vulnerable.
Any number of reports for decades have charted the progression of inequality and poverty in Aotearoa NZ, the thing surely is to do something about it! It will take a new generation getting politically active, community organising and taking direct action to finally boot Roger’n’Ruth’s toxic legacy and make some progress on housing and many other urgent working class requirements.
It may not be true that the MSD did not record, nor could not access calls about housing assistance. The Community Services Card Call Centre originally established years back as a temporary measure, and now permanent, and I think, now known as The Call Centre, was established with dedicated lines, and dedicated staff, manning separate lines : a ‘general’ line for members of the public, and a ‘medical’ line primarily for doctors and pharmacists, the latter requiring and providing much more limited personal information than the general line.
Both leave electronic footprints originating from the the call centre operator’s key board. All incoming calls were and are recorded, and they are also archived for an unknown period; it stands to reason that housing requests would be processed in much the same way, and it should not have been difficult to eg develop an algorithm or even a simple search process to determine whatever specific information was needed about housing assistance. Indeed, it should have been done to help ascertain the need.
Its not that bad, I enjoyed my van life immensely
Fresh night air, no fridge to run too, no dumbass tell-lie-vision to fuck you up
It takes great skill to screw up a country like New Zealand!
We have less than a tenth of the population density of the UK so there’s plenty of space! The country is literally covered with pine trees suitable for house construction. So where has it all gone wrong?
In order of priority:
> Local government won’t release land for building.
> Local government won’t recognise international standards for construction materials, instead requiring local brand names on drawings thus allowing suppliers to gouge the market.
> Local government gets none of the central government tax revenue so cannot afford to build the infrastructure (roads, sewers, power etc) needed to allow for development. Which is one of the reasons they won’t release land.
It’s really not a hard thing to fix, is it?
I am totally confused Alan, perhaps you could point out to me the difference between what Minto wrote and what you have, doesn’t seem to be a real difference to me at all.
Yes we know this issue has taken years and years, and the two main parties are primarily to blame, but the current one with the hand wringing woman in charge seems to have done SFA about it. Despite having an enormous mandate.
You are not by chance ‘tribal labour’ that group of idiots who never ever criticise the party they are wedded to.
the dominant economics profession has a lot of misery to answer for.
i remember taking someone to housing NZ during the National government time. He could not get onto the waiting list because he wasnt homeless. i was told that even a car is not counted as homeless or sleeping on someones couch because you have a roof over your head. you only got on the list if there was some reason you could not rent privately and get accommodation supplement. i.e. the untenantable. created by cruel economics.