Further Job Losses At Kāinga Ora Shows The Government Intent To Dismantle The State Housing Build Programme – Public Housing Futures

Public housing advocates oppose further job losses at Kāinga Ora. Today workers were given notice of 673 net job losses. Together with the rest of the job cuts to date, this amounts to a third of the workforce.

This comes a month after the Government announced its plan to sell around 800 state houses a year, demolish 700 and renew 1500 – a proposal that would see no net increase in state housing from 2026.

“It’s clear the Government is cementing its goal to withdraw from building the homes we need. At the same time as mass job losses, they have pulled the handbrake on Kāinga Ora, pausing and cancelling hundreds of desperately needed developments across the country, many of which were consented and ready to go. The impacts of these cuts will be devastating,” says Vanessa Cole, spokesperson for Public Housing Futures

Census data released last year showed that 112,496 people were severely housing deprived – sleeping on couches, in their cars and on the streets. This has worsened with the Government’s decision to put up barriers to access emergency housing policy which has already seen increases in homelessness in centres such as Auckland, Wellington, New Plymouth and Christchurch.

“Building state housing at scale is a key solution to the housing crisis, and Kāinga Ora desperately needs the resourcing and the vision to be able to make this happen. We know from history that when governments stop building state housing, it impacts the whole housing system – we all lose out. We’ve already seen the ripple impact that this has had on jobs in the construction sector,” says Cole

“Starving public services of resources, gutting the workforce and then proposing private market solutions has been a key strategy of this government. The Government is deliberately setting up Kāinga Ora to fail in order to roll back its role in building housing to enable the further privatisation of our housing system.

“The private sector cannot deliver the homes we need – homes with secure tenancies, that are built for people to age in place, and are permanently affordable. And once we lose the workforce, skills and knowledge needed to coordinate the building, maintaining and providing of state housing – it’s very difficult to gain this back,” says Cole