Rising unemployment, collapsing public services, and growing inequality expose New Zealand as a failed privatisation experiment — and raise hard questions for the Left.
The recent Housing Report reveals National’s ineptitude when it came to homelessness and housing unaffordability. Even retiring baby-boomers do not escape National’s incompetence when it came to unrestrained migration; insufficient housing stock; spiralling speculation; and poorly-planned infrastructure to cope with a rising population;
National’s “grand plans” for 220 new social and transitional places remains woefully short of the 1,138 houses that National sold off to IHC’s Accessible Properties at the end of March. It is also unclear what is meant by ” transitional places”. Are these actual houses? Or motel units, à la Auckland-style;
Why the bloody hell is New Zealand getting so unaffordable that an Australian companys carpark is the best help available to a growing number of our people?
Politicians lose respect when they know something needs to be done but won’t do it for fear of losing a few votes.
Every week over this wet winter I am being asked to fix substandard structures that are leaking that should not in any way be housing but are being populated by families, couples, the working poor who consist in equal measure of both people born here and recent non-wealthy migrants.
There is something deeply morally wrong about a small minority in our society making huge profits from non productive speculation, setting the economy up for a crash, whilst hard working people struggle to keep up with rack renting…
Shelter is a human right, not a privilege. Private ownership of land is a privilege, not a human right. The debate is framed about getting ‘first-home buyers’ on the ‘property ladder’. Framing this as a right makes no more sense than having a debate about how to get people onto the ‘sharemarket ladder’.
So a mere 22 desperate people took up Paula Bennett’s obscene ‘solution’ to pay the poor $5000 to leave Auckland….
Lot’s of rich people rushing to the corporate media to breathlessly tell us that they have the solutions to NZs Housing Crisis.