Missing persons cases cause flurries of action and public conjecture from time to time; searches quite rightly swing into action the moment police and neighbours hear of missing children, or a senior that has disappeared from the local old folks home. But when the missing person is known to be mentally unwell, the concern is muted, and often the action is delayed and ineffective.
As you drive in from Heathrow Airport to London, it is not long until you see, not far away, a tall, dark building. As you come nearer, you see it is the burned-out husk of a multi-storey tower block – Grenfell Tower, which burned almost exactly one year ago, causing the deaths of 72 people.
There is an ample supply of housing overall, but it is poorly distributed in terms of size and price. Increasingly large gains in house values are accruing for the already wealthy while the poorest households suffer excessive rents or lose housing access to housing altogether.
Housing NZ and their Minister Paula Bennett were told in 2016 by the Drug Foundation that they were misinterpreting their own policy on meth contamination, and Housing NZ told the Drug Foundation they were right but kept doing it.
I think we have a leader in Jacinda who could articulate this powerful vision and provide that leadership, because if we don’t make a radical departure now we are going to get sucked into the geopolitical vortex between these two and be forced to choose a side that in’t in our true national interests.
I don’t know about other “social” housing providers, but from my first-hand experience and the revelations of the meth myth, I know that HNZC does not have the competence or commitment to provide anything else but anti-social housing.
Wendy’s workers will be gathering outside the Te Atatu Wendy’s store at 7.30pm tonight to explain why they are striking to media and supporters.
“Housing New Zealand’s chief executive Andrew McKenzie refused to be interviewed again today.
He has never given RNZ an interview on his agency’s meth testing policy and his communications manager said he never will.”
CAN A “MOMENTUM” be built in New Zealand? This, in essence, was the question posed by millennial political scholar extraordinaire, Max Harris, to the sixty-or-so leftists who showed up at the Kai Pasifika restaurant on Wednesday night (30/5/18) for the welcome return of Laila Harré’s political “salon”.
In a week when the government has announced hundreds of millions to compensate farmers, many of whom are exceptionally wealthy, for something which appears to be no fault of the government, Housing Minister Phil Twyford is refusing to compensate state house tenants for what amounted to state-sanctioned abuse of vulnerable families by Housing New Zealand.