We are seeing a complete break down of our crucial social services. The spiteful harvest of National’s draconian welfare reforms are coming home to roost and NZers should feel ashamed of what it says about us as a country.

What did you think was going to happen by forcing solo parents back to work?

What did you think was going to happen by putting the homeless into motels and then handing them $50 000 debts?

What do you think was going to happen from privatising state homes?

What did you think was going to happen by banning everyone with a positive meth test out of state houses for 12 months?

What did you think was going to happen from a capital gains free tax regime that supported and nurtured property speculation?

What did you think would happen by opening the floodgates to tens of thousands of semi-skilled migrant workers with no Union protections?

Property bubble

It is now an obvious political calculation by National to set the tax frame on property so that middle class speculators benefit while the poor suffer. This is the politics of greed, property owners vote while the poor do not. Those middle class speculators have now loaded an eye watering half trillion in debt…

Nation of Debt: New Zealand sitting on half-trillion-dollar debt bomb

New Zealand now owes almost half a trillion dollars in debt – and a growing chunk of it belongs to ordinary households, mainly borrowing to buy property.

…those NZers part of this bubble are now waking each morning watching the markets for the first sign of a pop. It will be any number of global stresses, the Brexit, the EU meltdown after Brexit, Russia upgrading its sabre rattling, Chinese Stock Market meltdown, American Stock Market meltdown. That fear will drive some fiercely back to National, but it will be the Party that can somehow find a way to guarantee mortgagee sales won’t occur on the family home who will benefit most.

The Government have used the property bubble growth to mask the fact the economy has seized up and it will be those on welfare who once again bare the brunt of National’s harshest political choices. Those highly leveraged will support National in personal desperation, those who have nothing left to lose will vote Labour.

P houses

One of the great spin lines by the Government to attempt to defend the problems their policy has created is ‘meth contamination’. Currently any clown can be a meth tester, the meth ‘contamination’ from simply smoking the stuff is as contaminating as second hand tobacco smoke…

Methamphetamine residues not the big health worry people fear: scientist Nick Kim

Tenants and home buyers need not necessarily fear traces of residual methamphetamine in a property, a New Zealand scientist has claimed.

Dr Nick Kim, a senior lecturer in environmental chemistry at Massey University, tested the residue left on walls by meth smokers and found the potential health effects of past P smoking was no worse than those of tobacco, or handling meth-contaminated bank notes.

In fact, contamination was a phrase he used carefully because it had been used loosely, he said. The accepted New Zealand benchmark for remediation, 0.5 micrograms per 100 square centimetres, was based on levels in a meth lab, not on houses where smoking had occurred.

…so there isn’t really any health danger from this type of meth ‘contamination’, but it’s excellent hate spin for National because it feeds into all those bigoted stereotypes used when thinking about the poor. Throwing every tenant out whose house gets tested for meth and banning them from accessing any state housing for 12 months is the exact type of policy that actively creates homelessness, it certainly isn’t about the welfare of the tenant.

State Housing privatisation

The madness of privatising state houses when we have 40 000 homeless, 20 000 families requiring emergency housing and tens of thousands more living in over crowded cold houses is equalled by the huge amounts of cash National are spending trying to sever their obligation to provide housing for every citizen…

Cost of state house transfer slammed by Labour

The cost of the Government’s plan to offload state houses has been slammed after its cost was revealed at nearly $30 million.

Figures obtained by Labour MP Phil Twyford shows the Government has had 129 officials working on the policy, which hit problems this week when a key provider withdrew from plans to buy and manage 348 Housing New Zealand properties in Invercargill.

The PACT group was the only interested party in the Invercargill transfer, meaning the Government has been forced to put its plans there on hold.

Twyford said the cost of implementing the policy was scandalous and it would not deliver “a single extra house at a time when vulnerable Kiwi families are living in cars and garages”.

Labour’s figures showed $26.7 million had been spent on consultants, and $2.2 million on the sale process in Tauranga and Invercargill, Twyford said.

“It is obscene National has spent $26 million on consultants advising them how to sell state houses.”

It was also “unbelievable” that the Government had 129 officials working on the policy, when the focus should be on housing the homeless.

…blowing millions on Bill English’s latest idealogical brainfart to hock off the State obligations to religious, minority and corporate groups is an obscenity that just doesn’t stop under this Government, but the true kick in the guts us that National intend to privatise billions of dollars more in state houses so they can afford their $3billion tax cut bribe for the 2017 election.

Ghost houses

Because the tax havens and property bubble that National built is making so much money for investors, it’s cheaper for the speculator to not allow any tenants to live in their house. The madness of this has seen a huge jump in ‘ghost houses’…

Rise of the ghost homes – More than 33,000 Auckland dwellings officially classified empty

More than 33,000 Auckland dwellings are officially classified empty as the city grapples with a crisis of affordable housing and homelessness.

Auckland’s 6.6 per cent vacancy rate is higher than either Sydney (5.2 per cent) or Melbourne (4.8 per cent), where there has been an uproar over “ghost houses” deliberately left empty by speculators trading on a soaring market.

Critics such as Labour’s Phil Twyford claim the figures show the same is happening here, especially as the 2013 Census figures predate an increase in foreign buyers in 2014-2015.

…we are allowing speculators to lock tenants out of houses and then can’t understand why we have such  homeless problem. FFS – how dense are our voters in this country?

Unaffordable houses

Speculators have created a situation where they buy the homes, lock tenants out and in turn lock entire generations out of home ownership…

Auckland has the fifth least-affordable houses in the world

Auckland’s housing affordability has worsened, with the city climbing from the world’s ninth most expensive city to fifth in a year.

The annual Demographia survey, released today, compares prices to incomes in 367 cities. Auckland is one of the worst in the world due to extremely high house prices coupled with moderate wages.

…that’s Gen X, Gen Y, Millennials, the poor, women, Maori, Pacific Island and migrants all locked out of home ownership, but we can’t dare suggest this is class war, we can’t dare suggest a hegemonic structure built by the rich for the rich is robbing everyone else of their rights as citizens to share the harvest of civil society – oh no. The poor deserve to be poor and the rich deserve to be rich where wanting a quality of life is somehow portrayed as unrealistic and spoilt.

The homeless

Which leaves us with the explosion in homeless numbers, a spiteful harvest from National’s 2010 welfare reforms. We have a Social Housing minister more focused on managing the media than the actual housing crisis.

Who will Paula Bennett turn on next in her never ending crusade to attack and denigrate anyone caught helping the poor and showing up her policies? Doctors helping children in cold state houses? Nurses tending to the homeless? Churches that donate blankets?

At this stage Paula is behaving less like a Social Housing Minister and more like Tony Soprano on a revenge bender.

Those generously helping our homeless deserve praise, support and to be at the table when the policy gets made, instead they face manipulation and smears for daring to highlight this Governments failures.

It’s disgraceful and Bennett should be forced to stand down.

The entire housing meltdown of our community has run amok with this Government’s blessing.

This is a crisis exacerbated and made worse by John Key and his Party for pure political reasons. That’s why it’s so corrupt.