The naked counter productive madness of Housing NZ

How Housing NZ see their tenants

Housing NZ are vehemently denying that they are part of the incarceration problem because they have a secret policy to turn down any prisoner trying to be bailed to a state house. Without getting an address prisoners can live at, prisoners are kept inside prison.

So should we believe that Housing NZ wouldn’t have such a draconian policy aimed at prisoners?

Remember when Housing NZ were throwing state tenants out of any State House that tested for meth based on deeply flawed science that didn’t prove any actual contamination…

Housing New Zealand is being accused of falsely evicting tenants and wasting taxpayers’ money on unnecessary meth decontamination.

The Drug Foundation says the country has been sucked in by the methamphetamine testing industry and the threshold for a fail test is far too low.

“Make no mistake, [meth decontamination companies] aren’t in it for the public good; they’re in it for their own profits,” says Ross Bell from the Drug Foundation.

Mr Bell says Housing New Zealand has been suckered in and is evicting tenants unfairly.

“I think that it’s deliberate,” he says. “They know the truth [and] they’re using the lies to kick people out.

“They like to be seen as tough, and I think they need to free up waiting lists as well.”

… the science is pretty clear here, unless the property has been used to manufacture meth, the ‘P contamination’ is about as dangerous as second hand smoke, yet housing NZ were more than happy to politicise that fear mongering to demonise state tenants and soften the public up for state house privatisation, so the idea that they have been secretly denying prisoners access to state houses and in turn exploding our incarceration rate is actually utterly believable.

The lawyers who work in this field are universal in naming Housing NZ as the problem…

Lawyers back minister’s claims people on bail blocked from homes

Justice Minister Andrew Little yesterday said Housing New Zealand (HNZ) was preventing people from being bailed or paroled to live with family in its houses.

“The policy is Housing New Zealand has to give approval – and people at the coal face are telling me that approval is routinely withheld.”

Senior criminal defence lawyer Stephen Bonnar QC said the practice had been around for at least half a decade.

HNZ would often come up with a flimsy reason to turn down an otherwise ideal location, he said.

“They may say, for example, the address will be overcrowded.

“That really doesn’t wash in a case … where the defendant may have already been ordinarily a resident at the address.”

…this is the very counter productive mentality of our punitive neoliberal social services that I was complaining about a couple of days ago.

Housing NZ are part of the housing crisis and the incarceration crisis, at some stage the new Government must purge these welfare agencies of the neoliberal acolytes who see their interests first and the welfare of those they are supposed to be serving second.