The real question behind our horror housing stats – where the hell were the media for 9 years?
The true status of our housing failure and inequality has been laid bare in todays damning report…
Housing Minister Phil Twyford has released a “sobering” stocktake on housing which has found homelessness was worse than thought and there was a growing “floating” population of people in insecure housing.
It warned that New Zealand was “quickly becoming a society divided by the ownership of housing and its related wealth”.
It also showed home ownership had slumped dramatically since the 1980s – especially among Pacific and Maori people – and Auckland’s housing problem was created by a mix of population growth, partly fuelled by migration, and the construction and land development sectors “hindering” housing affordability.
It also pointed to a potential time bomb in the impact on housing affordability on the elderly, finding the proportion of older people who were living in mortgage-free homes had dropped from 86 per cent to 72 per cent since the 1980s.
…here is the thing I just can’t comprehend.
How the fuck did it get this bad without the mainstream media screaming about this for 9 years?
How come an avalanche of social damage can build over 9 years and collapse without the mainstream media of NZ noticing for almost a decade?
Where was the critical analysis of National? Where was the holding the powerful to account? Well if you have a neoliberal media who conform to neoliberal cultural mythology of individual success, they can never challenge the right wing Government of the day.
The same panelists and pundits all vetted for their conformity to the neoliberal cultural myths alongside journalists who don’t rock the boat creates a complacency of opinion that misses and can not comprehend the reality until it explodes in reports like this one.
We didn’t just need a new Government last September, we needed a new media.
The media did notice the social and economic inequality over the dark nine year reign of Natz/Key/English. Couldn’t help but not notice the decline of the social fabric of NZ right before their eyes.
However, my reckoning is msm would have been advised by Natz/Joyce to turn a blind eye and carry on with the misinformation it has always been delivering for that same period, keeping the masses under the illusion all is well in our fair land!
How the fuck did it get this bad without the mainstream media screaming about this for 9 years?
My best guess is that the increasing prices and ever lower ownership rates made the majority of the media elite, most of whom are on 6 figure salaries and can afford a house, feel warm and fuzzy (i.e. wealthy, which is a nice feeling I guess). This is equally true for the rest of the home owners also. It’s more or less become this pointless battle of the “haves” vs “have nots”, when in actual fact no one wins that fight over the long term – since it inevitably leads to societal collapse where no one retains much of anything.
They should have watched Waatea News!
To be fair, Radio NZ – John Campbell especially – ran multiple stories of homelessness in the last few years.
Print media – not so much. To absorbed with click-bait shite such as this; https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/01/has-anyone-worked-out-what-the-hell-meghan-markle-ever-did-to-kate-hawkesby-yet-wtf-was-that-weird-column-about/
Or running fake news stories such as the Herald’s Donghua Liu Affair, which destroyed David Cunliffe’s career.
Yeah, where were the media for 9 years? Excellent questions Martyn, that I would like answers to