The true horror of our obscene NZ inequality laid bare for the world to shame

Emergency housing a ‘global embarrassment for NZ’ – HRC

Human Rights Commission (HRC) chief commissioner Paul Hunt said he expected the UN’s findings would be a “global, public embarrassment” for New Zealand.

Aotearoa was scheduled to be examined by the Committee on the Rights of the Child, today. A government delegation was in Geneva to answer questions.

HRC said its report to the UN Committee was damning and covered significant human rights breaches in New Zealand’s emergency housing. It published the report in December and had lodged the report with UN Special Rapporteur Balakrishnan Rajagopal.

It said emergency housing was often not clean, dry, safe, secure or in good repair for children and teens in Aotearoa – so some preferred to live on the street.

Hunt told RNZ the UN would report back on its findings after the presentations in Switzerland.

“This international accountability – it [the UN] doesn’t have sanctions that it can impose – but what it can do is embarrass government. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child will make some recommendations, it’ll make some findings.

“And it’s likely to be very critical of New Zealand in some respects. And that’s bad news for New Zealand, that’s internationally embarrassing. And that’s the primary remedy for taking a matter to the United Nations – it is global public embarrassment.

“There are inadequate forms of accountability in Aotearoa, around housing rights.”

Children’s commissioner Judge Frances Eivers and representatives of Save the Children and the Children’s Rights Alliance would also make presentations to the UN committee.

Hunt said: “The human right to a decent home, grounded on Te Tiriti o Waitangi, is a fundamental human right. It’s part of the International Bill of Human Rights. That means it’s binding on New Zealand in international law, but frankly, most public officials ignore it. Most politicians, pretend it doesn’t exist. And most judges don’t take it seriously.

“So the problem is that in New Zealand, there’s no effective accountability system for housing rights. So what can we do? We have to go to the United Nations and tell the United Nations that New Zealand is not complying with its binding international human rights obligations.”

He said the government needed to put human rights and values such as manaakitanga at the centre of the emergency housing system, and this would also build public trust.

Governments were periodically examined by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child to make sure they were meeting obligations.

New Zealand was last reviewed in 2016, under the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

In 2020, previous UN Special Rapporteur Leilani Farha visited Aotearoa and found successive governments had contributed – by neglect – to a housing and human rights crisis.

I think it is great that NZ is being shamed on the international stage over our appalling poverty and inequality when it comes to housing.

The naked truth is NZ is a very tiny herd like settler culture with a low horizon imagination and we care desperately about what the rest of the world thinks of us.

Because we refuse to force Governments to actually build more state houses (because we are so reliant on the desperation our housing shortage creates for Landlords), we have this corrosive wound of housing inequality used to prop up landlord profit margins.

Most of Parliament’s MPs are property owners, so they don’t really give a fuck and the mass immigration and low wage economy exploiters need more and more migrant workers to enter NZ to keep that desperation for housing competitive.

Nothing will change until our poverty, inequality and housing crisis become internationally recognisable and embarrasses us into actual action.

The only way you can force Kiwis into doing something meaningful on poverty and housing is to shame them into it.

 

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