This Government has butchered public housing

Public sector cuts: 673 jobs to go at Government housing agency Kāinga Ora

Kāinga Ora staff crying in office over ‘horrendous’ restructure process

And here comes the sell off…

Kāinga Ora’s half-billion-dollar state home sell-off excites developers

…when developers are ‘excited’ the people should weep!

This entire exercise in mutilating Public Housing is based on the report Chris Bishop got Bill English to do over a text message using $500 000 set aside for emergency housing…

…selling off public housing in nice suburbs to pay for shitty housing in poor suburbs isn’t a public housing solution, it’s a joke.

He’s making Public Housing homeless!

Bernard Hickey is scathing…

Govt to sell billions of dollars worth of state housing land

Bishop stripping Kāinga Ora back to being landlord of stagnant stock of 78,000 state homes; Govt to sell around 900 homes per year in leafier areas to fund renewals & eyes sale of bare land blocks

• • Housing Minister Chris Bishop yesterday announced Kāinga Ora would be stripped of its ‘non-core’ activities of developing new land, managing First Home loans and KiwiSaver withdrawals and consenting its own projects;
  • Bishop detailed plans to add a net 145 new homes this year before capping the state housing stock at 78,000 for the next 30 years, with renewal and renovations of an already-tired housing stock paid for by land and home sales in leafier suburbs;
  • He said around 800 state homes on land in suburbs such as Remuera would be sold to deveopers in the current year, with ongoing sales in the years to come of around 900, with the potential to also sell bare land bought previously for redevelopment;
  • The combined proceeds from land sales would amount to billions per year and would allow Kāinga Ora to generate ‘sustained cash surpluses’ from the 2027/28 fiscal year, which would allow borrowing to stop and dividend payments to resume;
  • Cabinet decided to cut around 1,000 jobs from Kāinga Ora to save $1.4 billion over four years, including by demolishing surplus homes rather than transporting them to iwi, cutting maintenance spending by $50 million a year and reducing the size and quality of new homes away from the Homestar Six rating; and,
  • Stats NZ reported yesterday building consents fell 9.8% to 33,600 in calendar 2024 after the Government suspended Kāinga Ora’s new building work and high interest rates quashed private sector demand, leading to collapses of building firms and the loss of 13,000 jobs in construction last year.

 

We are witnessing a class war but don’t have the political vocabulary to describe it in a country blinded by its egalitarian pretensions.

Bishop has a track record of saying one thing and then being unable to back it up.

He claimed a renters rights group loved his plan to allow Landlords to throw you out onto the street but then refused to give anyone the name of that organisation.

He claimed he understood the pain of renters because he was a renter, when asked if he was renting from family, he said no, only for it to turn out he was renting it from his in-laws and he didn’t consider them technically ‘family’.

He has this habit of lying to deflect criticism even when the lies can be easily discovered.

By attacking Kianga Ora, he is manufacturing a housing crisis for the benefit of landlords!

National don’t have money for new Public Housing but they do have $3b for landlords!

This is what we are now, this is who we is.

When the developers are ‘excited’, the people should weep!

 

Increasingly having independent opinion in a mainstream media environment which mostly echo one another has become more important than ever, so if you value having an independent voice – please donate here.