Waatea 5th Estate – $5000 Get Out of Town Ticket

3 Comments

1. Time to walk the talk imo. Stop National turfing out tenants from state homes in order to sell off the land to their developer mates. Stop National from tearing down good sound state houses. Stop National from selling off thousands of state houses. And how about freeing up all those tens of thousands of houses sitting empty, particularly in Auckland. Foreign speculators are letting thousands of homes sit empty. National are letting state houses sit empty with the view of selling them off. National are even selling tenanted state houses, so how many of those tenants have found themselves on the streets?

2. An excellent point by Huri – cut people with whanau living in their state house garage some slack because at least it gives one more family a roof.

3. One obvious solution that nobody seems to discuss is rent control. I’m not sure exactly how it could work. Making a rule that tenants can only be charged a fixed percentage of their income (as they are in public housing) could have unintended consequences, encouraging landlords to discriminate against low income tenants even more than they already do, and allowing landlords to pry into tenants finances. But surely private landlords just shouldn’t be allowed to charge families $2-300 a week to live in a caravan, or charge families 60% of their income for rent! These landlords are the parasites people who bash beneficiaries as “bludgers” and “scroungers” should be focusing on.

   BTW Claudette did any excellent job of hosting the show, despite some passionate interjections from the guests. Can we *please* have her as a permanent replacement for Willie Jackson?

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