In 1988, our National Housing Commission declared, “New Zealand does not have the huge, insoluble problems of homelessness and substandard housing which confront many other nations.”

This was the final report of the then disestablished commission, which to that point had reported detailed data every five years to keep the country and policy-makers informed about what we had once considered the foundation of stable society — a home for New Zealanders to call their own.

I was born six years after that report, and in those years and across my lifetime, deliberate political choices — specifically, political choices by people sitting in Parliament — have shredded that once-guaranteed housing dignity and stability.

They traded it for a game of Monopoly, which, the pecuniary interests register tells us, also happens to disproportionately benefit around half of the “representatives” in there with interests in more than one property (notably, approximately just 2 percent of the general population are landlords).

This dire situation is the direct consequence of political decisions, and it is disproportionately hurting the 1.4 million renters in this country that our Parliament, by majority, and as an overwhelming majority of comfortable homeowners, continues to structurally disempower.

In spite of this, we have made some slow progress. In 2017, the Greens worked with Labour to introduce Healthy Homes Standards and a slate of amendments to the Residential Tenancies Act, removing no-cause evictions and allowing renters to take claims to the Tenancy Tribunal anonymously.

Some standards, we obviously agreed, were better than nothing. A set of rules means it’s clear how a game should be played, but those rules become pretty meaningless if there’s no consistent referee monitoring and enforcing them.

Compliance not tracked
Unfortunately, that’s what the Healthy Homes Standards have become. My parliamentary written questions last year showed the government isn’t tracking how many private rentals are compliant.

It doesn’t know how many landlords and property managers have decided to self-exclude their properties from compliance. It has no tabs on the cottage industry of companies that have cropped up to verify these standards, let alone the variance in their approaches.

This leaves the third of New Zealanders who rent left to shoulder the burden of enforcing these basic rules which are supposed to protect them.

It’s a funny thing that whenever the Greens mention renters, we’re immediately shouted down and told that the problem is, somehow, that landlords aren’t given enough free rein. That the solution is more commodification of basic human rights.

Ironically, this is exactly what the National Housing Commission warned against back in 1988, that shifting of responsibility from the state to the private sector would, “add little to the total housing supply while allowing private landlords and property speculators to make even higher charges for a non-expanding supply of housing… rais[ing] the purchase price of land and rented property”.

We now know, viscerally, how right they were. Whatever metric you choose, we have the most expensive housing in the world.

The Accommodation Supplement, once rationalised in the state-housing sell-off to help support lower income New Zealanders pushed into the private sector, is now paid out to the tune of $2 billion a year with evidence showing it primarily serves to just bid up rental prices and effectively subsidise private landlords.

Special tax preferential
We remain one of the only countries in the developed world that continues to provide special tax treatment and preference to properties, incentivising the flow of capital into unproductive property speculation, or what University of Auckland researchers called, “a politically condoned, finance-fuelled casino”.

In less than 40 years, political decisions have not only made housing one of the major drivers of poverty and inequality in this country, but one of the major determinants of both physical and mental health, not to mention education achievement and school attendance.

So, who pays the cost?

Most immediately, it’s the 1.4 million renting New Zealanders, who Statistics New Zealand tells us spend more of their income on older, smaller, mouldier, lower quality housing.

Renting is no longer a transient state — unless you’re talking about the literal transience which sees renters in this country maintaining their tenancies for, on average, just 16 months at a time.

Almost all of us will know families with children and friends in their 30s and 40s who are flatting. A quarter of retirees don’t own their own home.

This didn’t happen overnight. It happened within a generation of political decisions that sold our human right to housing to the highest bidder.

As depressing as that may be, it makes clear that the status quo is not an inevitability. It can and must change if we want any hope of a fairer society.

The good news is the Greens have unveiled our plan to fix it all.

Chlöe Swarbrick is the Green Party MP for Auckland Central. This article was originally published in The New Zealand Herald and is republished here with the author’s permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Deception and political spin crossed new boundaries this week with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, under pressure to explain the housing catastrophe in Rotorua, making the absurd statement:

“Our long-term plan is to get them into sustainable, long-term safe housing. It’s why for instance we’ve worked so hard to now have built 10 percent of all the state houses in New Zealand.”

Meaningless, ludicrous and irrelevant.

Why was she not challenged by journalists on this preposterous statement?

The government has been demolishing state houses almost as fast as it builds them so that the net increase in state houses over the last five years stands at a piddling 1100 per year for a waiting list of 26,664. The waiting list has increased five-fold since Labour came to power in 2017.

Labour is taking us backwards on state housing at a spectacular rate.

And neither is it the fault of the previous National government. Labour has kept the policy settings for state house building the same as applied under National — right down to maintaining the same tough criteria to enable a low-income tenant or family to get on the waiting list.

Largest Labour privatisation since 1980s
The awful reason Labour is demolishing state houses and selling the land is to provide funding for Kainga Ora. The government doesn’t want to borrow to build, which any sensible government would, so it is forcing Kainga Ora to sell land and properties to do this.

It’s the largest privatisation of state assets by Labour since the 1980s.

Where are the journalists to put some simple questions to the Prime Minister?

• Why has Labour allowed the state house waiting list to INCREASE FIVE FOLD (from 5,000 in late 2017 to over 26,000 in 2022) with no effective policy response?
• Why does Labour still think it’s OK to produce just 1,100 net new state houses per year for a state house waiting list of over 26,000? (When Labour came to power there were 63,209 state houses which has increased to just 68,765 by June this year).
• Why are the number of children living in grotty motels STILL INCREASING?
• Why is the number of children living in cars STILL INCREASING?
• Why are the number of children in tents STILL INCREASING?
• Why is Labour still ONLY FUNDING 1600 new IRRS places (for state house and social housing providers combined) each year for the more than 26,000 families on the state house waiting list?
• Why does Labour still think it’s OK to keep the proportion of state house at just 3.6% of total housing stock when it was 5.4 percent in 1990?
• Why has Labour not instigated an industrial-scale state house building programme such as the first Labour government did in the 1930s? (Labour then built 3500 state houses each year – equivalent to 10,000 today on a population basis).
• Why is the government planning to sell 55 to 60 percent of crown land in Auckland to private property developers when we have a housing catastrophe for low-income New Zealanders?

Where are the journalists to expose this prime ministerial spin?

Republished from The Daily Blog with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz