Over the last few days, there has been plenty of media chatter in relation to the government’s proposal to pass a law enabling police to forcibly shift street dwellers from Auckland’s CBD. (Refer ‘Move On’ orders penalise those with the least, Scoop 22 Feb 2026.)

While Labour likes to express outrage, neither Labour nor National have given as much as a hint as to a solution they would commit to implementing. National sees street vagrants in much the same way as the Israeli government sees Palestinians; in both cases, they just want the ‘problem people’ to go away.

New Zealand, like most countries, has a long history of vagrancy, and of mean-spirited laws to deal with it. New Zealand, however, in 1938 introduced a universal welfare state; a political contract which gained broad bipartisan support until 1984. Over the 1938 to 1984 period the vagrancy problem was minimal. I remember being shocked at seeing beggars in Ireland in 1976; that was depression-era optics, which I thought had long passed in the developed world.

The most recent time I ventured out of Australasia was in 2019, on a trip to Canada, Scotland, and London. I remember remarking that Vancouver seemed to have fewer homeless people than Auckland. The next day I changed my mind; I discovered that the problem in Vancouver was more on the edge of the CBD, whereas in Auckland it had already become normalised around Queen Street and the city’s main library. I note this point, because the problem cannot be blamed on the Covid19 pandemic, and it was a problem that neither Labour’s Jacinda Ardern nor Phil Goff were willing to prioritise during their terms in office (as Prime Minister, and as Mayor).

(In Scotland, while Aberdeen did have a problem, it was less obvious than in Auckland; and even less obvious in Edinburgh. In London, I stayed in Stepney Green, a social housing area close to Whitechapel, and did not particularly sense a ‘street dweller problem’ there; nor in closer-to-the-City and now-gentrified Spitalfields.)

The current chatter focuses on homelessness, while only noticing in passing that many street occupiers are also beggars; meaning that, at its core, the problem is one of income insecurity.

Hardly anyone has connected the dots between begging and the regression of social security in New Zealand. The universal welfare state has lost its way since 1984. My sense is that many of today’s vagrants are not receiving any social security money; and that that may be in large part because it is too difficult – and humiliating – for them to deal with a Kafkaesque system that calls beneficiaries ‘jobseekers’, and is forever looking for ways to not support vulnerable people into constructive engagement. While the general public would regard vagrants as being unemployed, Statistics New Zealand does not even count them as unemployed. Our governmental systems are oriented around the ‘labour force’, and are largely blind to working-age people ‘not in the labour force’.

It is not my role here to analyse the way that our untweaked version of capitalism creates vagrancy. Rather, it is to note that our vagrants need these three things: an amount of unconditional income, a place better than the street where they can sleep and wash, and something fulfilling – maybe, even, productive – to do.

While, for the rest of this essay I’ll focus on the former, I’ll just mention the latter briefly. Minimum wage laws put most of these people out of the reach of the formal labour market. That leaves them two choices for something societally connected to do; voluntary work, or petit-entrepreneurship (aka non-criminal hustling). (Two other options, both disconnected from mainstream society, are: ‘hanging out’ in ways that intimidate, or participating in underworld crime.)

A Very Basic Universal Income (VBUI)

As our income-tax scale stands at present, a Very Basic Universal Income of $150 – payable to every tax-resident aged over 18 – could be mostly funded by abandoning the 10.5% and 17.5% tax rates. All annual personal income below $78,100 would be subject to a 30% tax rate.

Non-beneficiaries earning less than $53,500 would gain, because their VBUI would be more than their extra tax. (For these people in fulltime work, the gain would be small; $12 per week for a minimum wage worker working 40 hours per week; $16 per week gain for a minimum wage worker working 37½ hours per week.)

In technical economists’ language, the VBUI would be called a ‘refundable tax credit’, or maybe a ‘demogrant’.

People earning more than $53,500 per year – and beneficiaries – would have an unchanged net income situation. (For beneficiaries, the first $150 of their benefits would become universal; an accounting change only, from a costing point-of-view.)

People on benefits would have the first $150 per week of their benefit recategorised. People losing their jobs would continue to receive their VBUI, unconditionally. People not in the labour force would have their VBUI payments made directly, and there would be an opt-out mechanism; not an opt-in.

The biggest gains come to non-beneficiaries aged over 18 defined in the official statistics as either ‘underemployed’, ‘part-time’, or ‘not in the labour force’. The most important gains are that the $150pw VBUI constitutes an unconditional safety-bridge for those in danger of becoming redundant, or of having their hours reduced to part-time; and that it thus acts as an ‘automatic stabiliser’, meaning that people who lose their incomes can still maintain some of their usual spending.

The VBUI also means that people who gain work, or who gain extra work, still get to keep all of their Very Basic Universal Income. There is no income or poverty trap (as there is now), whereby gains in income from a new source lead to reductions in income from existing sources.

And it also substantially reduces the cost of administering social security, if people who lose their jobs automatically retain a very basic income to help tide them over losses in market income. The only information needed about non-beneficiaries in New Zealand would be their date and place of birth, their bank account number, and their immigration status. People receiving no publicly-sourced income other than a VBUI would at no stage be required to provide the authorities with any further information; they would pay tax at the going rate to the IRD based on market income connected to their IRD number.

Very Basic Universal Income is an ‘opt-out’ mechanism, which means that everyone receives it unless they have specifically asked to not receive it. And, even then, opt-outs should be managed as ‘temporary’. (All people legally allowed to earn income in New Zealand would have at least an IRD or NHI [Health NZ] number; ‘bank accounts’ at Kiwibank could be opened by Inland Revenue or Health New Zealand for people without other known access to banking facilities.)

In addition to reduced administration costs, there are several other ways that a miserly government could recoup its not-very-onerous outlays on VBUI. The two most obvious ways would be to raise the company tax rate from 28% to 30%, and to reduce the income threshold for the 39% tax down from $180,000 per year. A centre-right government which has done all these things – all very much consistent with centre-right philosophy – might then aspire to removing the 33% tax rate. That would leave a two-step tax scale: 30% and 39%.

We note that the introduction of a VBUI would, in itself, mean only one change to the existing benefit structure. That one change would be the accounting formality to categorise the first $150 per week of a benefit as a universal income, as a ‘duty-of-care’ income integrated into both the tax system and the benefit system.

A VBUI is not generous, and it’s not a Universal Basic Income (UBI). But it does act as an income that acknowledges both human rights and economic efficiency. Once the mechanism and mindset are in place – noting that the ‘mindset’ issue is analogous with that associated with the introduction of proportional-representation voting in New Zealand in the 1990s – then it becomes comparatively easy to tweak the numbers. In time, the VBUI might become a BUI, a Basic Universal Income; more like $250pw than $150pw. We need to start at a low amount, to sooth the apprehensions of the professional naysayers; those unimaginative people too ready to block social and economic progress.

A Teenage Basic Universal Income (TBUI) for adolescents

Late in 1979, Robert Muldoon raised the universal family benefit to $6 per week – a benefit (which commenced in 1946) payable on behalf of all children without any means testing. If we adjust that $6 by the CPI changes we get an equivalent of $42 today. Or if we adjust by GDP per capita – a better measure than the CPI, a measure which allows for economic growth – that $6 in late 1979 becomes $70 today.

My proposal is to pay a TBUI of either $42 or $70, to all New Zealanders aged from 14 to 17. For many of these teenage recipients, the amount would be paid directly to the recipient, and deducted from the Family Tax Credit payment presently paid to their caregivers.

I have calculated that recipients of a $42 (or even $45) TBUI should face a special flat tax rate of no more than 20% of their market income. And recipients of a $70 TBUI should face a special flat tax rate of no more than 23% of their market income. I favour fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds – all still legally at school – to receive the $42; and sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds to receive the $70 and pay a bit more tax.

The TBUI acknowledges that a significant minority of New Zealand’s vagrant population is in the 14 to under-18 age range. They would receive payments in the same way as older vagrants; if necessary, through an account opened for them by the IRD or Health NZ.

Call it ‘pocket money’, if you like. All New Zealand residents would receive this from when they turn 14, unless they opt-out. Fourteen is the age, in New Zealand, when children may be legally left-alone, unsupervised. Thus, it is the first age to directly signal that a young person should have a degree of independence, of economic autonomy.

Finally

All of the payments I have suggested are very basic and somewhat stingy. What matters is that they are unconditional, and confer a sense of citizenship onto our most vulnerable adults and semi-adults. There are no poverty traps; no impediments to recipients from ‘bettering themselves’, from being aspirational. Universal Incomes are not withheld when persons’ circumstances improve.

I personally would prefer less parsimonious payments; deficit-funded payments which would give an underdone economy a necessary bit of stimulus, realising that the arising increase in collective prosperity itself recoups such fiscal deficits. (The 1938 introduction of Universal Superannuation and other reforms turned out to have a fiscal cost significantly less than the projected costs. Refer Elizabeth Hanson’s 1980 book: The Politics of Social Security…) I note that we live in austere times; without really knowing the reason for these fiscal blindspots. Nevertheless, I am suggesting that, even with Scrooge in charge, we can do much better than we do today.

Further, with these universal incomes in place, everyone will know that everyone else will know that all of our vagrant population is in receipt of at least some income. (Refer Steven Pinker’s 2025 book: When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…) As it is, some of the beggars on the streets may be receiving substantial benefits, while others are receiving absolutely nothing; today we, in the public, are unable to tell any individual vagrant’s actual level of need.

There are solutions to these ‘all-rhetoric no-solution’ difficulties. It just takes the political will to see past our blindspots. Some form of rights-based universal income guarantee is a necessary but not a sufficient solution to the compounding vagrancy problem; and to other problems too, especially those problems affecting young people. (Note: Youth facing more psychological distress…, RNZ, 25 Feb 2026.)

Note on the Politics of Achievement

When Michael Joseph Savage in 1938 proposed (and then legislated for) a universal welfare state – with special emphasis on an initially very basic Universal Superannuation – he converted what could have been a political losing hand in that election year into New Zealand’s greatest ever electoral victory. There were many on the left and on the right of Savage’s parliamentary caucus – political people without political nous – who seemed to be eager to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Fortuitously, Savage was not one of them. By not being one of them, by not losing courage, he became the New Zealander of the twentieth century. Savage didn’t solve every problem. But he did make a difference, for the better; and was loved for that. While a modest man himself, his political leadership for New Zealand was far from austere.

Do our current lot of politicians even want to win in November? My advice to both National and Labour is to pursue the politics of success, and not the politics of nihilism.

(In this regard we might note that the Labour Opposition in 1931 suffered an ignominious election defeat, despite the appalling economic catastrophe which was then taking place. Labour went on to win in 1935, by promising a universal welfare state. It came close to electoral embarrassment in 1938; it came close to failing to deliver on its 1935 promise.)

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

ANALYSIS: By Susan St John

With the coalition government’s second Budget being unveiled, we should question where New Zealand is heading.

The 2024 Budget laid out the strategy. Tax cuts and landlord subsidies were prioritised with a focus on cuts to social and infrastructure spending. Most of the tax package went to the well-off, while many low-income households got nothing, or very little.

Even the tiny bit of the tax package directed to low-income people fell flat. Family Boost has significantly helped only a handful of families, while the increase of $25 per week (In Work Tax Credit) was denied all families on benefits, affecting about 200,000 of the very poorest children.

In the recession, families that lost paid work also lost access to full Working for Families, an income cut for their children of about $100 per week.

No one worked out how the many spending cuts would be distributed, but they have hurt the poor the most. These changes are too numerous to itemise but include increased transport costs; the reintroduction of prescription charges; a disastrous school lunch system; rising rents, rates and insurance; fewer budget advisory services; cuts to foodbank funding and hardship grants; stripping away support programmes for the disabled; inadequately adjusted benefits and minimum wage; and reduced support for pay equity and the living wage.

The objective is to save money while ignoring the human cost. For example, a scathing report of the Auditor General confirms that Oranga Tamariki took a bulldozer to obeying the call for a 6.5 percent cut in existing social services with no regard to the extreme hurt caused to children and struggling parents.

Budget 2025 has already indicated that Working for Families will continue to go backwards with not even inflation adjustments. The 2025 child and youth strategy report shows that over the year to June 2024 the number of children in material poverty continued to increase, there were more avoidable hospitalisations, immunisation rates for babies declined, and there was more food insecurity.

Human costs all around us
We can see the human costs all around us in homelessness, food insecurity, and ill health. Already we know we rank at the bottom among developed countries for child wellbeing and suicide rates.

Abject distress existing alongside where homes sell for $20 million-$40 million is no longer uncommon, and neither are $6 million helicopters of the very rich.

At the start of the year, Helen Robinson, CEO of the Auckland City Mission, had a clear warning: “I am pleading with government for more support, otherwise what we and other food relief agencies in Auckland can provide, will dramatically decrease.

“This leaves more of Auckland hungry and those already there become more desperate. It is the total antithesis of a thriving city.”

The theory held by this government is that by reducing the role of government and taxes, the private sector will flourish, and secure well-paid jobs will be created. Instead, as basic economic theory would predict, we have been handed a long and protracted recession with few signs of growth and prosperity.

Budget 2025 signals more of the same.

It would be a mistake to wait for simplistic official inequality statistics before we act. Our current destination is a sharply divided country of extreme wealth and extreme poverty with an insecure middle class.

Underfunded social agencies
Underfunded and swamped social agencies cannot remove the relentless stress on the people who are invisible in the ‘fiscally responsible’ economic narrative. The fabricated bogeyman of outsized net government debt is at the core, as the government pursues balanced budgets and small government-size targets.

A stage one economics student would know the deficit increases automatically in a recession to cushion the decline and stop the economy spiralling into something that looks more like a depression. But our safety nets of social welfare are performing very badly.

Rising unemployment has exposed the inadequacy of social protections. Working for Families, for instance, provides a very poor cushion for children. Many “working” families do not have enough hours of work and face crippling poverty traps.

Future security is undermined as more KiwiSavers cash in for hardship reasons. A record number of the talented young we need to drive the recovery and repair the frayed social fabric have already fled the country.

The government is fond of comparing its Budget to that of a household. But what prudent household would deliberately undermine the earning capacity of family members?

The primary task for the Budget should be to look after people first, to allow them to meet their food, dental and health needs, education, housing and travel costs, to have a buffer of savings to cushion unexpected shocks and to prepare for old age.

A sore thumb standing
In the social security part of the Budget, NZ Super for all at 65, no matter how rich or whether still in full-time well-paid work, dominates (gross $25 billion). It’s a sore thumb standing out alongside much less generous, highly targeted benefits and working for families, paid parental leave, family boost, hardship provisions, accommodation supplement, winter energy and other payments and subsidies.

Given the political will, research shows we can easily redirect at least $3 billion from very wealthy superannuitants to fixing other payments to greatly improve the wellbeing of the young. This will not be enough but it could be a first step to the wide rebalancing needed.

New Zealand has become a country of two halves whose paths rarely cross: a social time bomb with unimaginable consequences. It is a country beguiled by an egalitarian past that is no more.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Living in the Papua New Guinea capital of Port Moresby without a house or a source of income is a death sentence, says Raymond Green.

He highlights the struggles of sleeping in the streets, begging for his daily bread and wandering around aimlessly — living a life of quiet desperation.

His advice: Don’t ever borrow money from someone if you don’t have the means to repay them.

According to Raymond Green, he learnt this lesson the hard way when he had to sell off everything under his name to repay his debt.

“I have absolutely nothing. No house, no wife, no money, no valuables and certainly no food in my stomach as we speak,” he told the PNG Post-Courier.

“My struggles cannot be explained by words.

“Every day I have to keep on moving to survive, begging for scraps of food here and there.

Harassment and bullying
“I enjoy the cold nights, but I just wish it could be more peaceful, as there are always people out there who find happiness in harassing and bullying me,” he says.

“I live in pain, agony and desperation. My past haunts me, and my regrets fill me with sorrow.

“Sometimes I wish life could give me a fresh start, but it sadly does not work that way.”

Green doesn’t mince his words when he expresses his daily struggles of being “homeless” and “poor”.

Something he explains that he could have avoided if he had taken the right path when he was younger.

“My daily living is a constant struggle for survival, and I sometimes feel like I am dead inside,” he says.

‘Ultimately have nothing’
“It’s true, being homeless is practically like being dead because you ultimately have nothing.

“All I own can be seen inside my small bag. Everything I had has been either stolen, lost or destroyed somewhere or somehow.”

He says he is waiting for a one off-payment from a certain office, by which he can then use the money for his retirement.

He says there is a high chance he may never receive this payment.

Raymond Green is one of the many who live under extreme poverty conditions, while continuously fighting to survive in Port Moresby.

Theophiles Singh is a PNG Post-Courier journalist. Republished with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

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

Green Party delegates have voted to accept a deal with Labour which will give it two ministerial portfolios outside of cabinet in the New Zealand government.

Consensus was blocked, so the party required 75 percent of delegates to get the deal across the line this evening.

Labour offered the Green Party the two portfolios as part of a cooperation agreement.

? BREAKING: We’re thinking ahead by acting now. Today we’re proud to launch our bold new vision for the future that resets and reimagines Aotearoa so all of us and our planet thrive. pic.twitter.com/oOGjU5VnHO

— Green Party NZ (@NZGreens) July 25, 2020

Today’s vote to accept the deal came after several rounds of talks on potential areas of cooperation between the two parties concluded on Thursday.

About 150 Green Party delegates were presented the deal on a zoom call today, before voting on whether to accept it.

Green Party delegates were also told the two select committees Green MPs will chair or deputy chair will likely be Environment and Transport, RNZ understands.

As part of the proposed cooperation agreement, Labour will support the nomination of a Green MP to be the chair of a select committee, as well as a Green MP in the deputy chair role of an additional select committee.

Green Party co-leaders
The ministerial portfolios will be held by the Green Party’s co-leaders, Labour leader Jacinda Ardern revealed this afternoon.

James Shaw will continue as Climate Change Minister and be appointed Associate Minister for the Environment (Biodiversity), while Marama Davidson will be the Minister for the Prevention of Family and Sexual Violence and Associate Minister of Housing (Homelessness).

Despite a landslide election victory for her Labour Party, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said Saturday that the Green Party would be given two ministerial positions to help advance their “shared goals”https://t.co/cY7m3bVrX1

— AFP news agency (@AFP) October 31, 2020

In a statement, Davidson said the Green Party was “thrilled” to enter into this governing arrangement with Labour.

“We entered into this negotiation hoping to achieve the best outcomes for New Zealand and our planet. This was after a strong campaign where we committed to action on the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, and the poverty crisis.

“New Zealanders voted us in to be a productive partner to Labour to ensure we go further and faster on the issues that matter. We will make sure that happens this term.”

Shaw said the Greens had a larger caucus this term, who were ready to play a constructive role.

“In the areas of climate change, looking after our natural environment and addressing inequality, there’s no time to waste. Marama will do incredible work rapidly addressing the issues of homelessness and family violence,” he said.

‘First in NZ political history’
“We are proud to have achieved a first in New Zealand political history, where a major party with a clear majority under MMP has agreed to ministerial positions for another party, as well as big areas of cooperation.”

Areas of co-operation will be: “achieving the purpose and goals of the Zero Carbon Act” through decarbonising public transport and the public sector, increasing the uptake of zero-emission vehicles, introducing clean car standards, and supporting the use of renewable energy for industrial heat.

As well as protecting the environment and biodiversity, and improving child wellbeing and action on homelessness, warmer homes, and child and youth mental health.

In return the Greens will not oppose the government on confidence and supply for the full term of this Parliament, and support Labour on procedural motions in the House and at select committees

But the Greens will be free to take their own position on any issues not covered by the ministerial portfolios and areas of co-operation.

Ardern said in the interests of transparency, Labour was releasing the deal publicly in tandem with the Greens’ deliberations.

“On election night I said I wanted to govern for all New Zealanders and to reach as wide a consensus on key issues as possible. This agreement does that, while honouring the mandate provided to Labour to form a majority government in our own right.

Balancing two key objectives
“The cooperation agreement balances these two objectives, whilst not committing to a more formal coalition or confidence and supply arrangement.”

Ardern said strong, stable government was essential to New Zealand as it recovered from covid.

“Between this agreement and our existing parliamentary majority, we won’t be held back from getting on with the work needed to rebuild our economy and continuing to keep New Zealand safe from covid-19.

She said policy areas where Labour and the Greens could work together were places where the policy and experience of the Greens would provide a positive contribution to the Labour government, but without any requirement for either party to have to reach consensus.

“James knows climate change inside out, his expertise in this complex and detailed policy area is an important skill set to tap into, and he has a range of domestic and international stakeholder relationships that are important to maintain.

“Stability and predictability in climate change policy I see as key, and that has also been feedback that I’ve picked up from stakeholders ranging from environmental NGOs to the business community.”

On Davidson’s role, she said Green MP Jan Logie had led the work on family and sexual violence as an undersecretary, and it was at an “important phase of implementation”.

Addressing a national shame
“Again, continuity on addressing this area of national shame is at the front of my mind. It’s also my strong believe that this is an area which should be a ministerial portfolio in it’s own right, and so that’s what we’re doing.”

She said the agreement struck the right balance of the parties working on issues where there is agreement, “allowing space for disagreement and independence, delivering business continuity and predictability in key policy areas, especially climate policy, and guaranteeing that Labour’s majority is bolstered on key votes to ensure the ongoing stability of the majority government.

“Never before has one party won a majority under MMP, but that’s not to say that the principals of MMP should be ignored. Furthermore it is also simply not how I do politics.”

She said she would not have invested time and energy in this agreement unless she thought it was in the best interests of the government and also for New Zealand.

“My view is there are skills and talents that exist in other parties in Parliament, I want to make use of those from the Green Party, and work on policy areas in which there are skills and expertise as well, it makes sense for New Zealand to do that. At the same time though, I will use the mandate that we’ve been given.”

This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

By Eva Corlett of RNZ

As more cases of Covid-19 arise, New Zealanders are being cautioned to work from home or stay home if sick – but what if you don’t have a home?

Agencies working with New Zealand’s homeless community worry that people living on the street will be left behind, if there is a community outbreak of Covid-19.

Wellington-based rough sleeper Rueben has been living on the streets on and off for five years.

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He currently sleeps at a school overnight but said if there is a community outbreak, there are not many options for self-isolation.

Rueben said word is getting out on the street about the virus but threat of community outbreak is not top of mind.

“We’ve actually got worries of our own, to go through each day. It’s bottom of our priority list.”

While Rueben may not be so worried yet about an outbreak, the Archdeacon of St Peter’s Anglican Church on Willis Street, Stephen King, is.

‘Extremely ill’
“We will have people who are extremely ill, whose place of shelter will be St Peter’s, or the doorways that they sleep in.”

The church, built in 1878, has a long history of helping the homeless community, or as Archdeacon King describes “the least, the last and the lost”.

“We have that discussion about people hunkering down and isolating themselves until the illness passes. For some people there is nowhere and so what happens to them?”

Archdeacon King said rough sleepers already struggle to exercise precautions such as sanitising and social distancing.

And he adds that, even if accommodation was made available for self-isolation, continuing to care for people in that situation is a problem.

“That works fine for us if we have a partner or a parent or a child who can help us do that and recover. For those that don’t have that, where does that help come from?”

He said it will not come from hospitals, because they will be at capacity.

Equip, train volunteers
Archdeacon King said government agencies need to equip and train volunteers to continue services, if there is a lock-down period.

Plans are brewing, he said, but he is concerned about how it will play out.

“There are so many things being planned for at the moment as we head further into this crisis, that I just don’t want to see that the most vulnerable miss out on the plan.”

Up in central Auckland, Lifewise’s Peter Shimwell said they are giving their street whānau phones and sim cards to make sure they do not become disconnected.

He said Lifewise is a face-to-face service, so there is concern over how to maintain those connections with people so they are not “left behind and further disconnected”.

“At times like these we need to think outside of the box, in terms of city hotels and whether we have the capacity to unlock some of those.”

Indictment of society
Stephanie McIntyre of DCM – another Wellington faith-based group working with rough sleepers – said it is an indictment on New Zealand’s society that people are even in this position.

“The upshot of that, is that in this environment now, when we really need people to be safely home in their houses, we’ve got a very vulnerable group in our population, who are community members and might literally be left out in the cold.”

All the community organisations hope that empty motels will be opened up for rough sleepers to self-isolate, if need be.

McIntyre said that now is not the time to be worrying about growing motel bills.

She said that DCM is also checking to see if people have phones and can provide one if needed. But she hopes the Ministry of Social Development will ensure people do have a phone and sim card, so that they can be contacted.

Wellington City Council’s Manda Grubner said the council is concerned about how Covid-19 will affect the homeless community.

“It’s very difficult to maintain hygiene and do the things we are telling everyone to do, such as stay home.”

Food distribution
She said the council is reaching out to agencies working directly with homeless communities, including food distribution organisations, to figure out what support they need.

Grubner said the council has implemented its emergency welfare response and has had “all hands-on-deck” calling hotels to see who could accommodate people.

Auckland Council’s Christine Olsen said the council is mindful that people rough sleeping often have more health problems than the rest of the public.

She said it is working with agencies closely and considering making toilet and washing facilities available, as well as charging stations to keep phones charged.

Olsen said the council has talked with the City Mission to come up with contingency plans including to ensure the daily meal, which feeds between 300-400 people a day, is still provided.

The Ministry of Social Development is urging anyone sleeping rough to get in touch.

Emergency housing
In a statement, its spokesperson George Van Ooyen said “nobody needs to sleep rough, and every day we provide emergency accommodation for those in need, including those who have been sleeping rough”.

“We currently work with around 400 emergency housing suppliers each day to support over 2600 households with their urgent housing needs.

“We are supporting the Housing and Urban Development Ministry in its leadership of the Homelessness Action Plan.”

The government’s Covid-19 website includes a set of guidelines for homeless shelters to refer to.

Eva Corklett’s is RNZ’s housing reporter. This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a partnership agreement with RNZ.

• If you have symptoms of the coronavirus, call the NZ Covid-19 Healthline on 0800 358 5453 (+64 9 358 5453 for international SIMs)

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

By Michael Andrew

An Auckland University of Technology graduate is practicing true community journalism by sharing the stories of Auckland’s most marginalised and vulnerable people.

Former AUT journalism student Six is the editor of the K’Road Chronicle, a community newspaper capturing the essence and eccentricities of Auckland’s infamous Karangahape Road which serves as home to so many homeless.

A self-described over-qualified, under-employed journalist, Six knows the road as if it were her home. It was for a time; she spent several years living on the streets.

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She told Pacific Media Watch this experience gave her a unique perspective to write stories about other rough sleepers for the K’Road Chronicle – some of which have been made into a popular video series through a partnership with Stuff.

“It’s about building trust when I speak with them,” she says.

“I sit alongside them. Their story is my story.”

Supportive AUT Staff
While no longer homeless, Six was living on the streets during her time studying at AUT, a difficult period that she says was made easier with the support of the staff on her course.

“There was Greg Treadwell, Helen Sissons. Big respect for David Robie and his wife Del too, if it wasn’t for their support I’m not sure if I would have gotten through,” she says.

“Even the security guards, after I lost my key card and couldn’t afford to pay the $15 or whatever it was for the new one, they knew me and would let me in the building after hours.”

“And they even turned a blind eye when I’d occasionally spend the night on one of the couches.”

Head of AUT’s journalism department and Six’s former lecturer Dr Greg Treadwell says that her homelessness would have made her studies particularly challenging.

“There were rumours that she was sleeping down on the tenth floor, but I never went down to check.”

“So, if that was the level of support through inaction then I’m very happy to have provided that support.”

Social justice journalism
He says that such an experience would have bolstered her journalism with a strong sense of social justice.

“Her heart was always in the homeless community in many ways. And if there’s an advocacy journalism that’s appropriate, then the journalism that advocates for the homeless is fundamentally good journalism.

“If journalism speaks for the voiceless then the homeless have got to be the most voiceless in society.”

After graduating, Six had trouble finding work in the mainstream media, a problem that many journalism graduates are facing.

Her employment troubles forced her down other avenues, and while sitting on K’Road one day realised the wealth of stories that she could find through street locals. After pitching the idea and securing some initial funding from the K Road Business Association, the Chronicle was spawned.

Cult following
Now in its second year, the newspaper has attracted a cult following within the community and beyond.

“I can’t keep up with demand,” Six says. “I’m even getting asked for copies from AUT and the library.”

Other than sharing important stories, the paper is also providing employment for some K’Road locals who get given copies to sell themselves and keep the earnings, something that Dr Treadwell says is another reason why the Chronicle is a valuable asset for the homeless community.

He also says Six’s inability to find work in the mainstream media ultimately proved to be a service to journalism.

“I think it pushed Sister Six in the right direction,” he says.

“I personally think that the orthodoxy of mainstream newsrooms was never going to make her happy, she’s much more of an advocate than that.”

“So what she’s doing now is hugely valuable and helpful for society but also probably at this stage really good for her because she’s experienced the lacking of things in life, of comfort and so on.

“She knows what it’s like.”

Gonzo Journalism
A fan of American journalist Hunter S. Thompson, Six likens the type of work she does to Thompson’s Gonzo journalism, a style in which the writer becomes so involved with the subject and the subject’s world that he or she actually becomes part of the story.

Treadwell agrees.

“She’s the classic gonzo journalist in a lot of ways.

“She’s much more concerned with outcomes than process, much more interested in shining lights on injustice than necessarily following all the petty rules of the bureaucracy.

“Every city needs a sister six.”

The need for Six’s work is perhaps greater than ever. According to the Auckland Council the number of people classified as “homeless” in Auckland is 20,296. The number of people literally living without shelter day to day is 771.

Pacific Media Centre director Professor David Robie agrees, saying that the K’Road Chronicle came at a critical time.

Paper for the voiceless
“It was an excellent and exciting initiative to start the K’Road Chronicle – not only is homelessness a growing problem in Auckland, but until this publication started the homeless were voiceless as well.”

During her time at AUT, Six filed stories on diversity for the Pacific Media Centre’s Pacific Scoop project.

Dr Robie says the type of diversity reporting that Six is doing is an example for all journalists.

“Journalists should be supporting the voiceless, marginalised and stigmatised far more than they do. The mainstream media are far too close to power and should be far more challenging.”

“Six and her community should be congratulated for taking up the challenge – journalism that cares.”

Caring is certainly a value, among others that Six employs in her work.

Journalism values
She says that any journalist can write advertorials or sensationalist articles but it takes a special set of values to write stories about those living on the fringes of society.

Resilience, persistence, resourcefulness, pragmatism and positivity are what enables her to get through life and do the work she does.

“A journalist is nothing without values,” she says.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz