Where exactly are we "moving on" all these people in need of housing?
Certainly wont be into the 3500 cancelled state homes or the additional 900 up for sale, thats for sure.
Yesterday, the government announced another tried-and-true tactic of shifting things out of view to make things seem better (see: changing climate targets, tightening beneficiary criteria, gang patch ban) by giving police the power to issue “move-on orders” to rough sleepers to move them out of town centres or face fines as big as $2,000 or up to three months imprisonment.
Where will these rough sleepers move to exactly? The answer was “a reasonable distance away,” according to Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith, which reads as “anywhere our voting base can’t see them”.
But I can confidently tell you that it won’t be into state housing, because since taking power, the government has both cancelled 3500 state home builds, and has put 900 existing state homes up for sale.
Now, Chris Bishop did say when he announced the sale of these 900 state homes that they existed in areas that “don’t have high demand for social housing,” such as Point Chev and Remuera.
The “demand” doesn’t exist because these suburbs have gone through decades of gentrification that have pushed out certain communities to accommodate more affluent types who absolutely don’t want social housing anywhere near them - which, in a way, is the true “move-on order” of colonisation and capitalism.
Bishop also stated in the same announcement that the sale of these multimillion-dollar properties will go towards funding new social housing builds, which is hard to believe when you’ve already cancelled 3,500 new builds and decided to considerably downsize the ones you may put these funds towards building.
And how can we even begin to trust this government with the profit it makes from selling these state homes? Moves like this, cutting funding to food banks and rejecting food grants as cost-cutting measures, clearly show that people who are living rough aren’t a priority for them, and that shifting funding away from state housing and food banks is, in their view, better spent elsewhere.
Christopher Luxon, citing the gang patch ban as an example of how the move-on order will succeed (it didn’t; gang membership has since hit a record high), proves how badly thought through this move is. Simply moving the problem seemingly out of sight does nothing to address the problem and will lead to more stigma around the bleak reality of homelessness in this country and most likely be used to justify building more prisons and giving police even more power - both of which aren’t a solution to how and why people end up living rough.
Danz.
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