Monday, 25 May 2026, 2:18 pm
Article: Gordon Campbell
Fair
is foul, and foul is fair. Truly, the witches in
Macbeth had a pretty accurate take on the
government’s new demands for social housing tenants.
Having boosted homelessness by kicking people off emergency
housing, government ministers Nicola Willis, Chris Bishop
and Louise Upton claimed last week that it is “fair” to
raise the rent on the 84,000 impoverished tenants in social
housing.
They aim to use some of that revenue to cross
subsidise a smaller rise (circa $15 on average) in the
accommodation supplement paid to the 110,000 low income
people renting in the private sector. As well, the changes
will also cut $195.6 million from the funds currently
available for hardship support.
Already, these policy
changes are setting one segment of the poor against another.
This from a government that recently claimed to care so very
deeply about
maintaining social cohesion.
As Stuff reported:
Modelling
shows this will leave 111,000 families in the private rental
market better off by an average of $14.91 per
week.
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But 45,000 families in the private market
will be worse off by an average of $10.82 per week, and
84,000 families in social housing will be worse off by more
than $30 per week.
Willis said the changes are
about making the system fairer.
This is merely the
first stage what the government has in mind. In the name of
“fairness” it also intends to make living in social
housing more unstable, via
a second “ tranche” of changes:
Officials
will also look into a second tranche of changes which could
include tenancy duration limits with exemptions for ongoing
need, a responsibilities framework, support to get more
people into private housing and more regular eligibility
assessments.
[Chris Bishop]: “The second
tranche is more about making the system fairer and about
operationalising the different needs assessment and making
sure we get social housing for those who need it the
most.
This second step is being taken despite the
knowledge – gained from the justice system – that a
disproportionate number of people before the courts endured
unstable housing as children, experienced learning
difficulties and suffered other social development harms due
to the constant changes in where they lived and where they
went to school, alongside other forms of insecurity and
abuse. Yet there is nothing in these social housing changes
to indicate that the provision of access to stable
social housing – free of constant churn and eligibility
checks – is socially beneficial.
The eternal
fairness of landlords
Is it“ fair’ for any
government to rob one group of poor people to pay another
while also knowing that there is nothing to prevent private
sector landlords from creaming off that extra $15 by hiking
up the rent?
Pathetically, Housing Minister Chris
Bishop claimed last week that there is “no evidence”
this would happen. Not that he’s been looking. Perhaps if
Bishop and his Cabinet colleagues had
bothered to consult the social housing sector
beforehand, he might have been better informed. But
consulting widely would have meant he wouldn’t have
plausible deniability with regard to how unfair this
indirect subsidy to landlords is going to be, for many of
the most vulnerable people in the country.
Even so,
the foulest part of this “fairness” gambit came when
Stuff reporters revealed
that Upston creams off $1,000 a week from the taxpayer
in an entirely legal accommodation supplement – on top of
her annual $320,600 ministerial salary, plus perks. She
qualifies for this $52,000 a year housing handout by dint of
living away from home, even though she jointly owns what
appears to be a mortgage free flat in Wellington in which
she does not live.
Reportedly, Upston’s planned
reforms to social housing entitlements will – for many
poorer families with children – decrease their supplement by
$42 a week on average. The
details:
At the moment, households can claim an
accommodation supplement if their total cash assets are
worth no more than $8100 (or $16,200 for a
couple).
The maximum a household can claim, if
they meet certain income tests, is $305 a week. But they
have to contribute at least 30% of their income to housing
costs before they are eligible. If Upston’s bill passes,
that threshold will increase to 40% for households that own
their home. For families with children, the estimated
average reduction in entitlement would be $42 per
week.
Upston declined to tell Stuff whether
she contributes 40% of her income towards her own
accommodation costs. It would seem that she – and other MPs
in receipt of the accommodation supplement – may not be
meeting the eligibility criteria being forcing upon social
housing tenants. There are no reports of government MPs
blushing at this gaping hole in the tent of
fairness.
Footnote One: Keep in mind
that landlords are already getting a $3 billion annual tax
handout from this government. In the same week as the
coalition was robbing one group of poor people (to the tune
of $375 million gross) to pay some of it to another similar
group, the government also
announced a $6 billion spend-up on Defence.
It is
embarking on this spending spree despite the fact that the
new and upgraded equipment in question would be next to
useless in defending this country, and despite there being
no credible military threat forecast to New Zealand (or to
our Pacific neighbours) over the next decade. Ironically,
this spending package will also reportedly “continue the
long-term Homes for Families programme, which is
building modern, healthy houses for [Defence]
personnel and their whanau..” [My emphasis].
Maybe
we should be asking: is it fair that Kiwi families are being
starved – almost literally – so that our Defence forces
can continue to tootle around the Pacific waving the flag
and playing war games with their allies, in the manner
accustomed?
Jobs for the 6.5%
According to
official statistics, only 6.5% of New Zealanders annually
earn $150,000 or more. Co-incidentally, that is also the
average salary rate at the taxpayer-funded trough better
known as the Ministry of Regulation.
Shakespeare also
had something relevant to say about the ACT Party’s
campaign against regulations. From Hamlet: “There
is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
Meaning: if you called it a “protection” rather than a
“regulation,” would David Seymour be getting quite so
much political mileage out of attacking it?
Probably
not. In a classic bureaucratic power play, Seymour and his
Regulations Ministry have been intent on creating a problem
to justify their own existence. To ease the burden of
bureaucracy, they have added another layer to it. In the
face of endless reports without concrete outcomes – they
have singled out the now-abolished
Productivity
Commission for that sin – the Regulations Ministry
recently issued a report on their work to date that
contained no concrete recommendations.
Like many bean
counters before them, the officials in the Regulations
Ministry have recently counted the number of agencies with
regulatory powers. Yes we do have lots of agencies (267)
that have the power to issue/enforce regulations. Yet that
figure tells us sweet nothing about the worth of the
regulations, who they protect, and how many people they
affect, annually. No, the world didn’t have quite so many
regulations 30 years ago, back in the glory days of
de-regulation that led directly to the Global Financial
Crisis (caused by banking de-regulation) and the Pike River
tragedy here (caused by labour market de-regulation.) Most
us would call that “progress.”
That’s largely
because most of us would prefer to live in a modern society,
with modern standards of care. Is there some duplication to
be found in our regulatory system? Of course. Yet should it
be a government priority to spend vast sums of money to
build and staff an entire new Ministry to re-invent the
regulatory wheel? Of course not. The Regulations Ministry
would surely fail the kind of rigorous cost benefit analysis
that it seeks to impose on everyone else. More than
anything, ACT’s ideological brainchild looks a lot like
Elon Musk’s hare-brained DOGE cost-cutting project, which
ended
up doing more harm than good.
Moreover, far from
choking on red tape, the vast majority of us will never,
ever encounter many of the regulations currently on the
books. As Jack Tame recently pointed out by way of example
on TVNZ’s Q&A programme, most dog owners never
let their dogs loose in kiwi sanctuaries. But IMO, it is
still good to know that there is a regulation on the books
to discourage and punish anyone who does.
Back to
Seymour’s folly. It is not as if regulations and red tape
have never been subject to scrutiny and revision before the
coming of David Seymour. In effect, the Ministry for
Regulation has added another layer of administration to the
work of evaluating/renewing/revoking regulations that the
like of Treasury and MBIE and DIA have always done before,
as a matter of course.
That being so, the new body
looks like nothing more than a bog standard bureaucratic
power play. Seymour and his pet Ministry aim to become the
arm of central government to which all others must
eventually bend the knee, lest they embark on anything that
protects the consumer, at the expense of corporate
profit.
Finally, while railing against the evils of
bureaucrats sitting around on fat salaries doing nothing
worthwhile…the lucky libertarians at the Regulations
Ministry have
been enjoying salaries well in excess of the public
service average, in order that the Ministry can continue to
cosplay as a feisty crusader against the very same waste and
duplication that it embodies in
spades.
Footnote One: To be clear
about the lucrative make work that this right-wing charade
involves: Seymour and the Regulations Ministry did not
inherit an economy choking on unnecessary red tape and
regulation. Quite the opposite. How does Seymour explain
that New Zealand scored number one on the World Bank’s
Ease of Doing Business rankings in 2017, 2018, 2019,
and 2020?
New Zealand’s stellar rating as the acme
of de-regulatory freedom was based on factors like the ease
of (a) starting a business (b) getting construction permits
(c) obtaining an electricity connection, (d) registering
commercial property (e) gaining credit, (f) protecting
investors (g) paying taxes, and (h) trading across borders
etc. Furthermore, despite the clear evidence that we are
plagued by very high levels of market concentration in the
supermarket /banking/electricity sectors, our anti-trust
regulatory powers have rarely, if ever, been used in New
Zealand to break these damaging strangleholds. Arguably, we
use too little of what few regulatory powers we have. Even
so, Seymour is out to reduce them.
Since the Doing
Business surveys were discontinued, there is little sign
that New Zealand has lost any significant ground in
regulatory freedom. Unfortunately, our corporate sector has
a persecution complex about red tape that is not grounded in
reality. And David Seymour makes a lot of political capital
out of fostering that fantasy.
Wednesday’s
Children
Karly Hartzman is the lead singer of the
much-loved US band Wednesday, namesake of the spooky kid in
the Adams Family.
During their sold-out gig in
Christchurch on the weekend, she reminded the audience that
unlike her own homeland, New Zealand still has a good
reputation around the world, so treasure it. Even so, she
continued, what she’d found during the band’s incessant
touring, was that racism and trans-phobia occur everywhere,
in every country in the world.
That being so, she
urged, we have to help each other out to defeat ICE over
there and transphobic legislation right here, and “fuck
David Seymour!” someone in the crowd yelled out, to wild
applause from the young audience. Hartzman grinned before
adding, “And free Palestine.”
Wednesday pull off a
rare combination. They’re a great, noisy, mosh-pit
triggering, screaming emo-ish guitar band. They’re also a
great country music band lit by pedal steel guitar. Somehow
this combination gets fused together successfully in the
same set. Elsewhere, Hartzman has called the band’s music
“a country sandwich with a crunchy outer layer.”
Exactly.
First, here’s one of their country songs,
and the band’s closest thing yet to an actual radio
hit…Sweet song, as she says at the outset, is a long
con:
Nothing on record can convey how
big and propulsive this band is in live performance. Yet
here’s an older track, which has also been the second to
last song on their recent setlists before the throat
shredding closer “ Wasp.” Key sentiment: “God make me
good, but not quite yet”