Not only does everyone deserve shelter from the weather and a bed to sleep in, everyone deserves a place to call home.
It shouldn’t be hard, but under Christopher Luxon’s austerity, the government has pushed more vulnerable people on to the streets, into temporary shelters or cars and condemned more to poverty and hardship.
Otago Daily Times investigative reporter Mary Williams has revealed the scale of the problem here in Ōtepoti Dunedin in her piece No Safe Shelter: The plight of the homeless.
A boarding house resident escaping family violence explained "when you are homeless, you can’t recover, rest or study".
It’s "a race to the bottom".
But under Christopher Luxon, power company profits reached $1.85 billion in just six months, while ordinary New Zealanders are struggling to pay their bills.
The big supermarkets are now making $1 million a day in excess profits and the big banks are also taking advantage, making $600m a month in profit.
It is no wonder ordinary New Zealanders are in desperation and finding it just too hard.
At the same time, the government is purposefully dismantling our social housing agency Kāinga Ora, by cutting not just frontline staff but also social housing.
An empty Kāinga Ora section at Albertson Ave in Port Chalmers, now on the market as bare land for a third of its original asking price, rather than being the planned social housing, is an example of how the government’s dismantling of social services is again hurting our most vulnerable.
Not everyone is "wealthy and sorted" like the PM.
It doesn’t need to be this way.
We haven’t always been so defeatist. We know what the solutions are and we simply need a government brave enough to support our community.
Our "Home for Everybody" plan aims to do just that.
We will pull out all the stops to ensure everybody has a place they call home — to end homelessness.
We will make sure that our social housing agency Kāinga Ora is expanded to build 35,000 new public homes over 5 years, using off-site manufacturing of sustainable timber homes alongside redevelopment of older homes.
We will fix renters rights, ending no-cause evictions, stabilising rent increases, improving rental quality and giving renters back their rights.
It’s time everybody had a home and we will deliver.
