The BFD | Collins’ Comments

Hon Judith Collins
judithcollins.national.org.nz

Housing

In the December 2020 Housing figures just released, the number of people waiting for social housing in Papakura has jumped to 661 people with a “severe and persistent” housing need. Sadly this is up by almost 500 people since National left the government benches in 2017.

Across Auckland the ‘state house’ wait list has increased by about 5,500 people of which about half are families. They are waiting about 177 days for a house to be available.

Nationally, 22,521 people are waiting for public housing and that is about four times as many as when National left office.

National’s Housing spokesperson Nicola Willis has found that only half of the ‘new’ social housing places sourced by the Government are actually additional, newly built homes.

It is now known that Kainga Ora spent more than $750 million purchasing existing homes and re-labelling them as ‘state houses’. This is locking even more first home buyers out of the housing market.

A Progressive Home ownership scheme was promised by the Prime Minister in 2017, but nearly four years later it has delivered 12 houses for just 12 families.

By contrast, the First Home Grant scheme started by the previous National Government has helped 93,000 Kiwis to buy their first home.

National when it was the government, proposed constructive solutions to address the root causes of New Zealand’s housing emergency and promised to unlock a surge in new house building.

Recently we offered to work with the Government on temporary emergency measures like those used after the Canterbury earthquake, that would quickly make more sections available to speed up housing developments and get building started.

But the Prime Minister rejected this offer to work together claiming they had this problem in hand.

We can’t afford to wait until 2024 for the Government’s long awaited RMA reforms to take effect, we need to make changes urgently and now to get more housing built.

National Calls for Inquiry into Valentine’s Day Cluster

My colleagues in the National Party and I want an inquiry into the Valentine’s Day Covid-19 cluster to see where the response went wrong, and what lessons we as a country can learn from this.

The scope of the inquiry would include:

The performance of contract tracing
Communication of public health messaging
Whether the testing regime met expectations
If saliva or antigen testing should be used more fully
The legality of orders issued around testing and self-isolation

National thought the idea of a three day lockdown in mid-February was a bit optimistic and at the end of it we didn’t really know the source of the original case.

Going back into level three a week later as a result was a real blow for Auckland and Aucklanders. Level two across the rest of the country meant events were cancelled and opportunities especially for hospitality and tourism were lost.

These lockdowns must be avoided as they are costing the economy half a billion dollars each week.

Over the last two weeks we’ve found out that our contact tracing isn’t the ‘gold standard’ the Government would have us think. We haven’t met critical measures in the latest two outbreaks, and all locations of interest haven’t been disclosed to the public.

It has become clear that public health messaging needs to be improved as different agencies send out different messages about testing and the need to isolate. It has also shown that we need to communicate these really important public health messages in all the different languages spoken in our communities to make sure everyone understands them.

While Auckland remains the hot spot for community cases of Covid-19, we need to review the management of its roadway borders too. Every lockdown has resulted in long queues of people trying to get back to Auckland as well as trying to leave. Our police get constant changes to instructions and they work in shifts 24 hours a day when the borders close.

It is hard for people who through no fault of their own run into big problems. Take the recent case of the students trying to head home from their boarding school that was in level 2, late on a Friday afternoon. They were blocked from being reunited with their families at the border into Auckland with no reasonable explanation.

“We should always be aiming to improve our response so that level 3 lockdowns and above become unnecessary.

I hope that an efficiently run vaccination programme and roll-out is going to help stop further lockdowns too. The definition of border staff has to include everyone involved on the border from medical staff, hotel staff, cleaners to airport staff and airline staff and it would be a good idea to include their families too.

Going into lockdown should be our last resort and that means making sure our response to any community outbreak is comprehensive and targets the problem without disrupting more people and businesses than is necessary.”

“If anything, the effect of Covid-19 and its ability to spread has shown New Zealand there is a lot that must be done in respect of our response when community cases arise. An inquiry into the Valentine’s Day cluster is appropriate to show where we must improve to stop the virus in its tracks.

Take care and best wishes,

Judith