Take a Concrete Pill to Harden Your Heart

Have you wondered how MPs harden their hearts against the obvious plight of the poor, the needy people whose lives they promised to improve when we gave them a shot at government?

They got that opportunity and the results are in: the poor are worse off after fuel and cost of living increases. Statistics NZ data shows steeper annual rises in food costs earlier this year than in any time in the last decade. Government failures stare us in the face every single day with the most vulnerable even more wretched than previously.

Five years of ineffectual law changes and unfulfilled promises have created more child poverty, more homelessness and none of the much needed extra hospital beds while doctors and nurses are still crossing the ditch for more money outside New Zealand.

Everything our clumsy MPs’ fingers have touched is a disaster including the last two years of Covid mayhem causing untold economic damage, avoidable bad health outcomes and division between family and friends split into opposing vaccination camps.

They said they were “following the science” but how do they explain the rampant spread of Covid among the vaccinated and boosted?

How do MPs sleep at night? How do they justify their existence during the day?

Let me share my theory. I think the Beehive has a stash of concrete pills to be doled out to ministers on the verge of succumbing to the signs of neglect evident under their watch. Their hearts must be hardened to the misery they created.

You can be sure the PM and her trusted cohorts are on a steady diet of concrete pills to enable them to pass legislation that lets themselves off the hook while expecting everyone else to comply.

Take a look at the domestic rental housing market. Who benefited most from the Healthy Homes legislation? It isn’t tenants.

The Crown passed the Healthy Homes Act in 2017, forcing private landlords and boarding houses, starting from 1 July 2021, to make private rental properties warmer and drier within 90 days of a new tenancy.

Private investors quickly did their sums and decided that upgrading older rental properties was too expensive with costs unlikely to be recovered through increasing rents. A mass exodus from the private housing market ensued leaving the Crown, already dominant in the domestic housing market, with an even bigger chunk of it – which may have been their plan all along.

With fewer houses available and new ones not being built quickly enough to satisfy demand, the homeless and displaced were rehoused, at exorbitant cost to the taxpayer, in poky little motel units. You need a pretty stony heart to cram families into tiny motel units indefinitely.

Kainga Ora, managing 60,000 domestic rental properties, faces the same problem as the private investor: older properties aren’t worth improving. The sensible solution is to sell them off and rebuild on the same land, which this Government is doing. But when they were in opposition they criticised the National Government for doing the exact same thing.

In 2017 the new Labour Government cancelled the sell-off of state houses started under National, but three years later, in early 2020, they quietly and hypocritically started selling off state housing themselves.

The 2017 Healthy Homes Act let Kainga Ora off the hook by giving them until 1 July 2023 to comply. Their tenants, already living in damp, mouldy, sub-standard homes, had to wait several years longer than private rental tenants for a warm and dry home. This fact is neither here nor there to a government on a steady diet of concrete pills.