So asset sales are back on the agenda, and will be dependent only on the coalition government getting re-elected next year. Yikes. Right wing governments are forever selling off the assets created by the state in more enlightened times. Repeatedly, they plunder the past to hide their own failure to provide in the present, and plan for the future.
This time around, PM Christopher Luxon is calling asset sales “recycling” – as if the sale of a state asset is just one stage in a cycle of endless renewal. Yeah, right. A coalition government so in thrall to austerity has shown absolutely no interest in investing in the state’s resources, and using them as an engine of growth. Furthermore, the track record would suggest that any proceeds from asset sales will be frittered away on tax cuts for the wealthy, and/or on more tax breaks for the real estate industry.
Footnote One: Over 30 years ago, Winston Peters founded New Zealand First in opposition to asset sales. On RNZ, Peters was scathing about asset sales being a failed exercise in “wanton neo-liberalism.” (Give the frictions between his own governing partners, how can Luxon credibly call anyone else a coalition of chaos?)
Footnote Two: It probably goes without saying that Luxon’s asset sales plan is a throwback to the 1980s, and to the privatisation excesses of the fourth Labour government that continue to cripple our economy. (You don’t ever recover from selling off your banking and telecommunications systems, your national airline etc.) Talking of which, we sold Air New Zealand and then had to buy it back when the private sector ran it into the ground. Christopher Luxon used to run the same airline. He knows the history of failure behind what he is proposing.
Moving right along…the Key government’s sell down of the state’s stake in electricity companies has (a) robbed the state of huge amounts of revenue and (b) fed into the energy price spiral that business and households have suffered from this year. In similar vein, the recent sale of Fonterra’s retail arm to the French has kissed off our last chance of adding value to the nation’s primary sector. Instead, the Fonterra sell off will expose NZ consumers to further price gouging on dairy products by the new foreign owners, and provide an additional sugar hit to farmers that they (arguably) don’t need, since they’re already flush with the returns from high global commodity prices.
After all that, more asset sales are now lurking on the horizon? Sheesh. You could be forgiven for thinking that New Zealand has a suicide wish.
Targeting the homeless
Homeless, meet clueless. If anything, there seems to be an outbreak of squabbling between local and central government over whose job it is to resolve the plight of the homeless, with each side doing its best to unload the bulk of the responsibility onto the other.
Nothing surprising here. There’s not much ground for hoping that Auckland mayor Wayne Brown and PM Christopher Luxon would have much interest in resolving the problems of the inner city homeless in a humane fashion. Sweep them all up and dump them elsewhere – in a cell or out in the country – seems to be the sum of the collective wisdom of the Brown/Luxon brains trust.
Reportedly, the government is working on legislation to give the Police added powers to forcibly “move on” homeless people out of Auckland’s city centre and from other metropolitan centres. Brown’s chief concern seems to be that tourists might be finding the sight of the homeless to be a deterrent to their spending:
Brown said it would be entirely feasible to have police move intimidating individuals to another, less high-profile location where the social and economic impact of their presence is reduced.“Well, I think they go out into the countryside,” Brown said of a possible location for downtown Auckland’s homeless.
“The other part about it is the economic damage they do. [It] depends on where they’re doing it. I mean, if there’s a scruffy-looking person sitting outside a pub in Ngāruawāhia right now, it’s probably not enchanting, but it’s probably not closing off wealthy foreign tourists from spending a lot of money here.”
In the same (paywalled) NZ Herald article, Brown’s described the homeless as “ scruffy”, “bad” and “nasty.” Since he also describes the state of the homeless as a “people problem” it seem pretty clear that he regards them as being the agents of their own misfortune, and not as human collateral damage from the bad policy decisions made by central or local government. As Brown told the Herald, he ‘greatly sympathized’ with the traders on Queen Street:
“It’s a high-value area. They pay a lot of rates and they like to sell a lot of expensive s***.They should be able to, and they’ve been prevented by a whole lot of people who are not contributing to the economy, but who are being funded from the economy. The Government has to work out how they can connect giving them money and having some impact on them. You know, [for example] ‘we won’t give you any money if we find you sleeping in the street’ … There’s plenty of freedom camping places they can go to.”
No heart. And to paraphrase A.A. Milne, a mayor of little brain.
Us versus them
Moving the homeless onwards is yet another policy we seem to have cribbed from the Americans, the origin point of so many of this country’s health, education and socio-economic policies over the past 40 years. Last year, in a ruling called Grants Pass v Johnson, the US Supreme Court authorised cities to punish ( and prosecute) individuals for sleeping in public spaces even when there is no alternative shelter available to them. This ruling overturned a lower court decision that had found Oregon’s anti-camping bylaws to be in violation of the constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
As this excellent article by the US academic Deyanira Nevárez Martínez has pointed out, several US states and cities have since begun passing anti-homelessness bylaws in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling:
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order in July that exemplifies this shift by calling for cities to “humanely remove encampments from public spaces.” This approach, which prioritizes clearing visible homelessness over addressing a systemic lack of housing options, often leads to forced displacement that makes people without housing more likely to be arrested and experience increased instability and trauma.
Further down the chain of power in California, even more draconian measures are being contemplated:
The San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors is considering revisions to a local camping ordinance that would ban sleeping in a tent, sleeping bag or vehicle for over 60 minutes, and would forbid people from sleeping within 300 feet of a public location where they had slept in the past 24 hours.
That seems to be where Auckland at least, is headed. The only thing that may stop New Zealand from slavishly adopting these US precedents is that at some point, the enabling legislation could clash with another lucrative source of the tourism dollar: freedom campers. How can “ move on” legislation be framed so as to penalise only the New Zealanders who are sleeping rough– something that Wayne Brown and the relevant Cabinet Ministers would lose absolutely no sleep over– without also penalising foreign freedom campers, who seem just as prone to using the landscape as a public toilet.
Are we really willing to punish New Zealanders for doing in urban spaces what we are loathe to prosecute when foreigners are doing it in some of our most cherished scenic attractions?
Better Solutions
Criminalising homelessness is bound to end in a cycle of failure, as Martinez says :
It creates a cycle of arrest, incarceration and release, without addressing root causes, such as economic inequality, inadequate mental health and addiction services and a lack of affordable housing. People without housing are at risk of early death from violent injuries, substance abuse or preventable diseases.
New Zealand’s investment in social housing – and its funding support for those providing addiction withdrawal and mental healthcare support – has long been inadequate. Some of its policy responses have also been contradictory. For example, the Housing First initiative has has succeeded because it has prioritised the provision of safe and secure housing no questions asked, ahead of any requirement for addiction or mental health treatment – yet paradoxically, the provision of emergency housing now requires the homeless to prove that they have not contributed to their own condition.
This hard-line MSD approach has had consequences. RNZ has reported some chilling figures:
Data from the Ministry for Social Development shows the number of emergency housing grants has dropped from 6429 in April last year to 1290 in September, or a drop from $23.04m to $3.07m. The number of people in emergency housing has dropped from 2532 in April last year to 438.
So….going by the above data, the coalition government has saved a paltry $20 million by denying desperate people the emergency housing they need, and by kicking many of them out onto the street. It now wants to scoop them up, and dump them somewhere out of sight of the tourists, lest anything unpleasant should inhibit the spending impulses of our foreign visitors. Meanwhile, we continue to promote the myth of New Zealand as being a nation of friendly and caring people.
Some of us are. Yet the government seems far more interested in maximising the private sector’s ability to extract profit from housing provision, than in significantly expanding the access to social housing for those in need.
More from Lux
Some of the early reviews of Lux – the wildly ambitious new album from the Spanish singer Rosalia – have either called it an opera, or queried where it fits (if at all) within the classical tradition. This seems to me like a dead end. The album strikes me as a continuation of the way she built on her flamenco traditions to create something entirely novel on the No Mal Querer album that first made her a global superstar.
This time, her use of European classical traditions seems like a similar extension/reflection of what we know so well, in order to fashion something entirely novel. It is operatic, without being opera. It is world music though, with a vengeance. Rosalia has written and sung the content of Lux across 13 different languages. She uses the London Symphony Orchestra throughout, along with a changing bunch of other contributors, including Bjork.
At this point, this demanding work still leaves a lot to explore, but “Reliqua” is an early favourite. No, no, I’m not a saint,” she sings, “but I’m blessed… But my heart has never been mine I always give it away/Oh take a piece of me, keep it for when I’m gone/I’ll be your relic..” That’s an interesting lyric. We live in a world where celebrities function as saints once did, and the whole wide world now serves as their moral canvas: