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.
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”