Winston is right

Winston Peters is in court today, suing a bunch of former Minister and civil servants over their pre-election leak of his superannuation repayment. He's characterised the leak as malicious, and said that it is repugnant that his information was passed on to Ministers to use for political advantage. And he's absolutely right. WINZ had a legal duty to protect his privacy. And instead of doing that, they handed private data about a past issue which had been resolved to their satisfaction and which they had decided was not worthy of prosecution or further action to Ministers to be used for a shoddy political smear. They absolutely deserve to be taken to the cleaners over this, and the one disappointment is that the government is protecting those involved, rather than letting them carry the can personally for their bad-faith actions.

As for former ministers Anne Tolley and Paula Bennett, by leaking the information (and even by not immediately sacking the "public service" crawlers provided it to them) they demonstrated that they are unethical shitbags. They deserve to be taken to the cleaners too - and personally, rather than being protected by the government. which just smacks of a cosy establishment pact to protect each other from the consequences of wrongdoing. And that's the point where I disagree with Matthew Hooton: yes, Bennett and Tolley clearly can't help themselves. But that doesn't mean we should excuse their shitbaggery. To the contrary, it signifies their need for punishment, to deter other would-be shitbags. But it also demonstrates their absolute unfitness for public office: because someone who would abuse people's private data in this way is absolutely unfit to have access to anything.

Meanwhile, WINZ seems to be in full-on victim-blaming mode, which is just irrelevant. Because the issue here isn't how the error happened in the first place - they've previously accepted it was not Winston's fault when they decided to deal with it with a simple repayment - but that they decided to leak it to Ministers. Their choice of "defence" strategy shows that they still suffer from a sick culture of hating the people they are meant to be assisting. The current government has promised to change that culture, and "bring kindness back". Clearly, they still have a lot of work to do on that front.

An unbelievable denial

Paula Bennett has denied leaking Winston Peters' pension information to the media:

There was "absolutely no benefit" for National to leak the details of NZ First leader Winston Peters' pension problems, says deputy leader Paula Bennett.

She has rubbished suggestions National might have seen gains if Peters' party dropped in the polls, telling TVNZ's Breakfast the theory made no sense.

"It just doesn't make sense that it was. Why would we leak something on the day of our campaign launch, which we want to be all about us quite frankly.

All of which is just a little bit unbelievable. Firstly, because there is obvious motive for leaking against Winston: National's entire election strategy depends on taking him down by a few points, while benefiting from the "wasted vote". And secondly of course because Bennett has form on this. In case anyone has forgotten, she leaked the information of two beneficiaries who spoke up about government policy - then refused to apologise or rule out doing it again. Then she leaked against Te Puea Marae chairman Hurimoana Dennis after he showed the inadequacy of government housing policy last winter. In both cases, private personal information which she should never even have seen was abused for political purposes - its her favourite weapon. And of course, she was briefed on Peters' private business, in apparent violation of the Privacy Act.

In short, Bennett had motive, means and opportunity. If you believe her denials, I have a bridge to sell you.

Doubling down on war crimes

Last night, investigative reporters Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson revealed that NZ SAS troops may have committed war crimes in Afghanistan, and that the NZDF covered them up. There is an obvious natural response to such serious and well-supported allegations: announce an independent inquiry. Instead, the government has doubled down on denial:

Deputy Prime Minister Paula Bennett says there's nothing she's seen that "disturbs" her in a book claiming elite New Zealand troops in Afghanistan may have been guilty of war crimes, including the death of a 3-year-old girl.

[...]


"I've seen the statement from Defence and I think they have our best interests at heart and have huge integrity and I'm backing them," Bennett said.

Asked whether anything in the statements and reports she'd read about the book disturbed her, she said, "not at this stage, no".

[...]

Bennett said she hadn't read the book and described Hager as a "left-wing conspiracist" who was "very good at putting his views through".

"You're asking me to pick a left-wing conspiracist, someone who's written a book, puts it out at 5pm at night, gives no one a chance to read it and put their views so it's reported the next morning like it is now without us having a chance to go through it and make sure we're able to respond in the right way," she said.

Its the usual stuff we see from governments about Hager's work, and its worth remembering: nothing substantive he has published has ever been proven wrong. Its also worth remembering that Jon Stephenson won a substantial defamation suit from NZDF after they attacked his integrity like this over his previous work on Afghanistan. These are people of unimpeached credibility, and I would believe them over NZDF any day.

Meanwhile, by responding in this way, Bennett has essentially joined the coverup. And when war crimes and the murder of civilians (including a child) are at stake, that is... not a good look. And by tying themselves so closely to the NZDF's cover-up, they're implicitly asking to be judged by voters when it is inevitably proven to be false.

Climate change: The wrong track

Writing in the Herald this morning, Climate Change Minister Paula Bennett thinks our climate change policy is on the right track, citing the list of policies her government has. But are we really? Below is the government's latest official projection of our emissions pathway, from New Zealand’s second biennial report under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change:



As can be seen, the government expects both gross and net emissions to rise to 2030 (and rise beyond that), despite "commitments" to cut them.

The truth is that we are not on the right track. National's policies are ineffective, and deliberately so, to shield their polluting donors and cronies from having to pay the full costs of their activities. Their "goal" of 90% renewable electricity is on-track for failure, while they're letting polluters build more gas-fired power plants. They've deliberately crippled the ETS, while their policies around agricultural emissions research and electric vehicles are token measures, aimed at generating positive PR and the appearance of action rather than real reductions in emissions.

This is the biggest challenge facing the planet, and it is going to be disastrous for our agricultural industry. This is not a problem we can spin our way out of. We deserve a Minister who understands that, and government which will take it seriously. We won't get either under National.

Policy failure

A couple of months ago, stories about people living in cars after being forced out of state housing and force dinto debt by WINZ hit the headlines. Social Housing Minister Paula Bennett responded by announcing a policy to pay people to move out of Auckland. It was the usual National Party cynicism - the policy had already been announced back in January, so it was just a spin job aimed at creating the impression of action rather than the real thing. So how well has this policy worked in practice? Badly:

The Government's $5000 offer to flee Auckland grant is off to a slow start with just 12 families taking it up after the first month - one of which was homeless.

In total, $54,508 has been paid out, covering things like moving costs, bond, rent in advance and letting fees for the dozen families - collectively consisting of 32 people.

Assistance has been approved for a further 10 applicants pending confirmed moving dates and verification of costs - that'll move 20 more out of Auckland.

It turns out that people aren't actually that willing to uproot their lives and abandon their friends and support networks just because it is convenient for the government for them to do so. Or, to put it another way, people aren't arbitrarily mobile "labour units" to be shoved whereever Paula Bennett wants them to go. Who'd have thunk it?

Open Government: The dog ate their homework

Back in March, the New Zealand government received a formal warning from the Open Government Partnership that we were failing to meet our obligations. Given the reputational damage of such a warning, you'd expect it to have had a saultory effect on our policy and encouraged the government to do a better job. Instead, SSC did the opposite, unilaterally delaying the action plan and deciding to use it as a propaganda exercise, while ending any pretense at a partnership with civil society.

So how did this happen? Simple: The Minister claims to have never received the OGP's warning:

On 11 April 2016 I was first made aware of the Open Government Partnership Support Unit’s letter to the New Zealand Government dated 4 April 2016 (but received by New Zealand after that date). The letter dated 21 March 2016 referred to in your question was never received by the New Zealand Government.

"I didn't receive it" is the saddest of sad excuses, and it raises serious questions about whether SSC is fulfilling its duties as a point-of-contact competently. But also if they're paying this little attention to the issue then it explains a hell of a lot.

11 April is also when Bennett was briefed on SSC's plans to ignore the OGP's deadlines. Presumably, she also approved them. Which means when they turn into a clusterfuck and we get ejected from the OGP, we can hold her accountable for it.

Unconvincing lies

In parliament today, Paula Bennett was questioned pretty intensively about her clumsy smear of Te Puea Marae chairman Hurimoana Dennis. Her answers were less than convincing:

• Bennett claimed to be ignorant of the smear until asked about it by journalists on Tuesday afternoon. But her face in that interview tells a completely different story: she's lying, and wasn't expecting to be asked about it. Incidentally, this was an answer to a primary question, so any evidence that she knew gets her for contempt of Parliament.
  
• Bennett briefed her political staff about the investigation of Dennis. She refused to say why she did that, but there's no reason at all unless it was for the purposes of smearing him.
  
• The staffer who did the actual leak offered to resign. Bennett refused to accept their resignation as she was assured that "it was not the intention for it to be a smear campaign against Mr Dennis or the marae". Which invites the obvious question: if it wasn't supposed to be a smear, why was it revealed?
  
• Bennett, who has a past history of utter disregard for privacy of her critics, is suddenly very protective of the privacy of her staff, refusing to confirm or deny that the leaker was the person who accompanied her to a meeting with Dennis. By doing so, she made it clear that there will be no accountability whatsoever for this action.
  

These are unconvincing lies, and the overwhelming message is that Bennett ordered it, or at least tacitly approved it. And that is well below the standards we expect from government Ministers (or decent human beings). Lianne Dalziel was sacked for this sort of bullying, as was Judith Collins. And Paula Bennett must pay the same price.

Sack Bennett now!

For the past few weeks, Te Puea Marae has been doing the work the government has refused to do in helping the homeless. There's strong public support for this work, and even the government has been forced to contribute. But its also very obviously embarrassing for the government to have such a visible symbol that the public believe in a decent society and want homes for all. So, after doing a quick photo op for the papers there this morning, Social Housing Minister Paula Bennett had her press secretary leak information that the marae's chair was under police investigation.

This is fucking low, even by Bennett's standards: someone is doing good, but their doing good makes her look bad by comparison, so she abuses information given to her in confidence to smear them. And there's no question that she did it: press secretaries don't do this sort of thing without instruction, and Bennett has past form for exactly this type of dirty bullying. That sort of behaviour is simply unacceptable for a Minister (or, indeed, a human being), and she should be sacked for it.

Also worth noting: Paula Bennett is one of the Ministers responsible for the government's Social Investment Unit, which will be the primary customer of Stats NZ's "big brother' Integrated Data Infrastructure. So the person responsible for the agency which collects and trawls through our most intimate secrets is also the Minister with the worst record for abusing that sort of information. And that just doesn't seem safe at all.

Open Government: How did that happen?

Back in April, the government announced a unilateral delay in meeting our obligations to the Open Government Partnership. It was a significant decision, and a risky one - being even a day late on their new timetable means a real risk of being thrown out of the OGP - so its the sort of thing you would expect to have been kicked upstairs to the Minister. So I was quite surprised to see yesterday that Paula Bennett had not been briefed on any OGP issues in April (or in January, February, or March).

There's a big caveat on those lists of briefings, of course:

Certain briefings and reports have been omitted from this response where there are matters under consideration, forthcoming decisions and announcements, or where an individual’s privacy would be compromised by the release of the briefing title.

But none of these circumstances apply. The decision to delay has been made, the issue is no longer under consideration, there's no announcements planned (SSC never announced the delay, except in a buried section of their own website), and there's certainly no issue of privacy. So, taking the Minister at her word, and assuming that she's not lying to Parliament for shits and giggles, she was not briefed. Which raises the obvious question: is the Minister totally out of the loop? How the hell are these decisions being made, if not by her?

I have an OIA due back this afternoon from SSC which might answer some of those questions. And if it shows briefings to the Minister which weren't on Bennett's lists, then I think someone else should be asking some very pointy questions, via the Privileges Committee.

Paula Bennett's housing deja vu

After a week of bad media coverage about homelessness in Auckland, Social Housing Minister Paula Bennett was today forced to act, announcing that she would pay homeless Aucklanders $5,000 to move to the regions (where they'd conveniently be out of sight of the media and out of mind of the public). This is being pitched as a response to the current crisis. But it seems awfully familiar. Because she announced practically the same policy back in January:

Aucklanders languishing on the state house waiting list are likely to be offered financial incentives to move to regions that have a surplus of homes, the Herald can reveal.

Social Housing Minister Paula Bennett confirmed last night that the Government wants prospective tenants to consider moving to regions where dozens of state houses are vacant - and in some cases could be offered thousands of dollars in taxpayer sweeteners.

Pacific Island tenants could be prime candidates for such a move, she thought.

The only difference is that now she's offering more money. But its the same policy, driven by the same imperative: not to actually solve the problem - that would require building more state houses, something National does not want to do - but to create the appearance of action and allow the government to say that it is "doing something". Meanwhile, National is selling or even demolishing its state houses in the regions, meaning that there will be nowhere for people to move to. But it doesn't care about the reality, any more than it cares about the homeless. Its just a PR problem to them, rather than an open wound in our society.

Shouldn't the government be doing something about this?

That escalated quickly. On Monday Prime Minister John Key airily dismissed concerns about people being forced to live in cars and garages with a suggestion that people should "talk to Work and Income", with the implication that they would solve it. Two days later, Social Housing Minister Paula Bennett is forced to admit that WINZ is not resourced to solve the problem and that they don't have enough state houses:

Social Housing Minister Paula Bennett says there's no guarantee that homeless families would get a roof over their heads after contacting Work and Income.

Her comments come after Prime Minister John Key said Kiwis living out of cars and garages should contact the welfare agency where they would receive support.

Bennett said Work and Income would try their best to help, but it depended on what support was available.

"Look, I can't guarantee that," she said on RNZ.

"What I would say though is that we would do everything that we could do help them and it would depend on the kind of circumstances that they're in, whats available and the assistance that we could give."

Social housing was at 97 per cent occupancy, said the Minister.

Oh, and that $41 million for "emergency housing" the government announced earlier in the month? Turns out that that's funding existing places rather than new ones. Yes, its the old strategy of re-announcing existing resources as a substitute for action, creating perceptions rather than fixing reality. Which again shows how much National cares about this.

But remember, they have $3 billion for tax cuts for the rich. That's four times what the government spends on subsidising state housing. It has the resources to fix this problem if it wanted to. The problem is that National doesn't want to.

But kiwis care more than National does. We don't like seeing people forced to live in cars. We think every kiwi should have a roof over their heads. And we think the government should make that happen when the market inevitably fails. If National won't, its time for a government which will.

Open Government: A timeline for ejection

Its official: Paula Bennett has unilaterally granted herself a four month extension on submitting its second Open Government Partnership national action plan:

The processes we are considering mean that we will not be able to submit our 2016-18 National Action Plan by 30 June 2016. We want our engagement processes to be more inclusive and believe it is preferable to allow time for this to happen.

That said, we will submit our 2016-18 National Action Plan by the end of October 2016.

The problem? The OGP absolutely does not grant extensions. The rules regarding delays (p. 36) in their Government Point of Contact Manual are crystal clear:

1. Countries should deliver their NAP and Self-Assessment Reports on time. This calendar provides advance notice on all due dates in order to avoid future delays. In order to take full advantage of economies of scale, and to ensure transparency in operations so all OGP countries are treated fairly, the IRM will not modify or rearrange any of their product deadlines to accommodate delays from countries. NAPs and Self-Assessment Reports will be considered delivered when they are uploaded to the OGP website.

2. If a country submits their NAP or Self-Assessment Report late, the delay will be noted in the IRM report.

3. If a country delivers its new NAP more than four months late, the IRM will document this and, working with the Support Unit, will refer the case to the Criteria and Standards Subcommittee of the OGP Steering Committee. The country will receive a letter from the Support Unit noting this occurrence. The same rules apply to the late submission of the self-assessment reports.

[Emphasis added]

We've already had one such letter; a second one will put us immediately into review by the OGP's Criteria and Standards subcommittee. In other words, if Bennett is even one day late delivering this (and her record on this is not good), we may be thrown out of the OGP.

Heckuva job she's doing, isn't it?

The Wicked campers decision

For the past two months, the public has been complaining about Wicked camper-vans' offensive slogans. Yesterday, the Office of Film and Literature Classification responded, by classifying three of the vans as "objectionable" - meaning that merely possessing them is punishable by a penalty of ten year's imprisonment. But note what the ban applies to and why: three vehicles depicting drug use involving cartoon characters, deemed likely to encourage drug use among children. Their sexist, offensive slogans aren't affected. So, while Paula Bennet is blustering and threatening Wicked to remove their slogans or "get out the cheque book", its simply hot air. Those vans aren't banned, and on any honest reading of the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993, aren't likely to be - because sexist dickheadery isn't grounds for censorship in this country.

Meanwhile, there's this:

Wicked could face a fine of up to $200,000 per offence if it continued to use them. Drivers of the vans could also be fined and police would be able to use their discretion in charging. Police were deciding on the level of consequences.

Or, to put it another way, the police are going to make the law up as they go along to avoid damaging New Zealand's tourism industry. But these are strict liability offences here, which Parliament has decided apply regardless of intent or knowledge. If the vans are banned, anyone currently driving them (or whom they are currently rented to) is commiting an offence (likely multiple offences). It's the police's job to enforce the law as written, and they should do so - not subvert the will of Parliament. And if people don't like that (because, let's face it, it's going to look awful when we bang up a couple of German teenagers and subject them to a show-trial because the stupid van they rented was suddenly classified underneath them), then maybe they should have thought about that before clamouring for the law to be twisted in this way.

(Meanwhile, the Department of Conservation is now a week late on my OIA request on their issues about Wicked. Once upon a time, DoC made OIA a priority and dropped everything to process them. Clearly that is no longer the case under a National Minister. Just another sign of how National has eroded open government and transparency...)

Open Government: Oh FFS

It is now 63 days until New Zealand's second National Action Plan must be presented to the Open Government Partnership. A requirement of OGP membership is that action plans be co-created with civil society, including a mandatory consultationperiod during development. So when is consultation on New Zealand's action plan scheduled to begin and how long will it last? The Minister won't say, and their answer implies heavily that they are still waiting for advice on it. And thanks to Kris Faafoi's useful monitoring questions, we know that she didn't receive any advice on the OGP in March, or in February, or in January, despite there being a consultation process to plan.

It gets worse. What awareness-raising activities, required by the OGP's articles of governance, has the New Zealand government undertaken? She's still waiting for advice on that as well, it seems. Does she even know when its due? Yes, but she seems to think the deadline is negotiable:

While New Zealand's second Open Government Partnership (OGP) Action Plan is due to be submitted to the OGP by 30 June 2016, New Zealand intends to consult the OGP Secretariat on this timing to ensure that we can engage meaningfully in the development of the Action Plan.

There is, of course, no provision for extensions in the OGP statute. And its amazing that she's apparently decided this without ever having received any advice on it (you'd expect "ignore our international obligations and ask for an extension" to be a decision made by the Minister, not some public servant).

How has this happened? This might be the answer:

At any one time a minimum of one FTE in the State Services Commission (SSC) works on Open Government Partnership activities, with additional SSC staffing resources used as required.

One person. They have one person to handle what is supposed to be an ambitious, multi-departmental work programme with international obligations. No wonder its a fucking shambles.

Compare the answers from Bennett with the consultation requirements laid out in the OGP's Articles of Governance (p. 19). We've already failed on "availability of process and timeline", we've failed on "adequate notice", and we've utterly failed on "awareness raising". We will receive another negative report from the OGP's Independent Review Mechanism for this - and this after we promised them that we would fix those problems from our first consultation. Which means the possibility of a finding that we have ignored IRM recommendations, which (given we've already had one warning) means a referral to the OGP's Criteria and Standards Subcommittee and a formal membership suspension. That's what "open government" means under National: being suspended from the body which promotes it. Heckuva job they're doing, isn't it?

Open Government: The Minister isn't interested II

So far, New Zealand's participation in the Open Government Partnership has been defined by ministerial disinterest and SSC incompetence. Two weeks ago, the Opposition finally started paying attention to this, with Labour MP Clare Curran asking a series of parliamentary questions inquiring about the upcoming action plan process. The answers to the first batch of these came back over the weekend, and they don't paint a very pretty picture.

Firstly, the biggie: what concrete changes have occurred as a result of joining the OGP? According to State Services Minister Paula Bennett, the answer is that now we have an action plan. And that's it. No mention of whether the actions in that plan have led to any actual change in the way we do government ("no", according to the OGP's Independent Reporting Mechanism), which you'd think is the point. Apparently the Minister thinks that the purpose of the OGP is to generate plans rather than change.

Secondly, what lessons have been learned from the government's miserable failure on its first action plan? Officials are (still) considering it. Which given that one of the key identified failings was consultation an co-creation, and we have only 79 days to go until the next action plan has to be presented to the OGP, is leaving it pretty fucking late.

Thirdly, what action has she taken to fix those problems? None. The Minister is asleep at the wheel, and the result is going to be a further erosion of New Zealand's international reputation.

Finally, what advice has the Minister received on the consultation process for the next action plan? None - but she expects to receive some in future. Again, 79 days to go - its a bit fucking late now. And there's an obvious question of why she wasn't being advised about it back in October, in time to get a proper consultation process in place. Did she not ask, or did SSC not tell?

All of which seems to support my initial conclusion: the Minister isn't interested in the OGP, and SSC isn't interested in keeping her in the loop or asking her if she wants to do anything differently. And insofar as she hasn't been asked, then it is senior public servants in SSC who are to blame for the unambitious targets and appalling approach to "consultation" that they are inflicting upon us.

Wicked campers and freedom of speech

Wicked campers appeal to foreign dickheads by putting sexist slogans on their vans. Its offensive, and its led businesses to refuse to deal with their customers. All of that is fine, the push and shove of a free and democratic society. What's not fine is politicians like Paula Bennett calling for them to be banned.

(Also, Paula Bennett's "troll" just happens to be a former National Party spindoctor. Are we being scammed here?)

To point out the obvious: we have freedom of expression in this country. And this includes the right to offend. The Chief Censor has pointed out how high we set the bar before we can justify banning something: basicly it has to be "injurious to the public good". Specifically:

[A] publication is objectionable if it describes, depicts, expresses, or otherwise deals with matters such as sex, horror, crime, cruelty, or violence in such a manner that the availability of the publication is likely to be injurious to the public good.

You might not like what's written on a wicked camper van, but it simply doesn't meet this standard. Neither does it clearly meet the standards of "highly offensive language" allowing it to be age-restricted (which would effectively be the same as a ban). Any attempt to classify them in this way would be asking for a BORA challenge.

(So, BTW, is the Department of Conservation. The BORA applies to every act by the executive branch and therefore requires them to consider freedom of expression when attempting to ban Wicked from their campsites or prevent them from selling passes, and impose only such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society. DoC banning vans or acting against the company which hires them because it doesn't like what they have written on them is basicly asking for a lawsuit, which they would probably lose).

Yes, Wicked vans are offensive. So's Paul Henry. And we put up with both because the alternative is Paula Bennett telling us what we can and can't say. And that's the truly offensive prospect in all of this.

Open Government: The Minister isn't interested

Yesterday I received an OIA response from Minister of State Services Paula Bennett covering all the advice she had received since January 2015 on the Open Government Partnership. Which turns out to be a paltry seven documents. There's the stuff you'd expect: a general briefing from shortly after she became Minister, stuff on the appointment of the Stakeholder Advisory Group, a couple of briefings on the draft and final Midterm Self-Assessment Report. One interesting feature is that whenever they talk about consultation they redact material as "free and frank advice" - which isn't very open. But what's really interesting is what's not there: any briefing on the upcoming process for creating the second National Action Plan.

Consultation on this is scheduled to start next month, and the final document is due by June 30. You'd expect the Minister to be being kept aware of this, if not briefed early (late last year, say) on consultation and commitment options so she could choose what she wanted to do. Instead, there's nothing. Its possible that the Minister was briefed a few weeks ago, and that briefing excluded from the response, but its definite that she hadn't been briefed as of February. Which means in turn that SSC simply wasn't thinking about it that far ahead.

The upshot: the Minister isn't interested in the OGP, and SSC isn't interested in keeping her in the loop or asking her if she wants to do anything differently. And insofar as she hasn't been asked, then it is senior public servants in SSC who are to blame for the unambitious targets and appalling approach to "consultation" that they are inflicting upon us.

PR-driven policy doesn't solve homelessness

Back in September, Social Housing Minister Paula Bennett promised she would end Auckland's homelessness crisis by spending an extra $2 million on emergency housing. Six months on has she done it? Of course not:

Government funding aimed at injecting more money into emergency housing and making more homes come available in January is still yet to be spent.

Social housing minister Paula Bennett said back in September that the Government would invest $2 million in non-government organisations for short-term emergency housing.

However, a tender process was being followed and requests for proposals had been submitted, the minister's office confirmed.

Negotiations were underway with social housing providers and support services. A decision would then be made as to where the money should go to.

Meanwhile, while she's faffing about, people are sleeping in cars and in parks. In a decent human being, that would be a cause for urgency, to solve this crisis as quickly as possible. But Bennett clearly doesn't see it as urgent, or a crisis. Instead, like so many other National policies, it seems to have been driven solely by PR considerations. The goal of the policy isn't the outcome, but the announcement; to create the perception of action rather than actually acting. But that only works as long as no-one looks behind the curtain to check up on whether it gets followed through. And now that the inaction has been exposed, we should be a lot more cynical about such announcements in future.

Fixing the lottery

So, Social Housing Minister Paula Bennett thinks that getting a state house is so difficult that its like winning the lottery:

Getting a state house in the current situation is like winning a lottery for tenants, Social Housing Minister Paula Bennett says.

[...]

Tenants were disadvantaged by the current system, Bennett said.

"They almost have to win lottery to be at the top of the list and get a vacant house that becomes – particularly in Auckland - and a vacant house become available. We want to change that."

But its hard to see how National's plan of selling state houses to private and community providers will change that at all. It won't increase the number of houses, merely change who owns them. Which means that prospective tenants will still need to win the lottery to get to the top of one of the lists. And it will be even harder in the case of Housing New Zealand because they'll have fewer houses.

What it will do is allow the government to dump the problem on those providers, which in turn will let them dodge accountability for it. The government will be able to respond to questions about people living in garages by saying that there is no Ministerial responsibility for it and that the opposition should talk to the private housing provider instead (who of course will not be subject to the OIA and will be under no obligation to answer questions). Which, from National's point of view, is as good as winning the lottery...

Shuffling the deckchairs

We have a housing crisis. We have people living in tents and garages and boarding houses because they can't afford to rent a home of their own. The core driver of this crisis is lack of supply: there are not enough affordable homes to meet the needs of that end of the market (partly because they've all been snapped up by greedy Boomers speculating in the property market, and partly because developers don't find it profitable enough to build new ones).

The government's solution to this crisis? Sell state houses at a loss to the community sector - in other words, offload their responsibility for dealing with it.

This won't increase the net supply of affordable homes, so it won't solve the problem. All it does is shuffle those houses from one owner to another. I can't think of a better example of shuffling the deckchairs on the Titanic...

But the worst bit is the second half: shuffling those needy people out of the government's hair and making them someone else's problem. Its a clear sign that National does not see every kiwi having a decent roof over their head as a core responsibility of the government. Instead, they plan to run the DHB scam on housing: make it someone else's problem so you can disclaim responsibility and dodge criticism.

That's not good enough, and we shouldn't accept it. But then, what did we expect? Paula Bennet owns three houses. Her primary goal is in maintaining their value. She's the problem, and she will never provide a real solution.