Joanne McNeill: Budget no help to homeless

Joanne McNeill.

According to Finance Minister Bill English, his Budget last week delivered "better results for New Zealanders and their families" but it's hard to see how or where.

There were crumbs for the regions.

The perennially missing Marsden Point to Oakleigh rail link - which could have linked the port with the main trunk line thereby shifting a portion of the burden of logging trucks and other greenhouse gas emitting freight off Northland's besieged public highways - missed out as usual. But Social Housing Minister Paula Bennett did attempt a radical pre-Budget regional investment by paying the urban homeless to shift out of the inconvenient spotlight to ghost towns full of empty houses with main streets full of empty shops where government free-trade policies have closed down all local manufacturing in favour of cheap goods imported along with low wages from Third World economies.

There was some funding for regional public loos and rubbish bins too but these are not for locals. They're to service the freedom campers and other tourists who have become our number one cash cow since dairying went belly up.

There was no such comfort for homeless "New Zealanders and their families" trapped by a housing crisis created by a greedy government keen to promote growth and immigration but seemingly singularly bereft of either intention or ability to plan for its necessary infrastructure.

The next step in societies with endemic homelessness is slums and ghettos, and in some of these places, a range of creative affordable social housing alternatives have been successful.

A recent article by Owen Hatherley in the Art Newspaper covers Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena who has, in an attempt to create a third way between top-down and bottom-up housing, designed basic modular housing blocks connected to sanitary services which must be completed by residents in a variety of materials, making for a lively aesthetic and affordable, inclusive safe housing.

The sentence in the article "... architects now provide elegant over-engineered baubles for repressive regimes rather than get their hands dirty to help solve the global housing crisis" seems particularly apt.

Of course this is unfair to those local creative caring architects who regularly bang their heads against the brick wall of building bureaucracy which all but guarantees that only crony developers and builders foisting over-priced, cloned, formulaic, leaky McMansions built from toxic imported materials can operate in the current climate, but otherwise it rings true. Clearly our blinkered government would rather pass the buck than explore creative solutions.

It was a small mercy that English was too ashamed of his Government's arrant underfunding of essential services to throw in the bribe of tax cuts for the rich this time but clearly he had no such scruples about exploiting embattled tobacco addicts with a fresh 10 per cent per annum price hike on already outrageously over-taxed cigarettes. The tobacco tax take at over $1 billion per annum already way exceeds smokers' alleged health costs. Clearly price hikes don't work as a smoking cessation strategy either. If it did there'd be no smokers left by now.

When all else fails though, I suppose it is always politically expedient to have a morally reviled group of scapegoats on hand to milk.