Public housing advocates oppose further job losses at
Kāinga Ora. Today workers were given notice of 673 net job
losses. Together with the rest of the job cuts to date, this
amounts to a third of the workforce.
This comes a
month after the Government announced its plan to sell around
800 state houses a year, demolish 700 and renew 1500 – a
proposal that would see no net increase in state housing
from 2026.
“It’s clear the Government is cementing
its goal to withdraw from building the homes we need. At the
same time as mass job losses, they have pulled the handbrake
on Kāinga Ora, pausing and cancelling hundreds of
desperately needed developments across the country, many of
which were consented and ready to go. The impacts of these
cuts will be devastating,” says Vanessa Cole, spokesperson
for Public Housing Futures
Census data released last
year showed that 112,496
people were severely housing deprived – sleeping on
couches, in their cars and on the streets. This has worsened
with the Government’s decision to put up barriers to
access emergency housing policy which has already seen
increases in homelessness in centres such as Auckland,
Wellington, New Plymouth and
Christchurch.
“Building state housing
at scale is a key solution to the housing crisis, and
Kāinga Ora desperately needs the resourcing and the vision
to be able to make this happen. We know from history that
when governments stop building state housing, it impacts the
whole housing system – we all lose out. We’ve already
seen the ripple impact that this has had on jobs in the
construction sector,” says
Cole
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“Starving public services of
resources, gutting the workforce and then proposing private
market solutions has been a key strategy of this government.
The Government is deliberately setting up Kāinga Ora to
fail in order to roll back its role in building housing to
enable the further privatisation of our housing
system.
“The private sector cannot deliver the homes
we need – homes with secure tenancies, that are built for
people to age in place, and are permanently affordable. And
once we lose the workforce, skills and knowledge needed to
coordinate the building, maintaining and providing of state
housing – it’s very difficult to gain this back,” says
Cole
