A homeless man was found dead on the morning of August 28
outside the Auckland offices of three MPs from New
Zealand’s governing National Party. This followed at least
three other deaths reported in the past two months of people
living on the streets of Auckland, Wellington and
Christchurch.
The cause of the latest death has not
been reported and the man has not been publicly named. The
building outside which he was found, in the affluent suburb
of Epsom, houses the electorate offices of Justice Minister
Paul Goldsmith and MPs Melissa Lee and Nancy
Lu.
According to the Post, a worker at a neighbouring
physiotherapy business said homeless people were regularly
seen in the area and noted: “There used to be emergency
housing on the street. That’s not there
anymore.”
Auckland City Mission chief executive
Helen Robinson described the death as a “tragedy” and
pointed to the lack of services available to homeless
people. She told the Post it was “incredibly distressing
that this could have been avoided if we had adequate
services to respond.”
Charities have reported a
sharp increase in homelessness, driven in part by the
government’s restrictions on access to emergency housing.
Robinson asked: “How will ministers ensure that rough
sleepers have genuine access to the services that they need,
so that no other people die?”
Goldsmith issued a
brief, cynical statement: “This will naturally be an
extremely upsetting situation for anyone involved, and it
would be inappropriate to politicise it, or to comment
further. Our thoughts are with the family of the
deceased.”
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Goldsmith has been at the forefront of
promoting draconian policies that treat homeless people like
criminals. On May 14, he announced legislation empowering
police to issue “move-on orders” against people for
rough sleeping, begging or displaying “behaviour
indicating an intent to inhabit a public
place.”
Goldsmith said at the time:
“Unfortunately, our streets and town centres have endured
unprecedented levels of disruption in recent years. Many
people no longer want to be there. Businesses residents and
visitors are paying the price.”
The new police
powers will be used to push homeless people out of central,
shopping and tourist areas, without giving them anywhere to
live.
The homelessness crisis is the outcome of
decades of cuts to welfare services, the destruction of
healthcare and mental health services, a lack of affordable
housing, and soaring unemployment and poverty.
The
Ministry of Social Development (MSD) has pushed its regional
managers to reduce the number of people granted emergency
housing. The percentage of applications that are declined
has risen from 5 percent in June 2024 to 32 percent in June
2026. The numbers receiving such accommodation fell from
3,141 households in December 2023 to 471 two years
later.
An Auckland Council survey found the number of
people living without shelter more than doubled from 426 in
September 2024 to 940 in September 2025. There were still
706 counted in January this year. Prime Minister Christopher
Luxon revealed the ruling class’s contempt for the fate of
homeless people when he told the media in June that he did
not know there was no night shelter in
Auckland.
Serena Moran, a nurse who works with
homeless people in Wellington, told RNZ on August 20 that
she often failed to find anywhere for her patients to go:
“I basically have to say to them, I’m sorry I can’t
find you anywhere to stay tonight. You’ll need to go back
to the street.”
The number of homeless people
admitted to hospital increased from fewer than 1,000 in
2018–2019 to nearly 2,000 in 2024–2025.
The death
outside the Auckland MPs’ offices, and Goldsmith’s
insistence that it not be “politicised,” provoked an
outpouring of anger on social media.
One person wrote
on Reddit’s r/newzealand forum: “If only there was a
night shelter, or MSD didn’t have targets to meet” and
asked whether Goldsmith, Lu and Lee would recognise “the
very real outcomes of their and their parties’
decisions.”
On the New Zealand Herald’s Facebook
page, James commented: “The person didn’t die alone…
Our country and everything it once stood for went with
them.” Christopher wrote: “A rough sleeper dying outside
a National Party MP office is just a microcosm of the last 3
years of National.”
In a letter to the Press, Juliet
Neill noted that an encampment of about 90 homeless people
in the Christchurch suburb of Bexley (which was demolished
after the 2011 earthquakes) has been told “to leave the
area in February with no options provided of where they can
go, despite the plethora of empty premises in Christchurch.
Surely this could lead to more deaths from either the cold
or the massive heat predicted for this summer.
“A
body found outside a politician’s office should be a
wake-up call for the Government. Despite the call not to
politicise the event, this is political. We need a
government which will respond with compassion as well as
action,” she said.
The homelessness crisis, however,
did not begin with the present government.
Eight years
ago, the Herald reported on August 25, 2018: “Advocates
for the homeless estimate one person dies roughly every two
weeks on the streets of Auckland—but there are no official
figures. For the most part their deaths are going largely
unnoticed.” Moira Lawler, from the Lifewise charity, said:
“There is no concentrated resourced effort to prevent
these deaths.”
At the time, the Labour-Greens-NZ
First coalition government under Prime Minister Jacinda
Ardern had been in office for almost a year. It had
campaigned on false promises to end child poverty and
improve housing affordability.
According to Statistics
NZ, the number of people experiencing “severe housing
deprivation” increased under Labour from 99,462 in 2018 to
112,496 in 2023, equivalent to 2.3 percent of the
population. The number living without shelter—rough
sleepers and people in improvised or mobile dwellings—rose
from 3,624 to 4,965.
Labour initially claimed that its
KiwiBuild policy would deliver 100,000 “affordable”
homes over a decade. It only built about 2,300 homes before
the scheme was scrapped in 2024, and these were sold at
market prices out of reach of low-income families.
Meanwhile, soaring property values and rents enriched
investors and placed secure housing and home ownership
increasingly beyond the reach of working-class
people.
New Zealand is an extremely unequal country:
the wealthiest 10 percent of households control 49 percent
of the total wealth, while the poorest half own less than 5
percent. The number of billionaires has jumped from 18 to 26
in the space of a single year. The resources exist to
provide high-quality housing, healthcare and properly
funding social services for all, but they are monopolised by
a wealthy elite.
As the November 7 election
approaches, the capitalist parties have nothing to offer
except deeper austerity, protecting the wealth of the
super-rich, and the transfer of billions of dollars in
public funds to the military in preparation for
war.
By Chris Egan, Socialist Equality Group
5
September 2026
Original url:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/09/05/oafb-s05.html
