Rock Star or Rock Bottom

There was a story in the Press yesterday about 14 people sharing a small 3 bedroom house in Hornby after a family of 6 lost their rental and all their (uninsured) possessions in a fire and had to move in with the other two families already living in the house.

Their budget for a new rental, if they can find one, is a maximum of $440 a week. They are struggling to find anywhere because landlords in Christchurch have been allowed to price gouge and profiteer – i.e., do what uncontrolled capitalist markets will always do when supply is low and demand is high.


The man who is believed to have shot dead two WINZ staff members and injured a third, is sick, socially isolated and homeless. Sue Bradford was lambasted for remarking on the political dimensions of the tragedy and using it to "score political points".  

This is a horrible tragedy and we must respect the feelings of the family and friends of the victims but like it or not, it is political.  The fact that people cannot afford private rentals, that there is a shortage of social housing, that WINZ staff are instructed not to be proactive and advise people of their full entitlements, that WINZ staff are the buffer zone between government's social and economic policy and the people who are worst affected by it – are all political issues. 

The Auckland property boom and the Christhchurch rebuild are making some people very, very rich; some people's affluence has increased significantly,  but a lot of people are worse off, especially the  hidden homeless. Some have slipped off the radar completely,  some people hanging on by their fingertips, and a lot are "staying afloat by using their credit cards as flotation aids". 

The number of households that are under stress is steadily rising because rents are going up faster than wages, and inflation is increasing.  

Radio New Zealand detailed the case of a 45-year-old homeless woman in Auckland:

"Sandra and her 2 teenage sons and her 20-year-old daughter are living at the Monte Cecilia housing trust’s emergency accommodation in Mangere. Sandra says the last few years have been devastating. Until a year ago she was working at a plastics factory taking home $890 a week and paying $500 of that in rent for a 3 bedroom house in Papatoetoe.

'With the escalating rents every 6 months it was going up $20 and $20 every time. If I fell behind on the water rates then I was looking at Baycorp, if I paid the water rates then we had no power. If I could pay the water rates the power we didn't eat for that week. I was working 72 hours a week 6 nights a week, 6 at night to 6 in the morning and it just became too much of a struggle and I collapsed.'

"Sandra got arthritis in her hands, she lost her job and then the house. When her job seekers' support benefit couldn't pay the rent, they moved into a friend's state house until the friend was warned her tenancy could be terminated because of having extra people living there.

'So my children and I packed up and for 3 weeks we lived out of a Honda, my car. We would go to Manurewa pools for showers, you know I'd try to make a game of out it 'come on let's go to the pools, we'll have a morning swim and a shower and then we'll go to school.'

“In desperation Sandra turned to the Maori Woman's Welfare League who sent her to Monte Cecilia.

'I'm so thankful and appreciative of being in Monte Ceciia today I really don't know where I would have been if I wasn't here. Um CYFS was certainly an option for me to look at for them to take my children  I couldn't offer them anything, not a home not seven meals a week not 3 meals a day ,7 meals a week, clean water somewhere you know, safe to sleep I couldn't offer them any of that.’"

Janette Walker, the Labour candidate for Kaikoura,  spoke passionately at a meeting last week about the working poor she has met in the south of the electorate – people displaced by the earthquakes, forced into low quality housing and living in garages, sheds, caravans – because rents have risen beyond their reach. 

These hidden homeless and the working poor are no longer the exception to the general rule of New Zealanders having a decent standard of living. 

The raucous claims by the right that poverty is caused by people making "bad choices" and spending their perfectly adequate wages or benefits on "fags and booze" are an ugly echo of all those voices throughout history which have lauded and defended the pathological hoarding of the rich, and claimed it as proof of their superiority in the natural order of things. 

Those same strident voices damn the poor as "feckless", as a "feral underclass" which does not have children but which "spawns" or 'breeds".  Commentators who call for them to be sterilised are applauded as having the courage to say what others are thinking.  Cartoonists who caricature and stereotype them are defended for simply telling the truth.  Bloggers who mock them get media awards.

The rightwing ideologues and their foot soldiers should throw off their shallow pretence to being socially advanced and call for bringing back the Workhouse – that at least would be honest.  

A Parable For Our Times: with apologies to real sharks

Just so we are all on the same page - this is a parable based on the Kim Dot-Com situation


Once upon a time there was a little shark who wanted to be a Great White when he grew up. Because he was a clever and devious hunter he grew to be a very big little shark.  He was not content to dominate the sharks in his part of the ocean and set off towards the zone of the Great Whites – the shark elite whose ranks he thought he was big enough and vicious enough to join. 

This elite of Great Whites allows certain other smaller sharks to scavenge the edges of their kill zone and if they are well fed, they may even let an enterprising little shark dart in to seize some prey for itself, but if a little shark starts to act like one of the Great Whites, or threatens their interests, they'll turn on him.  

The big little shark desperately wanted to be a part of the Great White elite but to them he was just a scavenging pest. When he started to muscle in on their kill zones, they decided to destroy him. He managed to escape and fled south but they were in a blood frenzy and pursued him across the oceans as far as the great southern ocean where he found some quiet waters in which to rest and gather his strength. 

The local sharks seemed a pretty dopey bunch and were easily bribed with a few fish to let him take up residence in their waters. Once rested, he took to his usual tactic of scattering around large amounts of fish offal to boost his reputation as the biggest predator in the neighbourhood and managed to gather a number of scavengers around him.  

But, unbeknownst to him, there was a Great White in residence – cleverly disguised as a dolphin. This shark in a dolphin suit alerted the Great White elite to the big little shark's presence in his waters, and a kill squad was sent to finish him off.

Using all his skills, the big little shark managed to escape the kill squads and found himself a spot where he could defend himself.  He thought that if the Great White elite was never going to let him become one of them he would be as much of a nuisance to them as he could – especially to the resident Great White.  

He looked around for allies. There weren't many as the waters had been so depleted of fish they could not support much in the way of predators, but he managed to find some prey species which were swimming around in an agitated and fearful state. 

He devised a cunning plan. He also disguised himself as a dolphin (a very large one it must be said) and persuaded the prey fish that he and his dolphin school would protect them from the Great White and its gang of scavengers if the prey fish would act as a diversion. They were to present themselves as a target while he and his school would sneak up behind the Great White and ram him – that being the way dolphins attack sharks.  Once deprived of their devious leader, the scavenger gang could be chased away by the dolphins and all would be well. 

The fish were so anxious for some leadership they totally forgot to question how come this particular dolphin had such huge teeth, not to mention the fact that dolphins also eat fish. 

After a lot of discussion, the prey fish agreed to band together to create a big enough shoal to attract the resident Great White's attention. The Great White duly sniffed out the prey and headed in for the kill. To the horror of the fish there was no sign of their dolphin protector.  Once the Great White had killed and eaten as many of the fish as he could catch and his scavengers had finished off the rest, he turned and found himself confronting the big-little shark.

"That was my gift to you," the big little shark said. "Proof of my good intentions. I want to stay here in these waters and if you let me I can promise you more prey, especially lots of tasty young juveniles. They can see right through your disguise because frankly it's wearing a bit thin, but they think I'm a real dolphin."

The Great White thought a while and being a very pragmatic sort of shark who didn't get to where he was by useless displays of overt aggression, agreed to let the big little shark stay, as long as he delivered a regular tribute of the tasty young prey he'd promised. 

And if he became too much of a nuisance, the resident Great White thought, there is more than one way to kill a shark.

The End.