The ‘eccentric’ Auckland woman fighting eviction, with Mayor Wayne Brown’s support

Saturday, 3 May 2025

Gael Baldock’s lived in her state home for 31 years - but it’s attracted complaints from some neighbours claiming it’s an overgrown pest-ridden health hazard, and Kāinga Ora wants her out. Steve Kilgallon reports.

Her home stands out among the bright white, multi-million dollar weatherboard bungalows of genteel Westmere, in one of Auckland’s inner suburbs. Gael Baldock describes her front section, adorned with flowers and car carcasses, as a “wilderness garden with soft edges”. For two decades’ worth of complaining neighbours, it’s an overgrown pest-ridden health hazard.

It’s also the stage for a costly, long-running feud between Baldock, a local political activist, and her increasingly-exasperated landlords, Kāinga Ora (KO), that has run to multiple legal actions and even entangled the minister of housing.

After 31 years as Baldock’s landlord, the state housing provider has had enough. It wants her out. She’s refused to go - and has amassed a surprising army of supporters, including local councillors, the council CEO, the deputy mayor, a former NRL player, and even the Mayor of Auckland, Wayne Brown, who wrote: “She can appear to be somewhat eccentric … and at times can be annoying to some people… [but] Gael is a good citizen and deserves to be able to live without undue interference in my city.”

‘I’m a collector’

When an absent-minded scaffolder dropped a pole, breaking a flower sculpture Baldock had created, it also shattered a relationship which the Tenancy Tribunal said was marked by Baldock’s “absolute mistrust” of Kāinga Ora after a “long and complex history of problems”.

The agency was about to repaint the exterior of Baldock’s two-bedroom bungalow for the first time in three decades, but had finished only one exterior wall before the scaffolder’s mistake.

Baldock wanted the contractors to pay $800 for the damage. They took 18 months to cough up, and she admits saying they couldn’t remove the scaffold until that happened. “I had to use what leverage I had,” she says.

Amidst that debate, says Baldock, it was mid-winter, and work remained unfinished, so she asked for a halt as she had whooping cough and couldn’t have the windows open.

She says she asked in vain for the painters to return in each of the next three summers. The house remains scraped back to the wooden weatherboards. And the scaffold was in place for almost three years - costing KO almost $15,000.

Baldock says she’d previously been promised a new kitchen, proper ventilation in her bathroom and kitchen and other maintenance that never happened. So, in 2023, when KO wanted to inspect the house (two days before she was due to have major surgery) to assess what was needed to bring it to legal Healthy Homes standard, she refused. She knows now that was a mistake.

“Why do an inspection to inspect things that you've already approved but haven't put in?” she says.“ I just got really pissed off, and it wasn't a good move … [but it] was just a game to try … get them to do what I want, which is to finish painting the f…… house.”

But some of those repairs, KO told Baldock, were deferred due to the state of her house. “Every room is heavily crowded to the point that we struggled to move around the belongings and… could not fully access at least four rooms,” they wrote.

Opening her front door, Baldock says: “I hate the ‘H’ word (hoarder). I’m a collector, I’m an artist. My home is not that tidy…”

Stuff was only admitted as far as the front room, a bewildering cacophony of books, papers, artwork and junk. She has a lot of possessions. Moving out won’t be easy - but it’s looming. In February 2024, KO gave Baldock a formal 90-day notice to move on the grounds she had refused the inspection.

It appears its patience had simply run out: it’s been a turbulent tenancy, as Baldock’s bulging KO file explains (she obtained it through an Official Information Act request which took KO eight months to supply).

When she moved into the house in 1993, she was back from overseas but struggling to find work in her field of architectural design. She was offered the home within two days of applying, a beneficiary of the ‘pepper-pot’ theory of seeding state properties through each suburb for a greater cultural mix. By 1999, her tenancy manager was chiding Baldock that the section “required considerable tidying up’’; in both 2007 and 2010 KO took legal action to make her clean up, the latter time after Auckland Council served an enforcement notice. There’s a note in her file from one KO manager saying they would terminate her tenancy if she didn’t comply.

There’re later complaints from neighbours about rodents, mosquitoes and flies. One email says: “The neighbours have another miserable summer ahead” because “your office has chosen to ignore it”. Another records a “huge” rat running along a tree along the back (there’s also Baldock’s demurral that she might be the source, pointing out that her cat was a good mouser but had only caught one, and there were no bite marks in her feijoas).

A decade later, as her cat Jasper sifts around in the overgrowth, Baldock points out hibiscus, hydrangeas, belladonna, an apricot tree, a visiting tui and her own sculptures, including two giraffes by the fence and a pair of 400kg concrete sculpture/benches adorned with hand-sculpted tiles (‘Sitting Pretty’). “It’s gorgeous,” she says. And she has multiple letters of support from fellow residents that she’s a “valued neighbour”, “part of the fabric” and “her garden brings a lot of character … she has many friends on the street”.

The garden is also a mausoleum for three deceased Nissan S-Cargo (a play on the French word escargot, or snail), a dumpy little car made only from 1989 to 1991; a fourth, functional S-Cargo is parked on the roadside, crammed with soft toys. It was once described to her by a Drag Queen, she says, as one of the “three icons of Auckland” (the others being the Skytower and the Harbour Bridge).

Behind it is parked a scratched-up Holden Commodore, left to Baldock in the will of another civic crusader, the late Penny Bright. Darkly, Baldock says that angry cyclists (she’s been a vocal opponent of local cycleway plans) have several times smeared excrement on the door handles.

The dispute over the garden simmered for a long time, but the war with KO, in Baldock’s eyes, broke out in September 2013 when a keen-eyed KO staffer saw a story she’d written in the Ponsonby News.

In the magazine, Baldock described herself as an artist and sculptor (she’s always had a sideline in sculpting). She’s been on a disability benefit since 2011 after breaking her back in an accident on a yacht, and also suffers from cancer. She doesn’t want that to define her.“I called myself a sculptor, because who is going to read an article on style from an invalid’s beneficiary?” she says.

That description sparked an investigation in which KO claimed Baldock had shown “pre-meditation and persistence over more than six years in deceiving HNZ over your true income”. They issued a bill of $88,893 - the difference between a market rent and her subsidised rent - and an end-tenancy notice. But Baldock’s accountant said she’d earned just $11,000 over three years, with work that was “at best marginally profitable … your office [wrongly] seems to think a vast sum of money has been earned by Ms Baldock”. KO rescinded both the bill and eviction notice.

But the battle had begun.“Get Gael back was the long game. That’s how I see it,” Baldock says.

She - and many of her supporters - think last year’s eviction notice was KO’s retaliation for losing the Ponsonby News skirmish.

That’s important, as the law as it stood then allowed KO to require Baldock to move at 90 days’ notice if it offered a “suitable” alternative property - as long as that wasn’t a “retaliatory action”. The alternative was in Mt Albert, about 4km away, which Baldock didn’t like, partly because of a derelict, graffiti-covered house next door.

There was mediation, in which KO agreed to remove lead scrapings from the paint removal which had laid on the ground for some five years, they were to work together on sorting the painting, and Baldock says she offered to open up for the Healthy Homes inspection.

But the relationship continued to deteriorate, and a Tenancy Tribunal hearing went badly for Baldock: the Tribunal dismissed all her claims and granted eviction. KO points to that decision, which said it had “done everything and more that they should have to accommodate the concerns and demands by Gael”.

The agency has a “different view” of events. It declined an interview, and instead provided a statement from regional director John Tubberty, which didn’t directly address a lengthy list of questions from Stuff.

Tubberty said KO “strongly refutes the various claims made by Ms Baldock”. He said KO had “gone to great lengths” to maintain the property, but “despite these efforts … as the Tenancy Tribunal recognised, Ms Baldock hampered the completion of works, by imposing ‘unreasonable restrictions’ and being ‘deliberately unhelpful and complicated the process so much more than was necessary’”.

The housing minister, Pride Parade, and 50-odd letters of support

The dispute has engulfed a lot of important people. Veteran councillor Christine Fletcher’s letter urged “special consideration” for someone who had “worked tirelessly for the community’; Ponsonby News editor Martin Leach talked of a “straight-shooter, tireless and committed”. Local MP Melissa Lee wrote to the associate housing minister asking him to intervene. Baldock says Housing Minister Chris Bishop even approached her at the Pride Parade asking why she had cost the department more than $30,000.

(Bishop remembers that somewhat differently; he said Baldock “called out to me” at the parade and initiated a conversation, but he’d told her to talk to Kāinga Ora and her local MP and had no “knowledge of the case beyond that”.)

Baldock is deeply involved in local politics (she ran twice, unsuccessfully, for her local board), and has the ear of several elected officials, saying: “I didn’t want to be a bludger, so I went and worked for free for the community … people love me. They are asking for me to stay in the area, because the political work I do is that important.’’

Sunday Star-Times reporter and council watcher Jonathan Killick, who knows Baldock well, says: “She’s a regular fixture. She’s been known to text elected members her ‘feedback’ mid-meetings … some would say she has an outsized influence.”

Councillor Mike Lee was among Baldock’s supporters in the public bench of courtroom 7.2 of the Auckland District Court on April 15 for what should be the final chapter of the battle of Baldock vs Kāinga Ora - her appeal of the Tenancy Tribunal decision.

“Gael is a constituent who is active in the community, she cares, and an impersonal bureaucracy is evicting her and she is very worried and frightened, so I am here to give her moral support,” Lee explained.

Asked if this was Baldock’s last chance saloon, her lawyer, legal-aid barrister Barry Hayes agreed. Kāinga Ora, incidentally, say their legal fees alone are $20,000.

Hayes made concessions. He accepted that Kāinga Ora had not acted in retaliation (Baldock murmured unhappily at this) but said the new house was inappropriate and there was no good reason to move her. If they did demand that, he hoped the court would give her six months to pack. “I understand… she is somewhat of a hoarder.” Baldock winced at that.

KO’s lawyer was methodical. The Residential Tenancies Act gave them the right to take the house, the agency had “gone to great lengths to work with” Baldock, they said, and the agency wasn’t simply making her homeless. “This is not a case of someone being told to move out and being left on the street and having nowhere to go.”

The court decision has yet to be delivered. Baldock’s supporters say she’s embedded in the Westmere community. They want her to stay. “This is my home,” she says.