Janet Wilson: Failed promises and Rotorua's homelessness hellhole

Friday, 9 September 2022

TVNZ's Sunday investigation into the conditions in Rotorua's emergency housing triggered calls for action.

Janet Wilson is a freelance journalist who has also worked in communications, including with the National Party in 2020. She is a regular contributor to Stuff.

OPINION: When it comes to homelessness, there’s nothing like television to bring into national consciousness the desperate plight of a growing underclass, with politicians hand-wringing while kicking for touch.

Last week’s Sunday story on Rotorua’s Golden Mile, which revealed Fenton St as a crime-ridden hellhole, stands as a bookend to another story on homelessness more than six years earlier, from Three’s The Nation.

Journalist Mike Wesley-Smith’s story in May 2016, which depicted row after row of South Auckland families living in cars and garages, set off a firestorm for the National-led government of the day and mobilised the then Labour Opposition.

In her first sit-down interview in October 2017, newly-installed Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described capitalism as a “blatant failure” when it came to housing the poor. She pledged that the coalition government she led would be “active” when it came to plugging capitalism’s holes.

* 'Alcoholics, drug deals, gang affiliations, domestic violence' - Emergency housing labelled as dangerous

Tiny Deane, pictured in 2018, was the subject of a TVNZ investigation into emergency housing services provided by his businesses.

* Rotorua has become a 'dumping ground' for the country's homeless, some locals claim

* 'People are just not doing their jobs': Rotorua homeless advocate takes aim at cops

Rawiri Waititi says successive governments created Rotorua's emergency housing crisis.

* Building 100 homes the next target for Rotorua homeless campaigner Tiny Deane

“When you have a market economy, it all comes down to whether or not you acknowledge where the market has failed and where intervention is required. Has it failed our people in recent times? Yes,” she said.

Fast-forward five years to Kristin Hall’s story and the capitalism the prime minister was busy deriding is apparently back in favour with her.

Because rather than applying the centralised policies Labour has executed with health, education and Three Waters, which seek to put “big” in front of government, it’s content to trust capitalism to look after the country’s most vulnerable citizens.

Fenton St in Rotorua, site of many of the “alarming” stories about transitional housing. Since Covid-19 has hit, Rotorua’s motels have been filled with homeless clients instead of tourists. (File photo)

As Hall reported, since 2017, former truck driver Tiny Deane has created a vertically integrated business model using his trust, Visions of a Helping Hand, alongside another of his companies, Tiger Security, which uses gang members as its guards. While the trust holds the rights over the two motels he owns and eight contracts to manage other motels, Tiger Security provides the muscle.

Hall’s story alleged women and children had been kicked out of motels, including one who was in labour at the time.

She reported that the activities of Tiger Security staff were such that one woman bought a car to sleep in rather than use the motel.

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Deane has been amply rewarded for his endeavours, having received around $14 million in funding from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Ministry of Social Development (MSD).

On Monday, having come to power with the pledge of ending homelessness, there was yet more hand-wringing and kicking for touch from the prime minister. Professing that the Government didn’t want motels to be long-term homes for New Zealanders, she said she would much rather that “people have temporary housing that is not a garage, that is not a car”.

Which would have been passable messaging except that the number of children living in cars had risen by nearly 350% from when Labour came into power at the end of 2017 to June 2022. It also paints a picture of a Government that’s happy to kick for touch on how to solve the problem.

What began as a temporary solution to a growing issue has become entrenched. Rotorua moteliers now expect to be providing emergency accommodation for the next five years.

It’s in effect a state-backed nationwide skid-row that’s morphed into a $1.2 billion business, creating unprecedented numbers of slum landlords like Tiny Deane, who earn millions each year, thanks to the beneficence of HUD and MSD, which has driven up the rates for the motels and emergency accommodation it utilises by sometimes double.

Which is made even more extraordinary because this isn’t a policy that’s coming from the entitled land-owning class. It’s from a party whose voters are the people living in those motels.

And while Ardern is right when she says that her Government is building more houses than any previous National or Labour governments, the more than 10,000 state homes it proudly claims it built in the past five years is what it needs to be building annually if the country’s most at-risk have any hope of achieving the stability a home provides.

In presiding over the greatest wealth grab in a generation, which Covid-19 afforded, allowing the property classes to become wealthier while the landless serfs - renters and beneficiaries – only became poorer, Ardern and the Labour Government have become victims of their own risk-averseness in not providing an achievable housing programme.

What began five years ago as a call to arms against a problem of National’s own making has ended with the prime minister effectively kicking for touch on the issue that brought her to power – promises broken.

It’s the antithesis of her pledge when elected in 2020 that, “a focus on housing will be a priority for this Government”.

Two television stories, portraying National’s failure, Labour’s earlier hopeful promises, and the Government’s continuing failure to deliver.

Which, unlike Ardern’s assertion, isn’t ideal and is not a preferable alternative to living in cars and garages.

This article has been amended to correct the funding agencies for Visions of a Helping Hand. Correction made at 4.43pm, September 10.