On World Homelessness Day this October, Kick Back (an Auckland Central organisation founded on the purpose of ending youth homelessness), Auckland Action Against Poverty and ActionStation released their ‘Duty to Assist’ campaign.
If this was successful, their policy intervention would require state agencies, health professionals and community organisations to actively do everything possible to prevent somebody experiencing homelessness.
Under current policy, someone can turn up to Work & Income on the brink of becoming homeless and be told to come back after they are, indeed, homeless, when they then might be entitled to some help or support. Aside from being utterly dehumanising and trust destroying to reach out for help and have it denied, the current policy settings also mean a bizarre waste of resources – it’s so much more expensive and complicated to try and get somebody off the street and into housing, especially if the services interacted with in the meantime include the Police, than it is to ensure they never get there in the first place.
When I asked Aaron Hendry, co-founder of Kick Back, who’s spent years working at the front lines trying to house and support young people in Auckland, about what he thought the biggest misconceptions about the people he worked with were, he said, “A lot of people believe that homelessness is an individual problem. Often, a moral failing. That someone has done something wrong and that’s why they’re there. I think time and time again, what we see is people – in our case, young people – who have fallen through every gap that exists in our system, who have often been harmed, who are dealing with really hard stuff in their lives… And when they’ve reached out for the support from trusted adults, professionals, government agencies, they’ve slipped through the cracks.”
If we want to solve homelessness – instead of just moving people along and never actually dealing with the root cause of the issue – we need to house people. That means properly resourcing the fence at the top of the cliff, while also ensuring the ambulance at the bottom is available and ready to go for those who’ve already fallen off over the past few decades of poverty-driving trickle-down economics.
Unfortunately, we’re seeing both the fence at the top and the ambulance at the bottom being ripped away by current Government policy. The Government has chosen to put the brakes on 370 Kainga Ora developments. In August 2023, the number of emergency housing places in Auckland was 804. A year later, it is 138. As has been much publicised, the Government isn’t tracking where those who are kicked out end up. Front-line workers like Aaron tell me they’re seeing growing numbers of desperate people walking through their door.
Politicking, puritanicalism and a sense of being right doesn’t actually mean much when we’re confronted with the daily reality of a growing number of people with increasingly complex needs on our streets. That’s why I’ve been working so consistently across the aisle with Minister of Police, Mark Mitchell, through our inner city safety group, to raise the hopefully non-controversial, rational alarm that the identifiable variables right now in housing insecurity and poverty figures do not paint a rosy picture of what’s to come but, in fact, likely mean far greater social challenges in everything from the immediate to longer term.
Something’s got to give. We can and must have a rational debate – economically, socially and practically, about the costs (human and fiscal) and benefits of the kind of desperately needed long-term, multi-partisan investment in the housing, healthcare, educational and other infrastructure needed for a functional, let alone flourishing, city and country. (Chlöe Swarbrick)
www.greens.org.nz/chloe_swarbrick
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