A #right2housing Government Policy Statement - Housing and Urban Development [GPS-HUD]

The development of the GPS-HUD represents one more opportunity to implement the human right to adequate housing from which government have resiled.

Among all interventions and opportunities, and among all other words and phrases, only the human right to adequate housing offers a genuine and tested comprehensive framework for developing a high functioning housing system in a domestic and global environment in which capital, financialisation, and investment have become absolutely dominant. No one should be surprised by this, but it also needs to be said. No amount of accommodation supplement or emergency housing, or any other intervention, will offer any mitigation of the risks those forces are already bringing to bear, to negative effect, in our housing system. They currently reign almost unchecked by regulation, and while the proposed approach to the GPS-HUD identifies the commodification of housing as an issue, the opportunity to really make some change in the way New Zealanders think about housing seems to have really been missed – at least without a ‘new’, visionary, substantive, system-wide step change?in our actual approach. The right to housing offers a ready-made system intervention, and yet it is side-lined.?

On-going refusals to introduce, reference?in and implement the right to housing and UN guidance on this right is an on-going constitutional grievance akin [in type if not scale] to historic breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi – an agreement of constitutional significance simply discarded by the New Zealand government for decades. In regard to the right to housing, government is failing to recognise, promote and fulfil rights government has promised to recognise, promote and fulfil.

The GPS-HUD can and should implement the right to housing. It should be one tool among many government tools that reflect and implement the right. But neither is the case. 'Doing it our way' is not, does not, and has not met our housing needs, or ensured mechanisms are in place to foresee either crises or opportunity.?

The 7 elements of the right to housing offer rigorous insights and directions for all housing approaches - at both policy and strategy level. Importantly they span all aspects of the housing system.

The UN Special Rapporteur's final report on her official visit to New Zealand provides a 27 recommendation road map to a well-functioning housing system. It appears however to have had little influence on the proposed approach to the?GPS-HUD. The GPS-HUD could fully and comprehensively respond to that report and implement its recommendations.?

Without the intellectual rigour and the constitutional grounding of the right to housing as a tested comprehensive framework, the perfectly appropriate and inarguable words and phrases of the GPS-HUD offer few snippets of real implementation power. This is especially the case because the relevant legislation requiring the GPS directs that Kainga Ora, rather than the system at large, are the key target. How will this GPS-HUD influence the changes it is expressing an interest in, in our wider housing system?

I'm concerned the proposed approach attempts to reinvent the wheel without reference to existing meaningful obligations.

I believe New Zealand deserves and needs a GPS-HUD based on the right to housing. I also believe New Zealand deserves and needs a national rights-based housing strategy. I believe Kainga Ora needs to be accountable to right to housing standards and expectations. I believe New Zealanders deserve access to justice for failures of the system that undermine their established rights in regard to housing. I also believe New Zealanders deserve higher and more rigorous degrees of constructive accountability from government in relation to our awful, substandard, third world housing experiences, and government's failure to raise its aspirations to real strategic prioritisation of resources and interventions to ensure we have a great system in the future.?