Ryan Bridge: Not everybody wants to be at the mercy of a failed social housing system

Early Edition with Ryan Bridge

Who are we to believe when it comes to kids in motels?

It’s undeniably a disaster. At its worst, we had 4000 kids living in motels and emergency accommodation in New Zealand.

And the last lot who said it was a complex problem that required complex solutions, they said it would take time, and we sort of bought that argument because it does seem incredibly complex.

And then yesterday, the Government comes along and claims to have cut the number of households living in emergency housing by a third in six months.

What’s more, they said in Auckland, they’ve almost halved the number of people living in emergency housing in three months.

How can you halve the number of people in emergency housing in three months?

Does that make sense to you? In Christchurch, it's gone from 285 to 183 in three months.

They said they’d used intensive work to cut the numbers.

I don’t know whether I’m just cynical but, do you believe that? Or do you think there’s some trick, some fudging of the numbers here or the categories that they're using, something like that.

If all we needed was a bit of intensive work, surely we could have cut through that long waiting list a lot earlier.

Kieran McAnulty on Three News last night had a crack at the Government.

“They're both claiming credit for something they didn't do and they're also crying about something when they've made it harder for people to access it.”

He then went on to say this: “The honest way to deal with the issue of emergency housing is to build more social houses. And that's the very thing the Government has pulled back on.”

Wrong. There is another way that you can deal with the problem of an increase in demand for social housing, that's to grow an economy to get people into well paid jobs.

Not everybody wants to be at the mercy of a failed social housing system, do they?

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