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“The State's War Against Our Homeless Whānau” - 11 August 2025

Exposing the Calculated Cruelty Behind New Zealand's Homelessness Crisis

Ivor Jones The Māori Green Ltn

11 Aug 2025 — 16 min read

Mōrena ano,

The story of Florence Waaka feeding homeless whānau in Ōtautahi is not just one of aroha triumphing over abandonment. It is the story of a nation that has systematically engineered a homelessness crisis to serve the interests of property speculators and neoliberal ideologues. While whānau sleep rough in car parks and under bridges, this government and its predecessors have weaponised housing policy as a tool of class warfare, with Māori bearing the most brutal consequences.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/569515/one-wahine-s-mission-to-uplift-the-homelessness-crisis-in-otautahi

Background: The Systematic Destruction of Housing as a Human Right

The housing crisis strangling Aotearoa did not emerge from economic forces beyond human control. It is the deliberate product of forty years of neoliberal policy designed to transform housing from a human right into a speculative commodity. Since the 1984 Labour government began dismantling the post-war social contract, successive administrations have systematically transferred wealth from the poor to property investors, creating what researchers now term a "collapse of tenure".

The transformation of Housing New Zealand from a social service into a profit-driven State-Owned Enterprise in 1991 marked the beginning of this war against our most vulnerable whānau. The National government's "mother of all budgets" that same year slashed benefits, ended universal family support, and introduced market rents for state housing. This was not economic necessity - it was ideological warfare designed to force working-class families into the private rental market where landlords could extract maximum profit.

The consequences have been devastating and entirely predictable. Studies show that Māori who "look more Māori" face systematic discrimination in home lending, creating institutional barriers to home ownership based purely on appearance. This research revealed that for every increase in perceived Māori appearance, the odds of home ownership decreased by 18 percent - evidence of a racist banking system that has operated with impunity for decades.

The Manufactured Crisis Behind Florence's Mission

The homelessness crisis that drives Florence Waaka's daily mission represents the calculated failure of successive governments to provide adequate housing. Census data shows a devastating 37 percent increase in people living without shelter between 2018 and 2023, despite over one billion dollars spent on emergency housing during that period. This is not policy failure - it is policy success for those who profit from housing scarcity.

The statistics paint a picture of systematic abandonment that disproportionately impacts Māori whānau. Māori make up 43 percent of Auckland's rough sleepers despite being only 16 percent of the population. Over 34,557 Māori are homeless nationwide, with one-third being tamariki. These are not random statistics - they represent the lived reality of a system designed to fail our people.

The government's response has been to make homelessness even more punitive. Emergency housing rejections have increased by 386 percent since August 2024, with applicants required to prove they have not "contributed to their own homelessness." This victim-blaming rhetoric serves to obscure the real culprits: the politicians, property investors, and banking executives who have deliberately constructed this crisis.

The Architecture of Abandonment: How Neoliberalism Creates Homelessness

The individuals Florence Waaka serves - Ngawai Timu, John Aramakatu, and countless others - are not victims of personal failure but casualties of economic warfare. Their stories reveal how neoliberal housing policy systematically strips dignity and security from working-class whānau to enrich the property-owning class.

Ngawai Timu's trajectory from nursing professional to rough sleeper exemplifies this manufactured precarity. A car accident ended her career, ACC provided inadequate support for her second hip operation, and the combination of disability discrimination and unaffordable housing forced her onto the streets. Her decision to "choose homelessness" rather than burden her whānau illustrates how the system forces impossible choices on our most vulnerable community members.

John Aramakatu's story reveals the intersection of grief, disability, and economic abandonment that characterises neoliberal social policy. A workplace injury ended his shearing career, ACC failed to provide adequate rehabilitation, and the death of his son by suicide left him without family support. The fact that he sits at number 2,800 on the Kāinga Ora waiting list while sleeping in his car demonstrates the deliberate underfunding of social housing.

These individual tragedies are the inevitable result of policy choices made by successive governments who prioritise property speculation over human dignity. The transformation of housing into a commodity means that basic shelter becomes contingent on market forces rather than human need. This is precisely what neoliberal ideologues intended when they dismantled the post-war welfare state.

The Racist Foundation of Housing Policy

The disproportionate impact on Māori whānau is not an unfortunate side effect but a designed feature of New Zealand's housing system. Historical analysis reveals how 1930s and 1940s housing policies systematically excluded Māori from administration, planning and decision-making in relation to their own housing provisions. This exclusion established patterns of discrimination that persist today.

Contemporary research confirms that institutional racism in banking systematically denies home loans to Māori based on appearance, creating cumulative disadvantage over generations. When combined with the intergenerational effects of land confiscation, discriminatory employment practices, and underfunded education, these policies have created what researchers term a "Māori underclass" that comprises a disproportionate share of the homeless population.

The red zone encampment where Florence delivers kai represents more than individual hardship - it symbolises the spatial segregation of Māori poverty that housing policy has created. The sight of He Whakaputanga flags flying over homeless encampments serves as a powerful reminder that these are tangata whenua rendered homeless in their own land by colonial economic systems.

The Current Government's Escalation of Cruelty

Housing Minister Chris Bishop's policies represent an escalation of the war against homeless whānau. His decision to tighten emergency housing eligibility criteria while simultaneously cutting 673 jobs from Kāinga Ora demonstrates the government's commitment to austerity over human welfare.

Bishop's background as a tobacco industry lobbyist for Philip Morris provides crucial context for his approach to social policy. Just as he once worked to defend an industry that profits from addiction and death, he now implements policies that profit from housing scarcity and homelessness. His claim that making emergency housing "harder to get in" was a "deliberate policy choice" reveals the calculated cruelty behind these decisions.

The government's plan to sell 900 Kāinga Ora homes annually while building only minimal replacements represents privatisation by stealth. These sales transfer public assets to private investors while maintaining the fiction that social housing stock remains stable. Meanwhile, 60 percent of social housing projects planned for 2025 have been cancelled, ensuring that the housing shortage continues.

The homelessness crisis serves multiple functions within New Zealand's neoliberal political economy. It disciplines the working class by demonstrating the consequences of economic insecurity, maintains downward pressure on wages by creating a desperate labour reserve, and generates profits for the emergency accommodation industry that has emerged around managed destitution.

The psychological impact on communities cannot be understated. When kaumātua like Ngawai Timu describe sleeping rough as preferable to being a "burden" on whānau, it reveals how neoliberalism has poisoned our understanding of collective responsibility. The individualism that Bishop and his colleagues promote destroys the social bonds that traditionally protected our most vulnerable community members.

For Māori specifically, homelessness represents a continuation of colonial dispossession by other means. The transformation of housing into a commodity that can be bought and sold mirrors the original privatisation of collectively owned land that enabled colonial settlement. Just as nineteenth-century legislation enabled the Crown to acquire Māori land for settler agriculture, contemporary housing policy enables investors to acquire former state houses for private profit.

The impact on tamariki deserves particular attention. Research shows that one-third of homeless Māori are children, exposing an entire generation to trauma that will have lifelong consequences. These children are being sacrificed to maintain a housing system that enriches property speculators at their expense.

The Māori Green Lantern fighting misinformation and disinformation from the far right

Call to Action: Building Resistance to Housing Apartheid

Florence Waaka's work demonstrates that another way is possible. Her commitment to sitting with people, building trust, and responding to their actual needs offers a model of care that contrasts starkly with the bureaucratic cruelty of official social services. Her approach embodies Māori values of manaakitanga and aroha that the neoliberal state has systematically destroyed.

The solution to homelessness is not complex - it requires reversing forty years of neoliberal housing policy and treating housing as a human right rather than a commodity. This means building massive amounts of public housing, implementing rent controls, restricting property speculation, and providing genuine support for those experiencing housing insecurity.

More fundamentally, it requires recognising that homelessness is not a natural disaster but a political choice. Every night that whānau sleep rough represents a decision by our political class to prioritise property values over human dignity. Every eviction, every emergency housing rejection, every cancelled social housing project serves the interests of those who profit from scarcity.

The red zone encampment where Ngawai, John, and others found whānau represents both the failure of our housing system and the possibility of alternatives. In creating "a marae by spirit if not by building," these rough sleepers demonstrate that Māori values of collective care persist despite systematic attempts to destroy them. Their resistance to individualisation and commitment to "taking the kids first" reveals the moral bankruptcy of a system that forces such choices.

Florence Waaka's call for others throughout the motu to step up in their own communities is not just about charity - it is about building the infrastructure of care that can sustain resistance to neoliberal abandonment. Every pot of kai shared, every whānau housed, every community garden planted represents a rejection of the market logic that creates homelessness.

The government's recent admission that it is seeking "urgent advice" on rising homelessness reveals that their policies are generating political consequences they cannot ignore. This provides an opening for organised resistance that connects housing justice to broader struggles against neoliberalism, racism, and colonisation.

As Florence reminds us, we cannot wait for politicians to solve problems they have deliberately created. The aroha that keeps rough sleepers going must be channelled into organised resistance that demands housing for all. The whānau who gather around bonfires in the red zone understand what too many politicians have forgotten - that our collective survival depends on caring for each other.

The housing crisis will end when we make it politically impossible to maintain. Until then, the mahi continues.

Nā Ivor Jones, Te Māori Green Lantern

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