TLDR: The Human Rights Commission announced this morning it has set guidelines for an official inquiry into the failures of recent governments to provide for “the right to a decent home under section 5(2) of the Human Rights Act”.
Also, Labour fell 10 points in Newshub’s latest poll, but ACT was the beneficiary. New Realestate.co.nz figures show housing listings are at record lows, while Trade Me figures show rents are surging. Nick Jones reports ($$$) over 30,000 operations have been delayed as the infrastructure-starved health system struggles, even before Covid, and Thomas Coughlan reports for the NZ Herald (not-$$$) the Ministry of Health has only just ordered three million new syringes.
Elsewhere, Brisbane went into lockdown yesterday after delta clusters were found at five schools, while New South Wales’ Covid-19 tracking and tracing system is falling behind on the hundreds of new cases being found each day, including dozens out spreading the delta version in the community during Sydney’s ‘lockdown’. Meanwhile, Australia’s national cabinet announced a vaccination strategy late on Friday that is unlikely to see Australia open up its borders until it is 80% vaccinated in all states, which its advisers say is unlikely until mid-2022.
Coming up this week, I’ll be asking if the Government is considering a residency amnesty for the hundreds of thousands of temporary workers here in limbo, and whether the Government will open up its vaccination programme to pharmacies and all GPs. On the data front, I’ll look out for Aotearoa-NZ’s jobs data for the June quarter due on Wednesday and whether unemployment fell to 4.4% from 4.7% as expected, and whether annual wage inflation accelerated well beyond 2%. There’s also a potential ramping up of money printing by the Reserve Bank of Australia tomorrow afternoon and US jobs figures on Saturday morning that I’ll be watching.
A housing emergency and human rights failure
The main story today is Human Rights Commission taking the unprecedented and surprising step of launching a full inquiry into the housing emergency and whether Governments of both flavours have breached the Human Rights Act. It set 48 pages of guidelines for the inquiry and said it would detail the structure, composition, terms of reference and timescale “later this year”.
“New Zealand governments have signed up to a critically important human right: the right to a decent home. For generations, they have promised to create the conditions to enable everyone to live in a decent home, but this has not happened. Successive governments have failed New Zealanders.
“For many people, especially young people, the goal of an affordable, healthy, accessible home has actually become more remote. These serial governments bear a heavy responsibility for this massive human rights failure which is blighting lives and communities.”
“The right to a decent home, although binding on New Zealand in international law, is almost invisible and unknown in Aotearoa. One problem is that housing initiatives across the public and private sectors lack adequate explicit recognition of the human right to a decent home. Our Guidelines help to address this shortcoming. They provide a framework on which we can build.
“The housing crisis in Aotearoa is also a human rights crisis encompassing homeownership, market renting, state housing and homelessness. It is having a punishing impact especially on the most marginalised in our communities.” Chief Human Rights Commissioner Paul Hunt.
The United Nations independent expert on housing rights, Leilani Farha, issued a report on NZ’s breaches on housing that was tabled in the United Nations in June.
Farha wrote that housing speculation, a lack of affordable housing options, limited protection for tenants, substandard housing, the absence of an overarching Te Tiriti and human rights-based housing strategy, and a lack of adequate social housing or state-subsidised housing were the main causes of the crisis.
“The present government has made a promising start on housing, but it remains to be seen if it will do better than its predecessors and address New Zealand’s housing and human rights emergency. Based on the Guidelines, the inquiry will help ensure the government keeps its promises to everyone in Aotearoa New Zealand.” Paul Hunt
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Ka kite anō
Bernard.
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