My submission last month to the Select Committee considering yet another National Govt upset - this time "Community Housing". Lengthy but please read, share, comment: Committee Secretariat Social Services Select Committee Parliament Buildings Wellington 24 June 2013 Submission to: Social Housing Reform (Housing Restructuring and Tenancy Matters Amendment) Bill (1) This Bill has significant and alarming implications for both Community Housing providers and tenants of those providers – be they community or local government based. (2) I wholeheartedly support the submission by Community Housing Aotearoa and wholeheartedly agree with the objections they make to Sections 175-177 inclusive. Those provisions, if enacted as drafted, will knobble any shred of security that providers have in terms of being trusted to ‘get on with the business’ and achieve good outcomes with their tenants - because the Crown can too easily intrude on those operations, including the administration of their financial matters, and indeed usurp any governance structure’s power by demanding representation on it’s board. (3) The following are my comments on specific clauses:- (a) S175(3): this clause (like much of this Bill) causes extreme risk of political interference/posturing as it enables the joint Ministers (not the open Parliament) to decide what powers the authority will or may have; (b) S176(1)-(5): these clauses undermine the governance structure of community housing providers and S176(5) in particular is an insulting ‘big brother’ insertion that completely disregards the “Objects and Purposes” of any organisation’s constitution and is fundamentally undemocratic in it’s insertion; © S177(2)(a): also appears to lay the groundwork for the Crown forcing 2 or more providers to merge, amalgamate or otherwise ‘work together’. (d) These provisions are “instructions” and there is no clause protecting the providers’ rights to be consulted, nor any right to appeal provisions under the stated circumstances relating to these intrusive clauses. S180 relates to “recommendations”, not “instructions”, and although S180(1)-(3) describes a consultation process, S180(4) completely undoes the aforementioned sub-clauses as it gives the Crown the right to make an Order in Council without consultation – demonstrating yet again that this Bill is fundamentally undemocratic, flawed in it’s detailing and obscenely and unnecessarily intrusive. (e) The intent of this Bill was supposed to enable community housing providers access to the same supports/resources from the Crown as Housing New Zealand Corporation and to enable the Community Housing providers to provide better wraparound social services in their local communities in order to achieve better outcomes for the tenants and their families, with the added goal of moving tenants into the private rental market when they were able and it was appropriate to do so. The Bill as it is drafted will enable that intention but many of the provisions will undo the basis of that intention, ie, the Crown has too many undemocratic and unjust avenues of interference that will knobble the community housing providers operations and remove security of tenancy for their tenants. Michelle Pyke Voluntary Community Worker (25 years->)
Posted on: Sun, 04 Aug 2013 23:58:14 +0000
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