Community-led socialist organisation, Organise Aotearoa, has launched a radical new programme and set of demands to improve the state of housing and eliminate homelessness in New Zealand.

In its opening paragraph, the programme states that rising rents take up massive portions of ordinary people’s incomes, living conditions are deteriorating, and housing-related illnesses have killed 1180 children between 2000 and 2015. Instead of providing people with homes, the housing market provides uncertainty, stress, illness, and exploitation.

The content of the programme was informed by the attendees of two public meetings, hosted in Auckland and Wellington in October last year, where members of the public were invited to openly discuss their immediate concerns about the housing crisis and the rights of renters and mortgagees.

“We want the community to inform our policy as much as possible,” says Organise Aotearoa spokesperson Mikesh Patel. “Our housing programme will be the first of many documents analysing the state of inequality and deprivation in Aotearoa, and proposing a plan to the community on how we can change that.”

According to Patel, the work of existing housing organisations also informed the programme. “Across the country, people are fighting against gentrification, advocating for renters rights, and opposing unjust housing developments on stolen Māori land.”

Organise Aotearoa has so far held public meetings in Dunedin, Wellington, Rotorua, Hamilton, and Auckland on work and welfare, the justice system, the environment, and New Zealand’s relationship to the rest of the world. Its next series of meetings will focus on decolonisation and constitutional transformation.

“These struggles have informed our kaupapa. They are all connected under the capitalist system that was brought to Aotearoa by the British Empire - a system that we must move beyond if we’re to ensure the wellbeing of all people.”

The housing programme was published on Organise Aotearoa’s website following the one year anniversary of the organisation’s public launch.

ENDS

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