Youth Homelessness Crisis Escalates: Urgent Action Needed
The recent Homelessness Insights Report confirmed what front line services and our communities have been telling our Government. The Homelessness crisis is escalating.
Kick Back is concerned that an increasing number of children and young people are experiencing homelessness.
About 30% of young people and children Kick Back has served through our outreach and crisis centre, The Front Door, came to Kick Back within 2-4 weeks of their experience of homelessness. Kick Back is concerned that there is a growing number of new children and young people experiencing homelessness.
No child or young person should ever be without a safe or stable home. Kick Back believes this crisis can be solved, but we must act now!
Though recent Government decisions have increased the risk of homelessness for our children, Kick Back believes it is important to recognise that Homelessness is a product of a housing system which views housing as a commodity, rather than a basic human need we all have as people.
"We believe it is important to acknowledge that Homelessness is a manufactured crisis. No service, charity or amount of wrap around services, can fix this problem. If we are going to achieve housing justice for our young people we must begin to understand the manner in which homelessness serves as a product of Capitalism and Colonisation! Until we address the structural issues that allow homelessness to persist, we will never bring this crisis to an end. Our #Right2Housing as people, is a fundamental human need, essential to the thriving of our communities." Says Aaron Hendry, co-founder and General Manager of Kick Back.
Kick Back calls on the Government to act with urgency in response to this crisis by:
• Immediately rolling back the Emergency Housing Reforms
• Providing fast release funding to support local communities to activate community solutions
• Begin an escalated project of work to progress #Duty2Assist Legislation to ensure rangatahi and whānau can access the housing support they need
• Resource a Strategy to End & Prevent Youth Homelessness
• Fund a rangatahi specific Immediate Housing System to support young people in Immediate Housing need
• Commit and resource a strong Public Housing build program with a mandate to #HouseThePeople
"The time to seek advice and gather information has passed. The Government knows what they need to do. Our tamariki are suffering, our rangatahi are dying, the Government must act!' says Aaron Hendry.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Otago Daily Times
4 hours ago
- Otago Daily Times
Homelessness persists
Nobody expects solutions to decades-long poor housing provision in New Zealand to happen overnight, but it is hard to see coherence in the government's approach so far. It has made much of its success in getting families out of emergency accommodation. However, charities have become increasingly concerned tougher emergency housing rules and a two-strike warning policy for tenants have resulted in more people sleeping rough. This week The Salvation Army released a housing update with information sourced from other charities and more than 50 official information requests to local and central government. Among the sorry statistics cited was that there had been a 386% increase in emergency housing declines on the basis people had contributed to their homelessness in the six months since changes were made to the way the Ministry of Social Development supported people in emergency housing. Associate Housing Minister Tama Potaka has disputed this calculation, saying there was a range of causes for homelessness, and one of the biggest was disconnection with families and whanau. Whatever the reasons for the number of homeless people which The Salvation Army suggests is now 1 in 1000, the government has been slow to accept there is an increasing problem. It has frequently fobbed off questions about it by saying the reasons for people being without homes are complex, and contrary to what charities said, that anyone who is in genuine need of emergency housing would be able to get help. In Dunedin, the plight of the homeless has been well documented by this newspaper in recent years, and the decision by Kāinga Ora earlier this year to scrap 10 housing projects which would have provided 120 houses in the city has been hard to understand. High rentals are also a problem, with Salvation Army Dunedin community ministries manager Captain Logan Bathurst describing the situation as bringing housing insecurity close to a tipping point. Median rents in the three months to May were down 0.3% nationally, but in Dunedin they were up by 8.7%. The government's lack of enthusiasm for councils building new social housing has also not helped those councils keen to do more. Former local government minister Simeon Brown went as far as saying if a council had a choice about whether to fix roads or build more social houses, it should be focused on fixing roads. It is not clear that this discouragement, combined with the binning of Kāinga Ora projects around the country and the loss of skilled workers is going to be offset any time soon by the supposed boost to other social housing providers, and such changes as moves to allow easier building of granny flats and pushing councils to free up more land for housing. Last week after the release of the "Homelessness Insights Report" which showed an ongoing trend of increasing homelessness, the government has sought advice from officials on further targeted interventions to provide help and support to those living without shelter. It has also sought recommendations around better use of existing programmes and was open to new ideas which would make an enduring difference. Listening to what communities are telling it rather than political posturing and denying its policy's possible contribution would be a good start. Laugh along with Brooke Let's give credit where it is due. Regulation busting Workplace Relations Minister Brooke van Velden has given us a laugh-out-loud moment in a wet dreary week for much of the country. According to Ms van Velden, some farmers fear their kids collecting eggs is illegal. The consensus is this claim is a cluck too far, but to Ms van Velden it's no yolk. She thinks egg collecting would fall under a regulation which states no workers under 15 can be involved in the manufacture or preparation of goods for trade or sale or any other work likely to compromise health and safety. Breaching this could result in a $50,000 fine. Ms van Velden will be "consulting with farmers and the agriculture sector on the thresholds for light chores children can do on farms, like collecting eggs, feeding small animals and watering plants, while ensuring safety is not compromised". We hope she will not be surprised if swearing is involved.
Newsroom
4 hours ago
- Newsroom
Job cuts drop the axe on history
The Government is slashing jobs at the heart of our national identity, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage. The move will save $8 million over four years but critics argue it feels more like cultural vandalism than financial prudence. Four senior historian jobs have been axed after the ministry's funding was reduced in Budget 2025. In total, 26 roles will go. Popular history websites, including Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, have had a partial reprieve, but a historian and former general editor of the encyclopedia tells The Detail he has serious fears it will eventually disappear. 'What they have said is they [the websites] will sort of go into cold storage, and what that means is that eventually they wither and die because a website that's not kept up is eventually a website that does die,' says Jock Phillips, who was the chief historian at Internal Affairs before he became general editor of Te Ara. He says the changes gut vital expertise and risk eroding years of cultural knowledge. And he worries future events won't be recorded appropriately. The history websites, he says, are a crucial resource, both nationally and internationally. 'You only have to look at the user figures. Te Ara gets over four million separate users each year, a total of 13 million page views, which is a huge number and far more than, for example, the Te Papa website gets. 'New Zealand History gets over three million users each year. And the total number of page views on those two sites is about 20 million, which is an incredible amount of use. 'And an awful lot of people are enriched by that knowledge. About 70 percent of them are from within New Zealand, but one shouldn't forget the importance of the 30 percent outside New Zealand, who relish Te Ara. 'When I go overseas, people are amazed at the quality of it, there's no equivalent anywhere else, in any other country.' This week, seven history and heritage organisations put out a joint statement on the restructure decision, deeply concerned that the cuts will 'damage New Zealand's international reputation in the historical and cultural heritage sectors'. 'While not mentioned in the decision document explicitly, we are also deeply concerned about any potential for these resources to be transferred to for-profit organisations,' reads the statement from the Professional Historians' Association of New Zealand Aotearoa, New Zealand Historical Association, New Zealand History Teachers' Association, National Oral History Association of New Zealand, New Zealand Archaeological Association, Historic Places Aotearoa, and New Zealand Society of Genealogists. 'New Zealand's historical record is not a commodity to be monetised. 'These platforms must remain free and publicly accessible, as they have been for decades. Any privatisation would inevitably lead to paywalls, reduced accessibility, and the commercialisation of our collective memory.' RNZ reporter Phil Pennington, who has been covering the story, says the restructure is all about saving money – but it comes at a cost. 'Historians are really alarmed at these developments … and at the downgrading and the de-muscling of history in the ministry and at a government level. 'And they are saying it is misguided, [and] this ministry becoming a policy shop is the wrong way to go, and it will be like vandalism to our historical knowledge and our understanding.' Check out how to listen to and follow The Detail here. You can also stay up-to-date by liking us on Facebook or following us on Twitter.
Newsroom
4 hours ago
- Newsroom
What NZ's industrial policy can learn from the Aussies
Opinion: I recently spent a few days at the Institute of Australian Geographers' annual conference in Newcastle. In these straitened times, academics are increasingly (and quite rightly) asked to justify such travel, but I learned a lot from four days listening to Australian academics. Though thinking like an Australian is not something I have ever considered, save maybe as a curse endured by Aussies, it turns out there might be more to it than meets the eye. Edgy Aussie scholarship New Zealand's small contingent of academic and student geographers held their own in Newcastle, but in a shrinking number of fields and often with a less edgy scholarliness than their Australian counterparts. New Zealanders addressed some of the changes in our places and brought matters of care, concern, and Indigenous rights and perspectives to bear on local and national political debates. Many explored initiatives to strengthen participatory management and collaborative governance within and beyond the state. Australia's geographers introduced similar research to do with changing places and environments in Australia, and some also asked sharply critical questions about worlds near and far. There were papers, for example, on climate-driven economic and social collapse, detailed analyses of the geography of industrial and labour market change, the intergenerational trauma of warfare, and the border-bending effects of airborne policing of migrant boats in the Mediterranean. What all this told me is that I should harden my resolve to struggle against initiatives within and beyond my own university that I believe put universities' scholarly traditions at risk. These must be safeguarded as we pursue ways of weaving scholarship more effectively into public service. We owe this to the scholars, intellectuals, artists, discoverers, global diplomats, prophets of peace and so on – the products of our universities whose intellectual achievements we all celebrate as core to our nation. As they do in Australia. Economic powerhouse Just being in Australia was a reminder that we live 3.5 hours away from a global economic powerhouse. Our size, resource base, history, and distance from other places limits our capacity to be more like Australia. Nor can we model ourselves on Denmark, Singapore, Israel, Ireland, or Finland (the Government's comparator-du-jour). However, thinking more deeply as a geographer, making more of our proximity to Australia is a no-brainer. Despite celebrating and reaffirming our ties to Australia every 10 years on the anniversary of the Closer Economic Relations agreement, there is little evidence between those celebrations of us making any strategic leveraging of our closeness to Australia. It rarely surfaces in either mundane political debates or longer-term strategic policy. Being in Australia brought that home to me. Futures made in Australia I attended a session at the conference in which economic geographers debated the 'Future Made in Australia' policy, a 10-year, A$23 billion green transitions programme. The session celebrated a return to industrial policy in Australia after 35 years of neoliberalism, but it also asked some serious questions about contradictory objectives. For instance, panellists asked whether in its implementation the policy's transitions objectives were already being compromised by infrastructural investment to underpin a new round of resource industries. They asked how big infrastructural projects would boost an industrial ecosystem dominated by small to medium-sized firms. They asked how the policy would deal with the problems of transitioning regional workforces to the skills required of digital industries, and whether the policy would arrest the drift of regional populations to the cities, and even whether this was a desirable or appropriate goal. Australia's geographers plotted the research-led investigations necessary to address these questions – before the futures to be made turn into the mistakes of a past relived. These are precisely the questions that animated economic geography as a sub-discipline before economic policy was captured by the failed imaginaries of decades of neoliberal globalisation. Don't worry, people are mobile labour units, and their lives will be resolved and their potential maximised by competitive markets. Wrong and wrong – as geographers knew then and the Trumpian moment illustrates now, in so many ways. One long-term collaborator asked me what the debate was like across the Tasman. 'We don't have these debates,' I said with some embarrassment. 'The best we have in terms of industrial policy is 'Grow, baby, grow'.' In the interest of national pride, I omitted to add, 'as for a transitions agenda, regions, or labour-force skills, the current policy appears to be replacing regional government with a squadron of space police'. Universities as infrastructure In another session, urban geographer Kristian Ruming laid out a framework for assessing the crucial part played by universities in urban and national economy and society. He described universities as crucial resources of urban and national infrastructure – physical and cultural hubs that shape, provide, and deliver diverse social, cultural, economic, informational, educational, and knowledge foundations for cities and nations. As with other infrastructure, universities facilitate flows of, and access to, utilities, goods, people, and ideas. They are essential to sustaining contemporary social life, and they create opportunities to imagine, produce and enjoy better futures. Ruming also argued that universities were rarely understood in these terms. Instead, universities were being reinterpreted as solvers of state problems, as unnecessarily expensive government-funded industry training establishments, or centres for the cultivation of privileged discontent that must be squashed. Universities deliver so much more. Governments are right to demand public accountability from universities, but this demand should begin by recognising the full breadth of universities' infrastructural value. What I learned in Newcastle will enhance my teaching, research and institutional service. I'm confident it will yield more than the cost of a few hours' advice from a Big Four consultant on what to do with our universities or our country. The point is not that we must be like Australia, but that there is value in thinking like Australia, at least for a moment. We cannot be big, brash, and part of crucial global circuits of finance, resources, and geopolitical concern. But we can support our universities to debate and confront who we are and who we are not, how we should build our economy, and how we might imagine ourselves into creative and self-assured economic, cultural and political subjects. Our policy suite is more constrained than Australia's, but it ought to build on remembering who we have been and what we have done and celebrating what we have become, to imagine and invest in unfolding futures. This need not mean rejecting growth or embracing without question global tech entrepreneurs, but it should mean some thinking and must mean something more than 'growth' for its own sake, exporting resources, or scrambling for spittle from the slavering jaws of the tech bros. Matariki is the season for this kind of thinking. A time to task our universities with leading us on a journey of 'Future Made in Aotearoa'.
