Tribunal releases report on Crown homelessness policy
The Waitangi Tribunal’s latest report, Kāinga Kore: The Stage One Report of the Housing Policy and Services Kaupapa Inquiry on Māori Homelessness was released today in pre-publication format. It represents the conclusion to the first stage of the Tribunal’s inquiry into housing policy and services, and covers the period from 2009 to 2021.
The Tribunal finds that the Crown has breached its treaty obligations in several respects. The Crown formulated a definition of homelessness in 2009 without adequate consultation with Māori, and in the seven years that followed it took essentially no action to address rising levels of Māori homelessness. It formulated a Māori housing strategy but did not implement it, and it tightened access to the social housing register despite Māori reliance on social housing. The Crown also reduced the proportion of housing stock that is public or social housing. Taken altogether, these actions breached the Treaty principles of active protection, equity, and good government. The Crown itself conceded that it had breached the Treaty in the early part of the inquiry time frame.
The report notes that, in the period since 2016, when the Government was forced to recognise a housing crisis, the Crown has taken a series of measures to combat Māori homelessness. Most of these occurred so soon before (or even during) the Tribunal’s inquiry that their impact and Treaty-compliance cannot yet be measured. However, in certain respects, the Crown has continued to breach the Treaty through the narrowness of its consultation about its new strategies, its ongoing failure to collect thorough homelessness data, the shortcomings in inter-agency coordination, its continued failure to reform the welfare system to improve outcomes for Māori, and its lack of support for homeless rangatahi.
The Tribunal confirms that the Crown has a Treaty obligation to protect rangatiratanga over kāinga but remarks that traditional kāinga barely exist today because of colonisation and urbanisation. In the circumstances, the Tribunal says, the starting point for the Crown’s fulfilment of its Treaty duty to is to provide suitable housing to homeless Māori, because that is the immediate need.
Because the contributors to homelessness are so varied, the Tribunal has not identified solutions to the problem in this stage one report. That is a matter for a future Tribunal report to be released once the Housing Policy and Services Inquiry has investigated the broader issues that so patently underlie Māori homelessness and housing problems more generally – including the impact of colonisation, the Māori land tenure system, and the structural drivers of poverty. Instead, and despite the request of some claimants for it to range further, the report’s focus is on Crown strategies and policies to reduce Māori homelessness since 2009. The Tribunal signalled this limited scope in its statement of issues released before the commencement of hearings.
While deferring findings on issues concerning housing on rural Māori land, the Tribunal nonetheless notes the appalling living conditions of many Māori who have returned to live on their whenua, which it says should be unacceptable in twenty-first century New Zealand.
The Tribunal makes one recommendation: that the Crown and claimants now work in partnership on a new definition of homelessness that incorporates Māori perspectives.
Hearings for this priority stage of the housing inquiry took place between March and November 2021. The Tribunal agreed to begin the inquiry by addressing the issue of Māori homelessness because this was the firm request of the majority of the claimants, whose position was supported by the Crown. The Tribunal heard claimants in 79 claims, and witnesses appeared for the Crown from five separate agencies. Technical witnesses were called by the claimants, but no research was commissioned for this part of the inquiry.
The Housing Policy and Services Inquiry will move into the main part of its hearing programme in 2024.
The panel members for the inquiry are Judge Craig Coxhead (presiding), Dr Paul Hamer, Prue Kapua, and Basil Morrison.
The final version of Kāinga Kore: The Stage One Report of the Housing Policy and Services Kaupapa Inquiry on Māori Homelessness is now available to download as a PDF file:
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