Category: new zealand

Every day, someone is pointing a finger at someone else to blame them for the unaffordability of New Zealand housing. Many fingers are pointing in many directions: at John Key, at Chinese investors, at developers, at Auckland Councils, at greedy speculators and at the world economy.

What the media isn’t willing to admit is that the housing crisis is a natural consequence of the culture of New Zealanders. What we have to accept is that we’re not actually a very nice people.

This country was essentially founded by the sort of person who sells other people’s land out from under their feet, and the sort of person who buys the land anyway. Some parts of Wellington were ‘sold’ by people who didn’t even live there. We’re still like this – when we sell a house, we don’t give a fuck who is moving into our old neighbourhood, as long as they bring the cash.

Our current record immigration levels are also a natural consequence of our culture. The land-owners are in power, so if we open the floodgates to everyone demand for housing will increase, which means the value of the land-owners’ assets increase, which means they can sell them for the highest price.

We’re a pack of whores in this country. Let’s just accept it so that we can make sense of what’s happening.

Nowhere is the short-sighted, greed-crazed mentality that defines the New Zealander of 2016 more evident than in Auckland. The “Auckland housing crisis” (as it is dubbed by the Auckland-based media) is an outgrowth of that same mentality that South Islanders refer to when they say that Auckland has no soul.

Because it doesn’t. It’s just a bunch of whores trying to get rich at each other’s expense. Auckland is like Los Angeles: a superficial, shallow plasticland of hustlers, grifters and straight out bullshitters. No-one there trusts anyone else, and neither should they. Pull out a bunch of cash in either city, though, and you can have someone sucking your dick within seconds.

New Zealanders are whores because we treat each other like whores.

We don’t build decent houses because that costs more money, so we let our kids get asthma instead.

We don’t have a capital gains tax because that would inhibit our ability to get rich from property speculation, so we have empty houses owned by foreigners while our young people live in cars.

We close down rape crisis centres and slash mental health funding because we’d rather have tax cuts.

If we take an honest look at our own culture, we have to accept that there is no real housing crisis in Auckland – it’s merely another great chance for some of us to get rich at the expense of other New Zealanders. If we are honest we have to accept that we want it that way because it gives us profitable avenues through which we can exploit our countrymen.

The title of this article is the truth, whether it’s admitted or not. The mental health system of New Zealand is the way it is as it’s a cheap short-term solution that we voted for because, as a people, we love cheap short-term solutions.

There’s simply no way around the basic equation. People don’t work for free. If you don’t want to pay people to take care of the mentally ill, then cheaper ways have to be found. Currently our system works like this: if you report with a problem, you’re given sedatives until you stop complaining. Everything else, like spending time with an actual person who can help you solve your problems, is off the table because it’s too expensive.

The average national per capita funding for mental health services in New Zealand is $243 per year. This amounts to probably one hour with a psychiatrist (and associated clerical duties), per New Zealander, per year. Because of this tight funding, mental health care has to be denied to as many people as possible unless absolutely necessary.

I was once told that I was capable of taking 30mg of Olanzapine per night (a dosage which caused me to sleep for 12 hours a day), of working full-time and of completing a Ph.D., all at the same time. The sort of clown that can tell a mental health patient something this stupid is the sort of person that gets hired by a system trying to do everything on the cheap, because if you pay poor wages you get the dregs of the labour market.

Other ways of saving money include a policy of treating everyone who needs an invalid’s benefit as if they were malingering, lying, thieving scum first, and then maybe later as a fellow human being in need of help. Presumably the logic is that by treating everyone who comes to the mental health services as a probable benefit fraudster, many people with marginal cases are discouraged from seeking further help, which saves money.

If the mental health services are cut far enough, savings will be achieved when the most desperate kill themselves. Don’t think for a moment that this calculation is too cold-blooded for the Government – it isn’t. Every 25-year old mentally ill beneficiary that kills themselves saves the country about half a million in benefits over the course of their lives.

Consider that a study sponsored by the Academy of Finland found that “Well-developed community mental-health services are associated with lower suicide rates than are services oriented towards inpatient treatment provision” – in other words, paying to do mental health properly, rather than just putting an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, results in fewer people killing themselves.

This article from February describes how mental health services are being cut in Canterbury due to a lack of funding. If one takes into account that suicide is the second most common way for young people to die in New Zealand, it becomes apparent that recent efforts to save money by cutting mental health funding results directly in deaths by suicide.

Maybe New Zealand, as a nation, does not wish for anything else, as New Zealanders consistently vote for a political party that has a policy of underfunding mental health services.

Our mental health system may be a disgrace, but it’s one that we want to be a disgrace because it’s cheaper that way.