State house tenants ‘not a privileged class’

Press, 24 July 1987, Page 4

State house tenants ‘not a privileged class’

By

OLIVER RIDDELL

in Wellington Some Housing Corporation tenants have been attacked by the Minister of Housing, Mr Goff, for regarding themselves as a privileged class. He was commenting on a threatened rent strike by a Porirua group. The Housing Corporation’s new rent formula had been designed to give assistance to those who most needed it and subsidies would reduce as people’s incomes increased, lessening the need for taxpayer support.

Mr Goff said the Porirua group could not “regard itself as a privileged class subject to different rules from others.”

A single person on national superannuation

would continue to enjoy a highly subsidised rent of about $36 a week. A household on an average wage of $382 a week gross ($290 net) would pay a rent of $BB a week, but a household with a gross income of $531 a week ($4OO net) would pay either $159 a week in rent or the market rent, whichever was the lower.

People in this last bracket or better were in a position to meet their own housing needs, Mr Goff said.

All the 10,000 families buying their own homes through the Housing Corporation last year had earned significantly less than this amount.

Rents were designed to be fair to the tenant, the taxpayers, and other families in real need of assistance whom the Housing

Corporation would like to help, Mr Goff said. It was simply not on for some people who got a State house when their family had really needed it to go on expecting cheap rent long after their ability to earn a good income had improved. “I regret that there are a few people with misguided political motivations who are behind talk of a rent strike,” he said.

Any rent strike would not be dealt with at a political level. Where rent was not paid, the Housing Corporation would likely take a case for arrears to the Tenancy Tribunal, an independent body. If the rent was deemed to be fair but was not paid the corporation would, as in any other case, seek an eviction order, Mr Goff said.