Barry Soper: Emergency housing a big spend for Government

Work and Income is paying Kamo Motel, Whangarei, to house three families who are on Housing New Zealand's waiting list. Photo / John Stone

Ten years ago John Key stood in the capital's Westpac Stadium and with a sweep of his arm panned the 35 thousand seats, telling New Zealand that every year that's how many people were leaving to live in Australia.

Key declared that as Prime Minister he would give people a purpose to stay.

It was a claim that haunted him for his first years in office when the exodus continued and his opponents crowed about how he'd failed to live up to his promise.

Well they're now grimacing and moaning about how many people are coming here to live, over the past year almost 38 thousand Kiwis and Aussies came to live in the land of milk and mortgages. Those on work visas made up the most of the more than 71 thousand who came here to live over the past year, hardly surprising considering the amount of construction going on at the moment as political parties outbid each other on the number of houses they'll build.

And if you think the housing pressure's going to go off the boil in Auckland anytime soon, think again. Forty four percent of those settling here, or more than fifty six thousand, were bound for our biggest city.

The Government's now being damned by its opponents for turning around the migration flow and being damned for keeping the Auckland gates open.

Labour's saying the main reason why they're flocking to Auckland is because the Beehive has no plan for regional economic development, on how to distribute our new migrants around the regions. If it was only that simple.

It's true the country's bursting at the seams, with housing the main pressure cooker. It not only means those who're struggling to make ends meet will be forever denied their Kiwi brick and mortar dream, it's seeing more of them not even getting a foot in the door of a place they can call home.

Figures show how desperate it is with emergency housing with the Government budgeting two million bucks for 1400 people to live in motels for the last three months of last year. Yeah well, they ended up spending just on eight million for almost nine thousand needy people.

Many of them are hardly ideal tenants though having been blacklisted in the private sector, evicted from state houses, have criminal records and are violent to their families.

And that's the conundrum, when does the state stop taking responsibility for them?

That's a question that no one seems to have, or is game enough to have, an answer to.