Barry Soper: Why David Seymour has a point about state housing

The political Fred Astaire kicked up merry hell a few weeks back about a state housing block that was going to be built in his plutey electorate saying that some of the occupants will bring with them mental health issues.

Act's David Seymour was pilloried, accused of stigmatising those less fortunate than himself, although looking at his truckie toes on the dance floor, he's in no position to be casting aspersions.

But surely he does have a point considering these days if you move into a state house you can be there for as long as you like and get up to what you like. No-one's going to throw you out.

Housing New Zealand's zero tolerance policy has become a policy of appeasement.

If you're living next door to a state house whose occupants party 24/7, assisted by the P pipe, you are probably wondering how they can get away with it.

Unbeknown to us the bureaucratic boffins are in the process of putting in place a no-eviction policy under which their youthful boss Andrew McKenzie says it'd be very rare that someone would be asked to leave.

Even if there's a drug lab, the cops would be called in to sort out the cook, but chances are his family would stay on in the house.

McKenzie says they're a social housing landlord, social appears to be the operative word, where in their book success is keeping people in a house and bringing in the appropriate agencies to mend those on a bender.

The best thing to do, he says, is to embrace them and work out how it can help them to become stable again.

It's certainly a change from their attitude over the past three years when 300 state house tenants were shown the door for methamphetamine-related transgressions, ironically the same number of curious people who traipsed through the first state house in Wellington way back in 1937 after the Prime Minister of the time Mickey Savage struggled through the door with a dining table.

State houses were then seen as a stop-gap measure, to tide the tenants over until they found a place of their own.

But that was the relatively untroubled then, and this is the deeply troubled now where it seems the cradle will take them to their graves.

Getting back to the sort of tenants that so worried Seymour, the head of the Drug Foundation, Ross Bell, said he was pleased to see the social housing provider recognising its role with the kind of tenants they've got and their responsibility to look after the vulnerable.

That's all very well and good but unfortunately, whether they like it or not, there are obvious unintended consequences.