State housing tenants in Nelson and Hamilton have escaped eviction despite one tenant’s boyfriend attacking a neighbour and the other being accused of pointing a rifle at a teenager and asking if he wanted to die.
In Nelson, the first Kāinga Ora tenant admitted she threatened her neighbour and that her boyfriend also attacked the neighbour’s son.
Yet the woman, who was not named, successfully convinced the Tenancy Tribunal the incidents were isolated and unlikely to happen again.
The Hamilton tenant, meanwhile, was accused of firing his rifle in his Kāinga Ora complex’s driveway multiple times.
His neighbour’s 14-year-old grandson later told police he heard two gunshots about 11pm and looked out his window to see the tenant allegedly pointing a 1m-long firearm at him.
The tenant allegedly asked the boy: “Do you want to die? Are you not scared of dying? I’ll come and kill you right now.”
However, the tribunal adjudicator decided there was not enough proof the man made the threats, despite it being confirmed he was facing criminal charges after police found a firearm at his property.
The unsuccessful evictions appear to be speed bumps in Kāinga Ora’s new policy of getting tough on state housing tenants.
In January, Housing Minister Chris Bishop declared the “easy ride” for disruptive Kāinga Ora tenants to be over.
In March last year, the Government told the public housing provider to abandon its “Sustaining Tenancies Framework”.
That programme first started in 2017 as a pilot in which Kāinga Ora staff were urged to try their best to avoid evicting tenants and instead work with them to overcome their issues.
Part of the policy’s belief was that evicted tenants could be left with nowhere else to go, potentially leading them to cause more trouble on the streets or cost taxpayers more through poor health and medical expenses.
The new Coalition Government argued, however, that disruptive and threatening tenants were causing neighbours to live in fear.
They believed the threat of eviction would also “spark behaviour change”, forcing these tenants to behave better.
That tougher stance led to a five-fold increase in evictions.
A Kāinga Ora spokeswoman said about 85% of all its eviction applications to the Tenancy Tribunal were successful.
“Of the 88 applications we made in the past 12 months, 77 were successful,” she said.
However, the Hamilton and Nelson cases showed tribunals weren’t rubber-stamping every application.
The spokeswoman said the tribunal needed a “high standard of evidence”.
“While we always aim to meet that threshold, sometimes the evidence we are able to present isn’t quite strong enough,” she said.
In the Hamilton case, tribunal adjudicator Jenny Robson questioned how reliable the neighbour’s evidence was.
Robson noted that Kāinga Ora had presented evidence saying the neighbour - who was the grandmother of the teenage boy the tenant was accused of pointing the rifle at – originally gave a statement to police, saying she went outside to confront the tenant.
She told police the tenant then threatened to also kill her and shot off more rounds from his rifle.
But when Robson asked the grandmother what happened during the confrontation, she replied that the tenant ignored her.
“Her oral evidence was contrary to the statement she had given to the police,” Robson concluded.
The woman’s grandson also didn’t appear at the tribunal, meaning Robson was left to doubt the evidence presented.
The tenant himself refused to comment at the tribunal, saying he had pending criminal proceedings.
In the Nelson case, the tenant’s clean record over four and a half years helped save her tenancy despite her admitting she threatened her neighbour.
The drama began when her boyfriend assaulted the neighbour’s son on January 9.
The boyfriend was bailed with conditions to stay away following the attack, but allegedly returned to the woman’s flat within two weeks.
When her neighbour called police to report the bail breach, the tenant overheard “inflammatory language” about her boyfriend and confronted the woman, the tribunal said.
“The tenant does not dispute she threatened to assault the neighbour. The video evidence of such a threat was conclusive,” tribunal adjudicator Michael Brennan found.
However, he noted that only one of seven neighbours had complained about the woman and she had not had run-ins before this incident.
He ultimately decided there were enough mitigating factors to let her off.
“I have given the tenant the benefit of the doubt this time, but she should be clear on how any future repeat behaviours … may not result in the tenancy continuing,” he said.
Ben Leahy is an Auckland-based senior journalist. He has worked as a journalist for more than a decade in India, Australia and New Zealand.