Paul Little: Dickensian conditions prevail

Ashley Peacock was kept locked in a 3m x 4m room for all but 1 hours a day for more than five years. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Last year this column ruminated on the use of the word "Dickensian" to describe social conditions in Victorian times and applied it to New Zealand in 2016.

To what extent, it's worth asking now, have those conditions improved since? Please forgive me if I'm repeating myself.

Under the so-called three strikes law, Raven Campbell, a prison inmate who pinched a guard on the buttocks - his third offence - was sentenced, as that law required him to be, to the maximum term of seven years jail.

Social housing agency Tamaki Housing issued an eviction notice to the five children of Mabel Pe just weeks after her death. They were given three weeks to vacate the home where they had lived for 10 years.

Housing New Zealand issued an eviction notice to a family of seven, including two blind children, after their grandmother died.

In the last quarter of 2016, the number of people applying to Work and Income for hardship grants to buy food was 112,000 - an increase of 14 per cent over the equivalent period in the previous year.

Wendy Shoebridge, who was discovered dead in her home the day after she was told she faced charges over benefit fraud, was later found not to have committed any fraud, according to evidence presented at the inquest into her death.

A Unicef report confirmed New Zealand's youth suicide rate - more than double that in the US - as the worst out of 41 OECD and EU countries.

New Zealand was ranked by Unicef as 38th out of 41 countries for ensuring children's health and wellbeing.

Very young and very old people were being repeatedly re-admitted to hospital with preventable respiratory illnesses which recurred when they were discharged and sent home to their substandard housing, according to the Royal College of physicians.

A young man who was having trouble getting a job because he had half his face covered with a tattoo reading DEVAST8 said he got the tattoo after getting drunk on home brew in jail.

Ashley Peacock, who suffers from autism, was revealed to have been kept locked in a 3m x 4m room for all but 1 hours a day in the "de-escalation" wing of the Capital & Coast District Health Board's Tawhirimatea unit for more than five years.

The use of "seclusion rooms" at other facilities around the country subsequently came to light and was described by the ombudsman as potentially cruel and inhuman.

Fifty per cent of pregnant women from South Auckland in late pregnancy had not planned to get pregnant, according to researcher Dr Lynne Miller, who cited the high cost of contraception as a factor.

The mother and grandmother of 8-month-old Isaiah Neill, who died when left in a hot car while the pair smoked synthetic cannabis, were sentenced to three years in jail.

Examiners tasked with reviewing the case of 31 people being kept in the mental health services unit at Christchurch's Princess Margaret Hospital declined to visit the facility on the grounds that it sounded "awful".

According to that organisation's figures, New Zealand had the highest level of homeless in the OECD.

Roughly 1 per cent of the population or "more than 40,000 people live on the streets or in emergency housing or substandard shelters" according to a report published in Yale Global Online.

Two homeless men died in Auckland over winter - one sleeping in a cemetery, the other on church steps.

Asked on The AM Show about the progress of the Government's emergency housing building programme, the former Minister for Social Housing Paula Bennett said she couldn't say because "I haven't looked at it for about a year".

Charity KidsCan, which channels donations to children in need, announced the number on its waiting list for basics such as food, clothing and shoes had risen to more than 4000, the highest number in more than five years.