As government and business lag behind, the fledgling community-driven housing sector is pursuing alternatives to bypass an unjust system, writes Thomas Nash

Is there any hope for the future of housing in New Zealand?

Our tax law encourages wealthy landowners to enrich themselves through untaxed revenue (also known as capital gains). The government faces scrutiny over its Kiwibuild policy, which even if successful would mainly just increase the supply of largely unaffordable homes, while rental prices skyrocket. Our (Australian-owned) banks stoke this extractive system by creating more and more money through mortgage debt as they effortlessly accumulate billion-dollar profits.

There’s more. Our building code encourages developers to operate on a minimum standard, maximum profit rationale. Our building materials are controlled by a cartel supplying us timber treated with a toxic copper, chromium and arsenic preservative that is banned in many countries. Meanwhile we export our raw pine logs to companies in Europe that turn them into high value wonder products, including through sustainable timber modification processes pioneered by our own New Zealand forest research scientists.

It’s grim. And it doesn’t look like changing much because those that benefit from this set up have a firm grip on power and are not about to relinquish it. Some may even have convinced themselves that this is actually the optimal system.

How could this system change so that housing might once again be based on provision of homes for the many, rather than extraction of wealth for the few? One way is for government to enact laws and regulations that genuinely transform the incentive structure for ownership of land, development of property and construction of housing (simply taxing wealth would help). The government’s hotly anticipated “wellbeing budget” should actually require such a transformational shift, but it doesn’t appear to be on the agenda – yet.

The other way is for communities to develop our own parallel systems of ownership, development and building that are driven by a desire not for some people to get mega-rich, but to make sure everyone has a good place to live that they can afford through to retirement. The values underpinning this sort of system have deep roots in Aotearoa. Concepts of collective ownership and kaitiakitanga are deeply rooted in te ao Māori. More recently communities developed local building societies and credit unions – member-owned financial institutions that pooled people’s savings and helped them build homes.

Happily, as government and business lag behind, the fledgling community-driven housing sector is getting on with building projects and taking steps to coalesce as a movement. This week at Victoria University of Wellington the CoHoHui marks the first nationwide conference on collective urban housing to be held in New Zealand. Participants will include builders, designers, engineers and architects; lawyers, bankers and developers; community housing, papakāinga and co-housing groups; representatives of iwi, councils and central government; and others working on collective urban housing.

It’s a promising sector because it’s self-driven, can be self-funded and is not dependent on government and business. It could of course be greatly supported by government and business and the specifics of that will be a big part of the discussions this week.

Cities overseas have seen a flourishing in recent decades of community-driven and collectively-owned housing. In Norway the cooperative building association OBOS is owned by its 435,000 members and has built about a quarter of Oslo’s housing stock. It’s basically a housing and savings organisation – you become a member, contribute to the cooperative with your savings and own the right to occupy your home. Cities like Vienna, Berlin and Zurich are all deep into housing cooperatives. Across the Tasman in Melbourne, Nightingale Housing has been swamped with demand for homes built through their collective urban housing model.

There are encouraging examples emerging in New Zealand too. Jade Kake has written about the resurgence of papakāinga in her BWB Text “Rebuilding the Kāinga” and there’s a dynamic housing innovation eco-system being driven by hapu and iwi across the country.

Community housing providers (property developers that instead of extracting profit for their investors put all profits back into building and maintaining homes) are rare in New Zealand. One good example is the New Zealand Housing Foundation. It gets lower income families into affordable rental and then shared ownership homes and as those homes are paid off it recycles the money into building more homes. With $10m of finance over eight years it has built over $300m worth of housing assets, including at Waimahia Inlet in Auckland.

On the co-housing side (projects where future residents pool their resources and decide together the community they want to build) Earthsong has been going strong for years in Ranui, Auckland. Amongst a raft of new-entrants, the Buckley Road project is in the planning stages in Wellington, High Street Cohousing is underway in Dunedin and Cohaus has just been consented in Auckland. There’s even a collectively-owned commercial building you can help crowdfund – Collette’s Corner in Lyttelton.

In the end it’ll take a genuinely transformational government to put in place the rules for a fair system of housing in Aotearoa New Zealand. But we can’t wait for that, so in the meantime we should build our own alternatives to bypass the grossly unjust system currently locking people out of good housing.

Thomas Nash is social entrepreneur in residence at Massey University

Vague and antiquated legal language undermines complainants in cases of sexual assault, writes New Zealand Law Journal editor Brenda Midson.

One of New Zealand’s most notorious sexual misconduct cases re-emerged recently when a ringleader of the Roast Busters, a group of teenagers who were investigated five years ago for alleged sexual offences against underage girls, gave a television interview.

The interview sparked outrage, and the broadcaster was criticised for providing a platform for the group’s leader, while re-traumatising the complainants.

Back in 2013, the police investigated the case for 18 months but didn’t lay charges due to a lack of evidence. I argue that prosecution decisions and societal responses to sexual offending may not be any more enlightened today, partly because of the way the law treats the issue of consent and classifies sexual crimes.

Rape discourse

One of the common tropes in rape discourse is the idea that genuine victims would complain immediately. If they don’t, the argument goes, the complaint is fabricated. Another myth is that such “false” complaints are motivated by some personal gain, be it financial or political.

It is therefore deeply ironic that Joseph Parker, the leader of the Roast Busters, issued public statements about his role in the incidents five years later. But unless the police decide to lay charges after all, the alleged sexual offenders are irrelevant.

What is relevant is to consider what the response would be to a similar case if it arose in 2019. On the one hand, the publicity indicates a great deal of support for the complainants and concern about exacerbating their trauma. But in 2013, I participated in a Radio New Zealand panel discussion about the case, in which one of the biggest issues discussed was the conduct of the complainants – in other words, what they were doing in the company of the alleged offenders, why and how much were they drinking, and what they were wearing.

At the time, two commercial radio hosts, John Tamihere and Willy Jackson, grilled a friend of one of the Roast Busters complainants, asking her “how free and easy are you kids these days?”. They also described as “mischief” the conduct of the alleged offenders in bragging about their sexual conduct with drunk and underage complainants on social media. Both broadcasters were censured in 2013, but it is worth noting that Jackson is now a member of parliament, and Tamihere is running for mayor in Auckland.

The real issue

All these questions about the complainants divert attention from the behaviour of offenders. Some believe they are entitled to treat people in this way – and society and, in some contexts, the law have implicitly given them permission to do so.

We must look at every case in its own individual context but at the heart of the issue in most cases is consent. This has two elements: first, did the complainant actually consent? And second, if not, did the defendant believe, on reasonable grounds, that there was consent?

In the Roast Busters case, it would be hard to argue that the alleged offenders did have reasonable grounds for believing in consent if they did in fact set out to have sex with the complainants while they were drunk or unconscious.

Disparity in how the law treats women

Under section 128A of the Crimes Act 1961 a person does not consent to sexual activity if the activity occurs while he or she is so affected by alcohol that they cannot consent or refuse to consent. Also, a person does not consent to sexual activity if the activity occurs while he or she is asleep or unconscious.

Yet, these provisions of the Crimes Act are subject to interpretation by judges and juries. How, and on what basis, do they decide whether a complainant is “so affected” by alcohol that they are unable to consent?

Further evidence of the law’s differential treatment of sexual complainants is the way in which sexual offences are characterised in the Act itself. Sexual crimes are classified as “crimes against religion, morality and public welfare” as opposed to murder, manslaughter and non-sexual assaults which are labelled “crimes against the person”.

This disparity in language confirms a real inequity in the way in which the law treats women (who make up the large proportion of complainants in sexual cases). It is a relic of the days when women were chattels owned by men and a sexual offence was a property offence committed against the property owner.

This choice of statutory language is not confined to New Zealand’s legislation. In both the Northern Territory and Queensland, sexual offences against children are classified as offences against morality, but against adults they fall within the “assault” category. On the other hand, in Victoria’s Crimes Act, sexual offences against adults and children are sub-categories of a general “offences” category.

I would like to think that things would be different if Roast Busters happened now. Unfortunately, I do not have that optimism. Instead, I see the character assassination of Dr Christine Blasey Ford during Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the US Supreme Court, the Irish case where a defence lawyer was permitted to tell a jury to look at the way the complainant was dressed, and that the fact she was wearing a G-string was evidence of her consent. I also see the #notallmen and #mentoo hashtags.

I would like to see an end to the offence taken every time a news story references the victimisation of women or an advert for a razor calls out toxic masculinity. We know not all men do bad things, but all women are subject to (at the very least the risk of) sexual violence and harassment. Denial of that reality is a real barrier to change.

Brenda Midson is the editor of the New Zealand Law Journal and senior lecturer in law at the University of Waikato.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.