A smorgasboard of the Newshub commenters on Damien Light’s article.
A smorgasboard of the Newshub commenters on Damien Light’s article.

SocietyJanuary 18, 2018

Being measured means that you’re there: On the LGBTI+ community and the census

A smorgasboard of the Newshub commenters on Damien Light’s article.
A smorgasboard of the Newshub commenters on Damien Light’s article.

Stats NZ will again not include any non-binary gender options or any questions about sexual orientation in this year’s census. That’s a government-endorsed insult to the LGBTI+ community, writes comedian Eli Matthewson.

Whenever the census comes around again I always think about one thing: The Christchurch Wizard. The legend I’ve heard is that every census he would take a row boat, row out to sea until he was outside of the country border, and return after the day so he would not have to complete it.

This year, Stats NZ has decided not to include gender options outside of male and female, nor any questions about sexual orientation. Newshub posted a response from ex-United Future Leader Damian Light, and the comments underneath left me wanting to get into a row boat, row outside the country border, and then keep rowing far away from this country.

The most prevailing opinion swirling around this comment pit is that this is yet another example of queer people wanting attention and wanting to feel special. As thought the sole reason we would ask for this is the thrill of getting to tick a box in a survey. Not quite.

The reason for wanting to include these questions is so far from feeling special – it’s for the practical results it can bring. We have no statistics that even approach being definitive for the number of LGBTI+ people in this country, but if we did that could seriously help the LGBTI+ community. It could help organisations secure more funding for queer support groups which are often criminally underfunded. Rainbow Youth, for instance, had their biggest ever single contribution not from the government, but from Tamati Coffey winning Dancing With the Stars in 2009. Better stats about how many young people this organisation can help could encourage the government to cha-cha along to the party.

Beyond that, the stats themselves would be affirming for queer people to see. To visibly see that there are more people like you in this country, that’s a nice thing. And to see queer stats that don’t show those numbers attached to suicide or abuse rates, that is special. Seeing those numbers could mean something to queer people who feel isolated and alone.

But simply opening up this discussion seems to trigger a true mob of Facebook gender-truthers who argue that a small section of society are being too demanding. They believe there are only two genders, and this small minority is asking for too much. The go out of their way to point out how small a minority it is that’s asking for recognition. But if you’re going to tell me it’s a small minority – well, how small is it? We don’t have any numbers.

Even in just the first few comments underneath Newshub’s post the LGBTI+ community are called “Lgbtdumbells” and “the alhpabet mafia”. It’s rough, using an acronym designed to be inclusive to belittle us, primarily by eliminating the diversity within our community. Although the idea of an intense mafia drama about queer people meeting in a shady underground basement, smoking cigars and devising sinister plots about survey statistics does have its appeal.

Commenters trot out the same old tired gags – if people can identify as different genders than they should be able to identify as a “Ford Focus”, a joke designed to make people of diverse gender identities feel worthless. They demand it be known their are only two genders, and if you disagree “You and your pronouns can go read a science book”.

Well I took my pronouns and I did read a science book (…OK, a science blog). One in 2000 children are classified as intersex at birth. So scientifically, at birth, people are born in-between male and female. Many of them present as either male or female but some choose to identify as intersex or other alternative gender-identities. How many? Well, wouldn’t it be nice to have the stats!

What’s most frustrating about these comments is the sheer amount of people writing things like “Do these people ever shut up?” As if every time the queer community asks to be heard that is a true tax on everyone who has to listen. As if the same-sex marriage victory should have been the end of ever hearing from us. “You got what you want you gaybos – now can you please not at the 0.8 seconds it will take for me to fill in these two extra boxes on my census.”

I saw similar comments under an article about Call Me By Your Name. People were offended that they should have to see even a short clip of a queer film, that a news article about it should even come up in their feed. Even seeing one image to two men not kissing was too much time out of their day being taken up by queer people.

Of all the negative things that come with reading the comments section, this is the bleakest for me. Any moment when the media is devoted to something queer, whether that is to celebrate a film or to question the decisions of Stats NZ, there will be someone in there crying out that our community is demanding too much, making themselves too heard and taking up too much of society’s time and space.

And that’s not fair. Because we are here, we are a part of society and we deserve our space in the media. And if it upsets you that much, if you think we are getting too much attention, maybe we could work out how big our community is and just how much space in the media we should get. We can start by getting some stats.


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Looking out over Wellington city. Photo: Getty Images
Looking out over Wellington city. Photo: Getty Images

SocietyJanuary 18, 2018

I’m a civil servant and I can no longer afford to rent in Wellington

Looking out over Wellington city. Photo: Getty Images
Looking out over Wellington city. Photo: Getty Images

Following our report on the increasingly chaotic rental market in Wellington, one young government employee explains why she’s being forced to leave town. 

As told to Don Rowe.

I have been living in Wellington since 2010 and I have been left homeless four times during my seven years here. Despite being a professional civil servant in my mid-twenties, things aren’t getting any easier for me. I have decided to jump ship and move to Dunedin after my lease runs out.

I’m fortunate enough that my mum lives here, but she also lives in a one bedroom flat. The last time I stayed it put major stress on our relationship. I was staying with friends as much as possible, sleeping in their beds and everything, but having to share space with people for unknown amounts of time is incredibly stressful for everybody. It was a huge source of anxiety for me in general. 

Most of my friends have had to do the same; as soon as someone found a flat we all had to squeeze until someone else found their own place, but it took ages. I have one friend who couldn’t find a short-term rental so he’s sleeping in a roof. There are holes in the walls, every time it rains the place leaks, but the only time they hear from the landlord is when the rent is going up or, like recently, when the landlords decided they wanted to move in and fix it up.

At one stage I even had to call in a favour and move in with my ex-boyfriend. That was bad and I left after a week. But the alternative was living back with my mum which hard to reach from the CBD. I couldn’t go out, couldn’t go to parties, couldn’t do anything without somewhere to stay because it was so difficult to get back. I honestly just don’t think I could do another stint of living on a couch again, now that I’m nearly 26. 

Last year I went to an uncountable amount of viewings, most of them during the day – meaning I had to take time off work to get there. My friends and I, all professionals in our late 20s, collated an extensive CV to take with us, knowing that the competition was stiff. We cottoned on pretty quickly that the rent advertised on websites was just a guideline. Some prices were updated within 30 minutes of being published, and offering higher bids became the new norm.

Landlords are actively participating in this auctioning because, and this is a quote, “it’s the way things are at the moment”. I can only imagine how difficult it must be for students to secure flats if professionals like me are struggling.

Many of the houses that my friends and I visited were not up to living standards. Landlords were expecting us to pay above and beyond what the place was worth for a poorly insulated, damp and dingy hole. One of my friends viewed a three bedroom flat in Mt Victoria where the so-called third bedroom was a gib wall in the centre of the room with no windows. Another was a feral flat where the entire floor was littered with trash, the carpets stained, basically unliveable. The landlord had obviously not checked in on the flat before the viewing but knew that people were so desperate that anyone would take it.

Even so, most of the places we went to had lines out the door. And most places we applied for never actually got back to us, so we were left in limbo, and we just had to assume after a week or so that it wasn’t going to happen. One place was listed as a two-bedroom house so we turned up to this dingy flat in Mt Victoria and one of the rooms was literally a wardrobe. It couldn’t fit a double bed, maybe a single, and that was it. No drawers or anything. We overheard some students who were also looking at it trying to psych themselves up that it was a good flat and we were just like ‘this is a joke’. The fact that students are expected to live in such holes is just crazy.

And that’s the disappointing thing. The flats are expensive but they’re also terribly kept. I’ve never lived in an insulated flat, whereas somewhere like Dunedin most houses are listed as having insulation and central heating and so on. I just wonder why Wellington doesn’t have the same standards.

I ended up spending over a month couch surfing before I locked in a flat. And it was because we offered our landlord more money, something like $50 extra per week, as it was starting to look like we would never find anything. The house was in great condition, a restored villa, and our landlord was kind, but in typical Wellington fashion there was very little insulation, no heat pump, no means of heating the place at all.

I recently found out our rent is going up another $15 per room, which means the house is almost $700 for a three bedroom place in the depths of Newtown. I feel I have no option but to leave. I’m earning a reasonable salary for my age, I’m university educated, but at the end of the week I am unable to put money towards things that my parents were able to in their twenties, like travelling or maybe buying a first home.

It’s frustrating that I can’t afford to go overseas even though it’s all I’ve wanted to do for such a long time. It’s incredibly frustrating that I can’t afford to do any of the cool things I thought I would have done with my life by now. When I saved for a short trip to America I did everything I could, including walking to work which is a full hour each way. I needed every cent for it to be possible, and so I couldn’t afford to spend $7 a day commuting.

When public servants can’t afford to live in Wellington it’s pretty fucked. My mum is a renter as well. She also works for the government and she said that she knows for a fact she’ll never be able to leave her flat because she’ll never find another one she can afford. Her house is tiny. It’s joined to three other flats. It’s not insulated. It’s freezing in winter. She’s 67. Things aren’t looking great for people.

I’m looking at flats in Dunedin at the moment. Most three bedroom houses are listed around the $330 mark, a far cry from what it looks like in Wellington at the moment. And what’s more the houses are more often than not insulated with a heat pump, double glazed windows, an HRV system. It’s no wonder places like Dunedin and Whanganui are looking more appealing to many of us approaching our 30s.

I’ll miss Wellington a lot. I’ll miss the food and the culture and the city. But in order for me to do anything I want to do, anything more than just survive, I need to live somewhere else. And basically everybody I’ve ever flatted with is leaving too.

If you’d like to get in touch with The Spinoff to confidentially talk about renting in Wellington, email don@thespinoff.co.nz