At Te Whāriki Manawāhine o Hauraki, we have been supporting our homeless whānau as much as we can. The numbers in Hauraki have tripled under this government, and whānau are showing up to our Pataka Kai with signs of malnutrition.
I want people to understand what is actually driving our whānau onto the streets, into the mangroves, into their cars, and into sheds with no plumbing. The government’s weak response has been move-on orders. That shows just how little they understand or care about what is really happening here.
In our housing research, a wahine living in her car wakes each morning at 5 am to find a public toilet where she can wash with a flannel before work. She folds away her blankets, so the car looks normal, sprays perfume, and heads off to her two jobs. At night, she returns to the car. She ended up here after trying to leave a violent relationship, only to find that leaving meant losing her place on the housing list. Kāinga Ora told her she had to take a house in Auckland or go to the bottom of the list. But her mokopuna, her whānau, and her whakapapa are here. Every time she reached out for help, the system found new ways to punish her.
Another wahine spoke of Oranga Tamariki threatening to uplift her children. Landlords stopped returning her calls as soon as they heard the words ‘Women’s Refuge’. She was billed for damage caused by her ex-partner. She was rejected by private landlords for being Māori, a solo mother, and for having a child with a disability. She told us she would rather return to the violence at home than keep putting herself through this system. I think about that every time the government talks about ‘choice’.
“I have applied for what feels like over 40 houses. I have been to roughly 20 viewings. The calls start off promising when they hear I have great credit, no criminal record, and I always pay on time, am clean and tidy. But as soon as they hear I am a current MSD client living in Women’s Refuge, that is it. Not even a sorry you did not make the shortlist. Just no communication at all.”
The housing list in Hauraki is long, and available stock is critically short. In Thames-Coromandel, 46 percent of homes sit empty as holiday houses for most of the year, while whānau sleep in empty buildings, mangroves (tents), and cars. This shortage goes back to the early 1800s, when Hauraki iwi faced the confiscation of whenua for public works, gold mining, agriculture, and roads. The process of dispossession continued well into the 2000s. It left Māori in this rohe with very little land for the communal, multigenerational living that once sustained whānau.
The loss of railway jobs in the 1950s and 1960s pulled whānau even further from those support structures. The neoliberal reforms of the 1980s then stripped away the mechanisms that had allowed whānau Māori to access home ownership. One example was using the family benefit as a mortgage deposit. “Through Māori Affairs we could use our family benefit as a deposit for a house mortgage,” one kuia told us. “My parents did that, and that is how they got their home.” She went on, “But all that good social investment in our people has eroded. Now our kids cannot even rent, let alone buy a home.”
Some wāhine in Hauraki legally own whenua their tīpuna walked, but they cannot build on it. The Building Act was designed for individual Pākehā land tenure. It does not fit the reality of Māori land ownership, papakāinga, or collective, multigenerational living. The compliance requirements are costly and constantly changing. The consent processes are insurmountable for whānau who are “land rich but cash poor.” That financial reality is itself a direct legacy of colonisation. “The white person’s law has set us up to be homeless,” one wāhine said. So, the whenua sits empty, and our whānau cannot live on it. Holiday homes stand cobweb vacant, and the housing list grows.
“Houses are sitting empty, beautiful houses, but they belong to rich Aucklanders who only come down for the summer.” Meanwhile, our people live in garages and emergency motels. What is fair about that? Wāhine end up in substandard accommodation with mould on the walls and brown water from the taps. Tamariki get sick. Then Oranga Tamariki arrives to assess the conditions, tightening the machinery another notch.
Our Cyclone Gabrielle research showed how the flooding washed out homeless whānau from the mangroves. When they walked to the civic centre, they were not welcome and not eligible for help because “they were already living rough.” How do you access the Mayoral fund to recover your house, when you have no house? Communities in this rohe were cut off for up to fifteen days. They organised their own response. They fed and sheltered each other. They checked on kaumātua. They coordinated medication and supplies through networks built during COVID. They already knew waiting for the state was not a viable plan.
After Gabrielle, we advocated at all levels for relocatable housing for whānau whose homes were damaged. One wahine had been living in a shed with a bucket for a toilet. When her cabin finally arrived, a kaimahi described how she wailed with relief. “When she saw the truck coming, from the time it turned the corner until it was landed, she just wailed, calling herself home. All her nieces, who had not spoken for years, came to tautoko her. It was like a tangi. A real welcome home.”
In our gang whānau research, the Abuse in Care Royal Commission found that 80 to 90 percent of Māori gang members experienced abuse in state care. That means the state took those tamariki and moved them through institutions designed to strip them of their whakapapa and identity. Many were abused across generations. They were then returned to communities that had also been systematically destabilised by those same processes. The intergenerational trauma that followed is still moving through whānau in this rohe today. It is a significant part of why homelessness looks the way it does here. It cannot be addressed by a fine, a prison sentence, or a move-on order.
“Move on to fucking where? We were never meant to live like this,” one kuia told us. “Separated, struggling, looking for houses that do not exist. We always lived as whānau, with our kaumātua, our tamariki, everyone together. That is what we need again.”
Wāhine described home as children’s laughter, mokopuna running freely, kai grown from the whenua, kuia passing down knowledge, and the safety and belonging that comes from living with your people on your land across generations. That is what papakāinga means. It is also what wāhine are still fighting to reclaim for their mokopuna, while this government instead reaches for a law to move them on like vermin.
By Paora Moyle
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