MARAMA DAVIDSON BLOCKS ME ON TWITTER

After criticising her performance as Assistant Housing Minister, Marama Davidson blocks me on Twitter...

GREEN PARTY co-leader Marama Davidson has blocked me on Twitter. It comes at a time when I've been critical of her failure to front up on the social crisis that is Rotorua's 'transitional housing' and the growing number of homeless generally. She has been happy to let the Minister of Housing, Megan Woods, field the difficult questions - even though as the Assistant Minister of Housing, she has also been given 'special responsibility for homelessness.' 

Instead Davidson, on an annual salary of $236,000, has retreated into 'virtue signalling' as a way of disguising how little she has done as Assistant Minister of Housing. Her inappropriate promotion of Whittaker's Chocolate, just a few days after TVNZ's Sunday program exposed the appalling social conditions within Rotorua's 'transitional housing' dumping grounds, also exposed her continuing failure to act and despite being in the job throughout Labour's second term in office.

After she claimed she was working on the homelessness issue 'Every single hour, every single day.', Newshub did some investigation. Journalist Imogen Walls reported that,'since getting the role in 2020, Davidson’s issued just eight press releases and presented only three papers to Cabinet – which were joint with others – and introduced zero Bills to parliament to address homelessness.'

And what compounds Davidson's failure is that working class Maori are disproportionately represented in the homeless figures. Figures from 2018 say that there are more than 100,000 homeless people in New Zealand. And, according to  Ronji Tanielu, the Principal Policy Advisor for the Salvation Army, nearly half of that number are under twenty-five and of Maori and Pacific descent.

The cruel irony is even though Marama Davidson claims to speak for all Maori she continues to support an economic system that has condemned working class Maori to face the 'rigours' of neoliberalism. But Davidson represents a privileged layer of Maori who have economically benefited from neoliberalism and have no desire for real change. Instead, with the blessing of the State, they represent issues of culture, such as the promotion of te reo, as evidence of progress. But it is little more than window dressing, diverting attention from the fact that an unjust economic structure remains intact. And crucial issues such as economic inequality and housing inequality recede from view.

In 2012 and before she entered Parliament, Marama Davidson said that 'resistance to neoliberal capitalism is a movement that I have supported in principle.'  Even if this was true, her time as a parliamentary politician has seen zero evidence of her alleged support for that resistance. Instead, if anything, she has moved further to the right.