TAMATHA PAUL: SPEAKING OUT ON BEHALF OF THE HOMELESS

Labour leader Chris Hipkins might describe the comments of Tamatha Paul as 'stupid', but the Green MP has highlighted how homelessness has been allowed to become a 'law and order' issue.

 

ON THE very same day that Labour leader Chris Hipkins was taking Prime Minister Chris Luxon to task for the increase in homelessness in Auckland and Wellington, he was also attacking Green MP Tamatha Paul for saying that the police pay undue attention to the very same homeless that Hipkins was expressing his apparent concern about in Parliament.

During a university panel discussion hosted by the University of Canterbury Greens and Peace Action Otautahi, Paul criticised the police for 'waiting for homeless people to leave their spot, packing their stuff up and throwing it in the bin.'

The fact that this criticism was based on feedback she had received from frontline organisations like Wellington's Downtown Community Ministry and the Salvation Army was ignored by Hipkins.

He said that Paul's comments were 'ill-informed, were unwise, in fact were stupid.'

Chris Hipkins himself could be described as duplicitous. On the one hand he wants, in Parliament at least, to pose as the champion of the homeless. On the other hand, he also wants to pose as a champion of the police, leading a political party that has made issues of 'law and order' a priority. Either way, unhoused folk are a mere political football for Hipkins to kick around, in the hope of winning a few brownie points.

That he should condemn Tamatha Paul as 'stupid' simply because she was doing her job and representing the concerns of people who have zero political influence and are never listened to, only highlights that the mercenary politics of Chris Hipkins are not dissimilar from those of Christopher Luxon's. The difference is more a matter of emphasis, rather than substance.

The deeper issue that Paul was pressing on has been ignored in the rush by the political establishment and its media cheerleaders to pass judgment on the Green MP. Although the politicians might say they want to solve the issue of homelessness, the real concern, as Paul suggests, is keeping unhoused folk out of sight.

So it's sadly inevitable that Act Housing spokesperson Todd Stephenson should tubthump: 'Tamatha Paul has spent so much time hanging out with radical left-wing student groups that she’s got law and order completely backwards. It’s criminals who are the problem, not the Police who catch them.'

At a time when any notion of community responsibility is being torn apart by an economy in crisis, homelessness has morphed into an issue of law and order rather than one of finding real solutions to a deepening social problem. The homeless have been lumped into the category of potential criminals and who are making the city streets look untidy and driving customers away from the retail stores. It has become the de facto job of the police to hustle the homeless out of sight, despite the fact that the police are neither mental health professionals, social workers or housing advisors. I suspect that it's a job that the police themselves do not enjoy doing.

For those who were eager to attack Tamatha Paul and, in the process, take further potshots at the Green Party, it was obviously too much for them to put their bigotry aside and do some research. If they had, they would have discovered what else Paul has been saying about homelessness. For example, she wrote just three weeks ago:

'Wellington is in a state of housing emergency, and it has been allowed to snowball, because political decision makers have been slow to treat the issue with the urgency it requires. Just ask any of the majority of people who rent in our city or look at the increasing number of people who are rough-sleeping on the street. This far-too-common experience has been well-documented in the media, in the tenancy tribunal, in books and popular culture. The shameful and embarrassing housing market in Wellington has become the butt of many jokes, except those of us who are living in it are not laughing.'

Unfortunately, politicians like Chris Hipkins and Chris Luxon are not listening. The 'pile on' that Paul has faced this week highlights that homelessness has been allowed to become primarily a 'law and order' issue, not part of the housing crisis and certainly not the failure of an economy where the owners of capital have enriched themselves at the expense of everyone else.