Topically speaking

NZ State houses are far from flash, usually in areas where people don't really want to live and the rent is cheaper than market rate rents. Cheap rent means the inhabitants often have flash cars and SKY TV and there seem to be more SKY dishes in the likes of Merivale, just up the road than in the rest of the south end of town combined. NZ State houses are also owned by the gummint and therefore the taxpayer, not by the people who live in them even though people may occupy them for 20, 30, 40 years or more, perhaps until their death.

There are 11,000 people on the waiting list for a State house, and a huge chunk of them live in Auckland. There are criteria to be met to get one of these rentals such as the size of the house depends on how many people are going to live in it. The term of lease is as long as an individual/a family requires it and still fulfills the criteria. But they never own the house, the taxpayers do and when the senior generation pop their clogs, the rest of the family up and move to somewhere else, if they haven't already because they've grown up and left home. Unless they are teenage unwed mothers. Unless they are this lot or their ilk, in which case they decide to stay put because it was their mother's house. Rented, State house. Tenancy is not inherited.

In short: Housing Minister Chris Carter said police would be called to oust Maana family members from the Panmure state house – which their mother Kopu Maana lived in for about 40 years before she died last month – if they did not leave by the end of this weekend. But two of her daughters, bolstered yesterday by about 30 relatives and friends who have shifted to the property, have refused to move.

They are arguing they have a claim to the house because the family has lived there so long.

Yeah, they lived there so long because it was cheap and easy and they couldn't get their shit together to buy their own home, even though cheap rent was supposedly giving them the opportunity to save more for their own house. You know, the hand up not the hand out.

And now they have squatters in and appear to be trashing the place because they can't get their own "gimme, gimme" way.

This is the house (hardly a palace),



and its rating valuation is $660,000 because of its proximity to more desirable locations. They are even protesting about it and have support from the community. Yeah, of course they do, it's the same sort of people supporting them.



They think they have the right to stay because their mother lived there so long? What about the people who have been waiting years for a family sized state house? Where are their rights?

It's not this lot's house, they have no rights. Send them packing and prosecute the shit out of them for damaging Gummint property. AND refuse them any further State funded housing. There are many, much worthier people to spend the taxpayer $$ on.