September 24, 2020
Tamihere calls for $600m papakainga fund
Māori Party co-leader John Tamihere says the amount Te Puni Kōkiri spends on Māori housing is a joke, and papakainga will only work if there is a serious budget to work with.
The Waipareira head launched the party’s housing policy this morning at the 120 home development his trust has built for social housing agency Kainga Ora.
It includes a call for 2000 houses to be built over the next two years on Māori ancestral land, using $600 million drawn from the COVID Recovery Fund.
He says the scale of the $64 million Waterview build, compared with the $7.5m Te Puni Kōkiri has spent on its housing strategy, shows the scale of the response needed to address the Māori housing crisis.
"If you’ve got a dedicated $600m fund coming out of the $20 billion COVID Recovery Fund, we now have a dollar value that secures our whānau's interests at actually looking at using our own lands and actually going home to repopulate our homelands and our regions," Mr Tamihere says.
The Māori Party is also calling for 50 percent of all social housing units to be made available to indigenous people first, and for immigration to be curbed until housing supply meets demand.
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