Towards the end of last week, the government announced a number of measures aimed at expanding the available support services for rough sleepers.
One of the five immediate actions, announced by housing minister Chris Bishop and Associate Housing Minister Tama Potaka, included expanding the Housing First programme to fund up to 300 additional social homes for people already engaged with Housing First but still sleeping rough, however, both the Green Party and a number of city missioners have said that this wouldn’t be enough to accommodate the total number of people on the social housing waitlist in Aotearoa.
Additionally, earlier this week, Green Party MP Benjamin Doyle recently announced their resignation from parliament. Doyle announced that the reason for their resignation was a series of threats and ongoing abuse they’d received in March onwards, spurred by comments NZ First leader Winston Peters made about their social media posts.
And last Thursday, statistics released by Immigration NZ revealed that approximately 20,980 people in New Zealand had overstayed their visa, following a previous study in 2017 estimated the amount of overstayers at around 14,000.
In response, Immigration Minister Erica Stanford announced a series of changes to the immigration act, which included: allowing criminals to be deported for serious crimes even if they have been permanent residents for up to 20 years, triggering deportations for providing false or misleading information, and crimes committed before coming to New Zealand.
For our weekly catch up with the Green Party, Wednesday Wire Host Oto spoke with MP Ricardo Menendez-March to discuss all these issues.
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