Closure Of North Shore Women's Centre A Huge Loss
Press Release – New Zealand Labour Party
Each year, the Centre has helped hundreds of women and children and I now worry about the huge gap left behind in the North Shore for those who need this safe space.
Today's confirmed closure of the North Shore Women's Centre after losing government funding is a huge loss for women in Auckland.
'It's heartbreaking to see a centre which has done so much for women close following the Government's funding cuts,' Auckland issues and women's spokesperson Carmel Sepuloni said
'While Karen Chhour is busy accusing these frontline services of using Oranga Tamariki as a 'cash cow,' we continue to see just how out of touch she is as the consequences of her reckless choices become clear.
'As reports of concern about at-risk children surge, now is not the time to cut funding for prevention services.
'My thoughts are with our many frontline services in Tāmaki Makaurau which do an amazing job and are struggling to stay afloat as the Government takes their services backwards,' Carmel Sepuloni said.
'I want to acknowledge the Centre's incredible 38 years of service to the community and send my aroha to Tracy and her passionate team as they make this difficult decision,' North Shore-based MP, Shanan Halbert said
'Each year, the Centre has helped hundreds of women and children and I now worry about the huge gap left behind in the North Shore for those who need this safe space.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
RNZ News
an hour ago
- RNZ News
Government announces new 'Parent Boost' visa to bring families together
Immigration minister Erica Stanford. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone Parents of New Zealand citizens and residents will be able to access visas, with the government announcing a programme it says will bring families together. From September, parents will be able to access a multi-entry five-year visa, provided they meet specific requirements. Applicants will also be able to renew it once, meaning the maximum length of a visit can be up to ten years. Immigration minister Erica Stanford said a longer-term visa was an important consideration for migrants when deciding where they want to build their lives. "The Parent Boost Visa strikes the balance of making New Zealand more attractive for people who want to make our beautiful country their home, without putting additional strain on public services," she said. To be eligible for a Parent Boost visa, applicants must: They must also meet income requirements, either through their sponsor or through their own ongoing income, as well as having cash of up to $250,000 for a couple or $160,000 for a single parent. "The Parent Boost Visa strikes the balance of making New Zealand more attractive for people who want to make our beautiful country their home, without putting additional strain on public services," Stanford said. "We are committed to delivering an efficient and predictable immigration system that drives economic growth to take New Zealand forward." ACT's immigration spokesperson Parmjeet Parmar said she was proud to see the commitment fulfilled. "Ultimately, this visa makes New Zealand a more attractive destination for the talent we need to drive economic growth. A skilled workforce means more productivity, stronger communities, and more prosperity for all New Zealanders." ACT's own proposal for the visa would have introduced an annual fee to fund healthcare costs. The government policy requires comprehensive health insurance instead. In October 2022, then Immigration Minister Michael Wood announced the new parent visa to help clear a backlog of more than 8500 parents waiting to permanently join their adult children in New Zealand. About 12,000 parents were waiting in June last year, but only 500 had been picked to apply in the year before that. In February Immigration New Zealand announced a one-time increase in the parent visa quota , which had an annual cap of 2500, with 2000 visas allocated to queue-based applications and 500 to ballot-based applicants. But Stanford authorised an extra 331 queue-based visas to combat the backlog which had caused lengthy delays for families. Some parents had reportedly died while waiting . The new Parent Boost applications open on 29 September. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
Newsroom
2 hours ago
- Newsroom
Let's call ‘taxing the rich' what it really is
Opinion: Last month the Government, under urgency, halted all pay equity claims thereby disproportionately affecting women who experience pay inequality. This is one of many policies that included gutting government departments and cutting public service spending to accommodate a massive wealth giveaway in the shape of tax cuts to landlords (a policy designed to supposedly stabilise rents but which seems to have had little impact). As reported in March last year, the tax giveaway to landlords is estimated to cost the country $2.9 billion. To put this in perspective, that is more than the amount paid in Treaty settlements since 1985, which is about $2.7b. In other words, in one year, the current Government awarded landlords more money than has been paid out to Māori in 40 years as compensation for historical wrongs. I note this to introduce my central concern that economic policy, as has been the case for the last four decades, is dominated by the central myth (now axiomatic for almost every government) that all our ills will be solved if we keep giving as much money as possible to the rich. This is based on three central assumptions of current economic dogma that those who question are branded as 'radical leftists'. These assumptions are underpinned by the beliefs that wealth trickles down; deregulation is good for business; and the state should stay out of the market and everything should be privatised. First, wealth, especially when given away in tax cuts, does not trickle down. It stays at the top. Ever-increasing wealth inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient or any study of income trends show this. Second, seen from a purely corporate perspective deregulation is no doubt a path to profit. However, it is also socially disastrous as costs of deregulation are outsourced via public bailouts following financial crises, for example, that are directly caused by the rolling back of legislation designed to safeguard the wider economy. Third, the state has always been an economic entrepreneur funding all kinds of technological innovation, such as the internet, but this often goes unreported in the dominant economic journalism. All this results in top-heavy, financially starved economies as governments continually try to make the wealth giveaways fit into a budget by stripping support for public services or selling off public assets at knockdown prices. (There is a tendency to undervalue the future social benefits of publicly owned resources.) Such sales are no more than an attempt to generate a short-lived financial hit that dissipates as quickly as the resources we all once owned. The fact that the global economic outlook as well as specific national economies remain so fragile and unstable, and are increasingly unable to secure the basic needs of their populations in terms of health, education and social support, is surely enough evidence that the principle of continually moving wealth upwards doesn't work, certainly not for society as a whole. However, because it has become communal liturgy, recited from almost every media pulpit for the last 40 years, it has become increasingly difficult to challenge. Just as there is no economic justification for structuring an economy in which only the very wealthy are the true beneficiaries, there is also no moral justification. From inside this dogma, the moral justification has always been that it is the rich in the form of investors and entrepreneurs that are the only wealth creators, and so they deserve to reap the wealth they create. But you only have to see the collapse in wealth creation during the pandemic when workers could not work, to know that workers also create wealth. Yet many are told they do not even deserve a living wage. Supressed wages is of course one way to structure an economy (there is no such thing as 'the' economy, by the way) to ensure wealth moves upwards. This results in a phenomenon called corporate welfare where the state has to step in to pay benefits to allow workers to actually live. What this means is that the money taxpayers pay out in social welfare is really a direct contribution to shareholder dividends. Welfare often compensates for the company not paying enough to workers so it can pay more to investors. This is another example of the outsourcing of problems for which the government picks up the tab. Just as the Joker begrudgingly loves Batman for maintaining the order he gets to break, the neoliberals love the government because they know it will be compelled to bail them out – a phenomenon known as the 'Greenspan Put' named after the US Fed chair who first bailed out the banks in 1987. Tax breaks are, of course, the main way to benefit the wealthy by directly increasing the wealth they keep and by breaking the public purse and public services. This then opens up new opportunities for privatisation and profit that will benefit a very small group. And I haven't even mentioned our non-existent capital gains tax. The assault on the Te Tiriti ō Waitangi is another example of efforts to structure an economy to favour the wealthy. Aside from the persistence of a colonial mentality hostile to all things Māori, Te Tiriti remains a firm barrier to expanding corporate appropriation of public resources. Should the Regulatory Standards Bill get passed (another piece of legislation aimed at weakening democratic control of resources and opening them up to private exploitation), Te Tiriti will be all that protects us. As our society is placed under increased stresses and strains beneath the extreme weight of amassed, socially useless wealth that sits with a very small class of people, there have been increased calls to tax the rich. I think we need a different slogan. In keeping with the dogma, conservative supporters have made tax a dirty word. Rather than tax being an individual or corporate contribution to the maintenance of a functioning society, the corporatist right has over the past four decades tried to make it a synonym for theft. The idea that taxing the rich is really a form of theft also makes it easy for the dogmatists to present the call as a form of envy; a petty resentment of the successful. Instead of a call to 'tax the rich', the call should be to 'reclaim the wealth'. I believe this phrase more adequately represents the request to return a greater share of what was commonly created. It is also a call to give back even just a small amount of what was taken through the design of an economy knowingly and carefully organised to purposefully benefit the few. Even if the progenitors of the dogma genuinely thought it would be a social good, which is hard to believe because they themselves do not believe in society, there is no reason to believe the fantasy now.
Scoop
5 hours ago
- Scoop
Kenya: UN Expert Urges Immediate Halt To Land Demarcation Violating Ogiek Rights And African Court Judgments
GENEVA (4 June 2025) – A UN expert* today expressed grave concern over the ongoing land demarcation by the Government of Kenya in the Eastern Mau Complex, which threatens ancestral lands of the Ogiek Peoples and contravenes binding judgments of the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights (AfCHPR). 'These actions risk causing irreparable harm to the Ogiek's land rights, which have been unequivocally upheld by the African Court,' said Albert K. Barume, Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples. 'I urge the Government of Kenya to immediately cease all activities that undermine the Ogiek's rights and to fully comply with the Court's rulings.' Despite the AfCHPR's 2017 and 2022 judgments affirming the Ogiek's ownership of their ancestral landsand requiring their restitution, the Kenyan Government has yet to take any actions to return Ogiek lands. A hearing scheduled for November 2024 was postponed at the State's request and is now set for June 2025. In September 2024, Kenya's Environment and Land Court in Nakuru dismissed the Ogiek's claims to their ancestral lands in East Mau, contradicting the AfCHPR's decisions. Meanwhile, from December 2024 to April 2025, the Government convened a series of public forums to discuss how to implement the Nakuru court ruling, criticised as exclusionary and politically driven. These culminated in a rushed demarcation process beginning on 25 April 2025, without the necessary consultations with Ogiek Peoples. 'The demarcation threatens the rights of more than 8,500 Ogiek people in Nessuit, Mariashoni, and Sururu, and endangers ecologically sensitive areas vital for water catchment sustainability,' Barume said. On 6 May 2025, the President of Kenya issued a 250,000-acre land title deed for parts of the Maasai Mau Forest to Narok County, further alarming the Ogiek of Sasimwani, who remain displaced following the 2023 forced evictions of over 700 families. 'We call on Government, all states institutions and Indigenous Peoples to engage in dialogue grounded in mutual respect and human rights,' the Special Rapporteur said. He expressed readiness to visit Kenya to support efforts toward a just and rights-based resolution in line with the AfCHPR's judgments.
