His warning came in the same week that New Zealand was featured in one of United Kingdom's national newspapers in a story about the New Zealand housing crisis.

The Guardian feature quoted Darryl Evans, CEO of Mangere Budgeting in South Auckland.

"On some roads in South Auckland every second house has additional accommodation erected - be it an occupied garage, a portable cabin with a chemical toilet, or tents pitched on the front and back lawn."

"Up until a few years ago, a family member might let you camp in the garage at no cost, as a temporary set-up," said Evans.

"But now landlords have cottoned on to how desperate people are, and are renting out garages or Portakabins for hundreds of dollars.

"This is not people who haven't been trying. They have been trying very hard and still they're failing," said Campbell Roberts of the Salvation Army, who has worked in South Auckland for 25 years.

"A few years ago people in this situation were largely unemployed or on very low-incomes. But consistently now we are finding people coming to us who are in work, and have their life together in other ways, but housing is eluding them."

Last week the government announced NZ$41.1m for emergency housing, but with winter mere weeks away, charities believe any assistance will come too late for most.

"We warned the government six or seven years ago that a housing crisis was looming," said Roberts.

"Successive governments have ignored our warnings, and now look where we are. The worst homelessness I have seen in 25 years."

"You might be able to survive like this in the summer, but you can't in winter. You just can't live like this in a New Zealand winter."

Pope Francis speaking on Wednesday morning at the weekly General Audience in St. Peter's Square decried the inequality and contradictions in the world as he reflected on the parable of the rich man and Lazarus.

He noted that the lives of these two people seem to run on parallel tracks; their living conditions are opposite and totally non-communicating: the rich man's front door is always closed to the poor man who hopes to eat some leftovers from the rich man's table.

Source

theguardian.com

en.radiovaticana.va

Image: theguardian.com

While roughly one-quarter of Republicans (26%) and Democrats (25%) say the lack of jobs is America's most important economic problem, Republicans and Democrats strongly differ in their views of the importance of the budget deficit (31% vs. 7% most important) and the increasing gap between the rich and the poor (6% vs. 21% most important).

Americans are generally pessimistic about upward economic mobility. Nearly half (47%) of Americans believe that their generation is worse off financially than their parents' generation, compared to 16% who believe their generation is doing about the same, and 36% who believe they are better off than their parents' generation.

The Silent Generation (ages 66-88) is the only generation in which a majority (59%) believe they are better off than their parents' generation. Only one-quarter (26%) of the Silent Generation believe their generation is worse off than their parents' generation. Baby Boomers (ages 49-67) are divided (45% worse off vs. 40% better off). Majorities of younger Americans in Generation X (ages 34-48) (51%) and Millennials (ages 18-33) (58%) believe they are worse off than their parents' generation.

A majority (54%) of Americans agree that hard work and determination are no guarantee of success for most people, while 45% disagree.

There are substantial divisions by income level. Nearly 6-in-10 (59%) Americans with household incomes under $30,000 a year believe hard work and determination are no guarantee of success, a view held by less than half (48%) of Americans with household incomes in excess of $100,000 a year.

Less than one-third of Americans believe the federal government is either generally working (7%) or working with some major problems (24%). Roughly two-thirds say the federal government is broken but working in some areas (40%) or completely broken (26%). Continue reading

Sources

• Public Religion Research Institute
• Image: Bloomberg

• Should young people be able to jump queues for costly drugs at the expense of older people who've already had a long life?
• Are poor people more deserving of help than rich people"?

The proposals are among a raft of provocative questions being asked by Pharmac as it conducts a consultation exercise about the criteria it uses when deciding how to spend its budget, which last year was $783 million.

Other questions being posed are:

• Should the underprivileged groups such as Maori and Pasifika get priority access to drugs?
• Should it take into account the ability of parents of sick children to return to work?
• Should it assess the future earning potential of children?
• Should it have different priorities for providing treatment of conditions considered "preventable", compared to those that are genetically based?

Source

• Stuff.co.nz
• Image: Hacklive.ru

Wellingtonian of the Year and former City Missioner Father Des Britten said there was no doubt things were getting worse.

Unfortunately in today's world it was up to each person to pull themselves out of a bad situation, he said.

Father Britten had been in the unique position of serving up food to both Wellington's wealthy, when he owned top restaurant The Coachman, and to those down on their luck while at the Wellington City Mission.

"It is up to individual responsibility and at the mission we tried to help people to help themselves because you're never going to be happy living on a benefit."

City Missioner Susan Blaikie said she had previously worked in the corporate world where beneficiaries were seen as bludgers.

"But I don't know anyone that actually wants to be on a benefit. The bigger the gap is between the richest and the poorest, the more likely there will be social problems and crime."

The Reverend Blaikie had spent the last decade working with the church and said the issue was worse today than ever before.

She was concerned that no major party had produced a serious policy this close to the election.

The Salvation Army's social services spokesman, Major Campbell Roberts, said he had seen the gap grow over his 40 years there and in recent times more people were worse off.

"Even over the last two years there has been a significant increase in people coming for welfare services. At the same time you've got salaries at a level which have increased significantly.

"This is most probably a reasonably recent thing over the past 15 to 20 years."

People who had a long history of working and contributing to society were losing their jobs and more families were struggling for the basics.

At the Catholic charity St Vincent de Paul, national council chief executive Anne-Marie McCarten said more government agencies were referring people to charities. Read more

• Source: Sunday Star Times
• Image: The Dominion Post