Wednesday, 10 September 2008

The Govt will steal your home

A man's home is his castle? That hasn't been completely true for years, but a new law is finally nailing the coffin shut. As Owen McShane reports, after the softening up, the deluge:

I trust that no missed this story which reports that government or TLAs may get the right to seize people’s homes for whatever higher-density housing redevelopment is mandated by local planners. Private property rights are fundamental to our democracy and economy. I never believed that any government of New Zealand would even contemplate “stealing” people homes so that others should live in an urban planner’s high density utopia!
The idea that this solves unaffordable housing is laughable were it not so tragic.
I cannot believe this could be contemplated in NZ.
I have seen how this operates in the US, says Owen, and its a means of cleaning out Black and Hispanic neighbourhoods so that councils (who purchase the houses) can then sell at a cheap price to their developer mates.
The corruption around these schemes immense and inevitable.
Another reason to go to Australia!

America's Castle Coalition fights these "eminent domain" cases as they're called in the States, and their site documents the abuse about which Owen talks. And of course, there's much more here at NOT PC, including the tale of how Donald Trump used this means of corruption to put up a carpark at one of his casinos. Or just google "Susette Kelo."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Organ grabs up for discussion
A government paper has proposed using compulsory acquisition of citizens’ internal organs if they are needed for intensive-scale surgical redeployment in poor and unhealthy patients struggling with a health shortage.
The discussion paper on organ redeployments has proposed compulsory organ donations as a "last resort" option if a reluctant individual is refusing to yield organs which were critical for a surgical development plan to go ahead.
The discussion document was put out for public submission by the Sustainable Organ Redeployment Unit.
The unit is led by the Department of Internal Organic Affairs with input from 10 government departments.
It said large-scale organ redeployment was becoming increasingly necessary to address the growing health problems in a growing population.
But because of the scale required, it often needed a number of healthy organ-owners to sell their guts or allow them to be used.
The document - "Building Sustainable Live & Healthy Communities" - said where there was an "overriding public interest" in donations going ahead, individual organ owners could be forced to sell rather than kill off the needy.
The paper said organ owners may be reluctant to sell their organs because of "a personal attachment to their heart, liver, kidney or lungs et cetera", an inability to generously sacrifice, or a greedy desire to continue their own smaller-scale activities.
Reluctant organ owners might also want to selfishly keep their own organs of which they may have more than one example, or were uncontactable, or "simply uninterested".

Anonymous said...

:)

Sustainable Organ Redeployment (Y)unit = SORY?

No, what am I thinking. Make it the Redistribution of Organs Officially Transplanted for Electoral Desirability ... ie, ROOTED.

Anonymous said...

Sus

Excellent!

"I'm from the government. I'm here to ROOT you."

LGM