Missing the positives

Lesley Soper’s attempt to cry wolf over social housing (May 12) fails.

The Social Housing Reform Programme (SHRP) is designed to get more people in need into quality social housing – either through Housing New Zealand Corporation (HNZC) or registered Community Housing Providers (CHPs).

The objectives of the Social Housing Reform Programme are to help people who need housing support get it and the social services they need.

It will also help social housing tenants to independence, as appropriate and allow more local innovation and responsiveness to tenants and communities.

Any transfer of houses will not affect the rent tenants pay or their eligibility for subsidised housing, and properties transferred as social houses will also have to stay as social housing unless the Government agrees otherwise.

There are a number of tenants with long and medium-term needs, which gives CHPs the opportunity to integrate housing with other services they may provide, like mental health and disability services or budgeting support.

The social housing model seen in the UK shows how local providers can be more responsive, supportive and innovative than a national programme.

Ms Soper should see the positives, rather than searching for negatives that are not there. There are many parallels between David Russell’s brilliant article ‘‘TPPA can do no good for NZ’’ (April 25) and the incessant global roll-out of smart meters.

Josh del Sol, film-maker and rights advocate, persuasively reveals in his multi-award winning film that smart meters are a surveillance and control conjob.

To view, Google search ‘‘you tube – take back your power’’.

The United States has 50 per cent of homes fitted with smart meters so far. Rising consumer resistance is being met with massive corporate-governmentutilities collusion, deception, corruption and blatant lies.

His film outlines no energy savings, massive increasing power costs, in-home spying, numerous ill-health effects, hacking vulnerability and house fires.

Belligerent utilities in America that install unwanted smart meters face many cases now before the courts to pursue their removal.

Smart meters in the UK are proving to be a fiscal and administrative disaster.

The majority of states in the US now have active groups opposing smart meter installation, including those that now want their removal.

Smart meter installation is an assault on your person, privacy and property.

The silence and omissions about smart meters and the secrecy surrounding the TPPA is criminal.

Both TPPA and the smart grid are Elysium on steroids.

Any comment supporting smart meters, without viewing this film, would be misinformed and invalid.

Please be encouraged to view this portentous film for your future wellbeing. Be profoundly alarmed and outraged.

If you don’t say no to a smart meter in writing, utilities impose installation under the premise of your ‘‘implied consent’’. Negotiations on the TPP (Trans Pacific Trade Partnership), which our Government is so keen to sign, seem to have fallen on rocky ground.

President Obama is pushing it but the US Senate supports him not – the Republicans because he is their ‘‘Great Satan’’ and the Democrats because the conditions of this partnership are secret until after signing. ‘‘Just what corporate devilry are we all signing up for?’’

The trouble is, we’ve been there before, in the early 18th century.

In London that was a time of great economic chicanery.

The wider world was becoming known and all sorts of fanciful schemes to gain its riches (or those of investors) were in the air. One of the most intriguing was a proposal ‘‘for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage but nobody to know what it is’’.

I don’t know what happened to it then, but the hope seems to have survived for 300 years.