Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Damage to your home - paying for repairs

On the 20th December 2010 we received a letter from Housing New Zealand claiming we had damaged the property and informing us that we had to pay $1430.29 by the 24th December. Clearly this is an early Christmas present from the government department to cap off the other vexatious actions they are taking.
When we moved in to the house some 10 years ago the house was not exactly in tiptop condition and, given our circumstances, was our only option so we accepted it. We had a reasonable relationship with our tenancy manager and over time some problems were resolved. As would be the case with any tenancy or landlord we liaised with him and sought his permission before doing anything to or in the house.
Housing New Zealand however has continued with their relentless persecution of our family in what appears to be a common practice to extort money from those in need. There seems to be a great lack of checks and balances to ensure fairness and equality and little interest in sticking to their charter and customer promise let alone the enactments of government put in place to protect tenants.
At this stage I am hesitant to comment on a completely itemised list of what they are claiming and as to the evidence we have that rebuts their claim due to the fact we have not decided as to what action we need to take to deal with this albeit via the tenancy tribunal, district court or government ombudsman and if criminal charges will be laid against them.
I am also mindful that Housing New Zealand as we have seen are a large government sanctioned organisation and that they have an endless budget and resources to throw at people as they have been doing to us to make people’s lives a living hell.
To give you an idea as to the pettiness of the matter in, Bucklands Beach we use recycle bins and these are collected every 2nd Thursday. We moved out a week prior to the collection, and all that was required was on the Thursday after the next, the bin needed to be put on the side of the road for collection.  HNZ charged us for the removal of this as well as the removal of bricks and other things that were at the property when we moved in.
These actions pretty clearly support my claims that Housing New Zealand have been using their position to victimise our family and relentlessly cause us as much grief as they can and regardless of the fact that we were forced to move out due to Housing New Zealand not adhering to the work order set by the tenancy tribunal and purposely misleading the courts and the tribunal.
And what does the government have to say about this? Well at present the only thing we have been told is that this is an operational matter with Housing New Zealand.

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