OPINION: When Te Puea marae threw open their doors to the homeless earlier this week, they showed up the Government for its woefully inadequate response to the housing crisis.

Housing Minister Nick Smith's insistence that there is no housing crisis, and Social Housing Minister Paula Bennett's fudging of the facts over budget allocation for 3000 allegedly 'new' beds for emergency housing, added to the growing public perception that the Government, at best, had a cavalier attitude toward the homeless, and, at worst, didn't have a clue about the enormity of the situation.

The Prime Minister could hardly castigate his cabinet ministers for their blunders as he put the biggest hoof in it of all when he went on Paul Henry's breakfast show and gave the flippant response to the problem of people living in cars and garages, that they should simply contact WINZ and all would be miraculously sorted out.

It may be news to John Key but it's common knowledge that running the gauntlet of burly security guards at the gates of the welfare agency and dealing with the hostilities inside, is a degrading experience.

Not having an address to give, or access to a computer and the appropriate literacy skills to jump through the required hoops to get a benefit means many give up and have to live outside the norm. The bullying criminalisation of the unemployed and the unhoused has been a deliberate ploy to keep unemployment numbers down, but it has dire consequences.

With a low wage economy and crippling rents it doesn't take much for the working poor to slip through the cracks and join the ranks of the outsiders.

That outsider group has become so big in number and is such a visible rebuke that they are fast becoming a force to be reckoned with.

Occupy Nowhere or Occupy Garage and Car may not be organised or militant but they are a presence – a growing silent army of dispossessed that cannot go unnoticed.

The country has been extraordinarily lucky with its balmy El Nino weather that must have had energy providers wringing their hands worrying about unusual seasonally low household powers bills, but now that the winter is finally upon us, those with the luxury of shelter and access to the flick of a switch for warmth turn their minds to those left out in the cold.

If marae have the basic human decency to open their doors to the dispossessed and to send out the haere mai that "everyone is welcome regardless of colour", so too should the Government. The army should be ordered to erect temporary tent cities to show the Government is serious about all New Zealanders, not just the protection of ponied-up ones riding high on the hog of speculative real estate.

Allowing so many immigrants – a record 70,000 to flood the country -- and to take their money as long as the green backs flow through the Government coffers to achieve Finance Minister Bill English's mythical surplus, and to continue to allow foreign investors to buy our land in a decadent exchange of blankets and beds for i-Pads in schools, has to stop. Now.

The spectacle of New Zealanders living in tents would be an admission by the Government that they had failed, but if the need for, and Government responsibility of, more social housing isn't addressed quickly, expect more burglary, more child illnesses, more illiteracy and sexual abuse, a wider spread of third world diseases such as TB, more theft and social unrest.

Auckland residents have begun to notice the phenomenon of 'ghost houses' where houses in their streets have been put on the market and swiftly snapped up but - hello, hello there doesn't seem to be anyone one at home.

Wealthy speculators both here and overseas don't want to risk having their assets sullied by the renting class, or contaminated by P-users, opting instead to leave their properties empty as the housing market continues to rise unabated to the point where they can sell for a substantial profit.

This cynical speculation only ramps up the price of rentals and embitters young putative home owners being squeezed out of the market. Surely it's only a matter of time before those with nothing left to lose decide to move into the ghost houses and start squatting.

Why not pre-empt that takeover/takeback strike and pass a law that any house left vacated for more than six months should be forcibly occupied and rented out?

As an Aucklander begged the question to me recently – 'Why bother scrabbling round in the dirt trying to get low wage employment when you can use your Auckland home as leverage to buy another one, and another one, and another one with no worry of a capital gains tax and access to low lending bank rates'?

Working is for dummies, get with the real world losers - the only job that really matters is property speculation.