A decent home has access to core services and infrastructure Our homes must have essential facilities such as clean running water, power, sanitation, internet access, access to emergency services, and other core services and facilities. These services are essential for our health, security, and dignity. A decent home reflects respect for cultural diversity Our homes should enable and support people to live in accordance with their cultural ways of being such as intergenerational living or papakāinga on whenua Māori. This is particularly important for a country aspiring to inclusive multiculturalism grounded on te Tiriti o Waitangi. Many of our communities, including Māori and Pacific peoples, have models of living that include whānau or ‘aiga (extended family). Our homes and housing system need to reflect our cultural diversity and different ways of living. Our housing system also needs to respect cultural diversity in other ways such as ensuring that regeneration or new housing projects do not sacrifice places of special cultural significance. The full right to a decent home will take time to achieve Many of the features of the right to a decent home will take time to fully achieve across our housing system. It would be difficult and unreasonable to expect it to be fully implemented overnight. Ensuring everyone has a decent home takes time, but the government has a responsibility to take intentional actions towards achieving this goal. This is called progressive realisation. It doesn’t mean the government can avoid or delay its responsibilities. It must work as quickly and effectively as it can, and take steps which are deliberate, concrete, and targeted as clearly as possible to reach a place where the right to a decent home is a reality for everyone. So that we can measure how well we are making progress, it’s important to use indicators and benchmarks that help track improvements. Indicators include data and statistics from work like the Census and other kinds of data, and benchmarks set standards or targets to achieve. There are also some features of the right to a decent home that are so important they can’t be achieved by gradual improvement over time – they must be delivered immediately. These include: • Freedom from discrimination – for example, the government is required not to discriminate against disabled people in its housing policies and initiatives. It can’t reduce existing discrimination over time; it must stop direct discrimination immediately. • Providing temporary emergency housing for people who are experiencing homelessness. This emergency housing must be clean, dry, safe, secure, in good repair, and delivered in accordance with equity, equality, and nondiscrimination. The right to a decent home is also about our housing system. Making the right to a decent home a reality, while also honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi, doesn’t happen by chance. It requires a housing system that is fundamentally based on human rights. The right to a decent home in Aotearoa – for individuals, communities, and advocates 5