With all the brouhaha surrounding Brexit, the Australian election and the government's billion dollar infrastructure offer over the weekend sucking all the oxygen out of the room, another issue has passed by relatively unmentioned.

At the National Party conference, Social Housing Minister Paula Bennett announced that the government was looking to build up to 150 prefabs on vacant crown land to provide emergency housing, particularly in Auckland. The prefabs could come online by April next year. It's a similar tactic as the one used to provide emergency housing in Christchurch after the earthquakes.

My first reaction was how did we come to this? Building temporary shanty towns to cope with our most vulnerable.

Admittedly it's better than the idea to buy decommissioned cruise liners, drag them to New Zealand and stick the homeless in them. That idea sounded like floating ghettoes and reminded me of convict ships from 200 years ago. And it's a much better idea that getting WINZ to mass book motels for the homeless and then billing them later. But even so. Yikes.

One thing I'm learning about this government is their cautiousness. In this poll driven, focus group approach to public policy age I've learnt that if the government goes for an emergency idea then they probably should have been thinking about it years ago.

I've been hearing about homelessness for a few years now. It's not just the dropkicks and the losers of this world who have been forced to spend nights in their cars. I was contacted by a listener a month ago telling me about a couple in Nelson, both working low paid jobs, who found themselves homeless and dragging the duvet into the drivers seat. I know of a former millionaire taken to the cleaners by a wife who left him last year who's just got to his 6th week living in a second hand car.

With so many New Zealanders just one pay packet away from destitution loads of people have been forced into cars, garages or couch surfing.

None of this is new but it's accelerating. The government oversees a social housing department that runs 69,000 houses. While state houses haven't been state houses for life since 2014 you wonder how many were reserved for emergency purposes. Obviously not enough if they have to build prefabs.

Yesterday Housing New Zealand was accused of being slack. They said they'd build 2000 new state houses a year and built just half of that. They claim that the remaining half have started construction which they have, but I don't care. They still missed a mandated target. Not good enough.

I just wonder, if we've got to the point of building shanty towns for people forced to live in cars long term, whether the people charged with helping house the vulnerable are actually up to the job.