I visited a budget service with my colleague Simeon Brown in his electorate last week. The good men and women there say their caseload of families needing help has exploded. They now have double-income parents turning up in distress, some living in their own homes now struggling to pay the mortgage. Those budget advisers fear how many more people will be entering their doors as cost pressures bite and more and more squeezed middle-income Kiwis have to roll off one fixed-term mortgage and on to a much higher interest rate. The budget advisers talked of rising rents, which are up $50 a week in the past year alone; of more and more people being forced out into temporary and transitional accommodation as the State house waiting list soars to the highest on record, with 27,000 New Zealanders now without a suitable home; and of parents trying to raise their kids in emergency motel accommodation, paying hundreds on petrol to get those kids to school so far from their temporary home.