Watching the 2023 election campaign in New Zealand, one of Labour’s challenges appears to be that it has failed to manage voters’ expectations over the last six years. Recalling the election campaign in 2017, Jacinda Ardern gave people hope that politics could be different. However government is about handling problems – like building at scale and pandemics.
Labour disappoints again. Individual investment rights trump collective responsibility for people having homes.
Idiot/Savant writes about empty houses and the homeless.
National is all over the place in its response to Peter Gluckman’s Housing Corp methamphetamine report with three different justifications being provided by three different senior MPs.
Reviewed on Stuff: “Who owns New Zealand now? The NZ On Air-funded documentary that screened on Three on Tuesday, September 12 confronts the housing crisis head on and it’s an eye-opener.”
Two excellent but very disturbing pieces in The Herald yesterday. This crisis in poverty, housing and health is a national disgrace. It is why we desperately need to elect a Labour led government in September.
Jacinda Ardern will not campaign on a capital gains tax, but will seek advice and will not rule it out in a first term. The Nats have introduced a week form of CGT already. A more robust version needs serious consideration.
Yesterday Phil Twyford debated Amy Adams on the housing crisis. Adams was hopeless, the Nats still have no answers.
Lots of big stuff going on at the moment, but other stories are significant too. The extent of the coverage of this blunder will be worrying the Nats.
This afternoon in Parliament during question time Paula Bennett showed clearly that this Government has no idea what to do about the housing crisis.
The homeless crisis is getting that bad in Auckland that people are dying because they have nowhere to live.
Two indicators both agree that the Auckland property market has started trending downwards. Over leveraged buyers are going to get burned, and first time buyers are still shut out. Perfect.
RNZ: The Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment ignored advice from the Reserve Bank over its new housing affordability measure, and made houses appear to be more affordable than they actually were.
The Nation did good work on the housing crisis yesterday. This is the Brighter Future that Bill English warned of in 2010.
The mess surrounding and “affordable” housing development in Manukau highlights a dilemma that sets ratepayers against those in need of a home. This needs leadership from central government. I won’t hold my breath.
PM Bill English denies there is a housing crisis.
In 2010 he knew about and warned of the housing crisis.
The Sunday Star Times had some gut wrenching coverage of the conditions in some of Auckland’s slum boarding houses. How can anyone vote for three more years of this?
It was National’s best budget. Which means there are only three critical areas of failure.
Good piece by Andrew Little where he addresses the arguments of the property speculators. “It’s common sense. Taxpayers shouldn’t be subsidising speculators and helping them outbid home buyers.”
John Armstrong is not impressed: Government’s handling of housing crisis lurches from chaotic to shambolic
It must be election year, because National has admitted that the market has failed, and swallowed the dead rat of state building. A useful graphic summary in The Herald lets you compare National and Labour’s housing plans…
Useful but – mostly re-announcing existing developments, far too little, far too late, and open to property speculators…
Labour has set the cat among the property speculator pigeons, and they don’t like it at all.
But only in Nick Smith’s head. See the finally released government Housing Affordability Measure (HAM).
Good work by Lane Nichols in The Herald, a window into the minds of what we must hope is small subset of “property investors”.
Bill English would have you believe that there is no housing crisis. He desperately needs you to believe it until after the next election. Is Nick Smith deliberately suppressing housing data?
That is the Nats’ advice to aspiring Auckland house buyers.
Sick of the property porn on the Stuff and Herald websites? It was refreshing to read the truth for a change.
Warnings on the state of the Auckland housing market are coming thick and fast now. People who bought recently (at the peak of prices and low interest rates) are likely to get burned.
It’s almost as if deliberately running down state housing stock doesn’t make the need for homes magically go away – who could possibly have predicted that?
While much of the coverage of the housing crisis focuses on buyers, the situation facing renters is just as bad. Last week The Spinoff ran an excellent series on renting in NZ: “It’s getting desperate out there”.
Excellent speech from Andrew Little in Parliament yesterday, on the government’s willful blindness to the housing crisis.
“And when I saw that article in the NZ Herald this morning , in light of whats been happening to so many New Zealander family’s having to sleep in cars and the like over the past few years – I thought ”FUCK IT !!”… Im going to say something.”
The IMF warns that our household debt is far too high, as desperate tenants start raiding the Kiwisaver accounts to pay the rent.
