Housing and homelessness has been top of the public agenda this year. Over the weekend Labour rolled out a genuinely comprehensive response:
Build more affordable houses
Create an Affordable Housing Authority to fast-track development in our cities …
Build 100,000 affordable homes across the country …
Growing the building workforce …
Remove barriers that are stopping Auckland growing up and out …Crack down on speculators
Ban foreign speculators from buying existing homes …
Tax property speculators who flick houses within five years …
Consult on rules around negative gearing to prevent abuse by speculators ….Support for those in need
Focus Housing New Zealand on helping people, not making a profit …
Help 5,100 more Kiwis into emergency housing every year …
Require all rental homes to be warm, dry, and healthy. …
See Labour’s page for details under all these headings, and there’s plenty of media discussion. In contrast to the dithering Nats, Labour is promising to actually build houses – to fix the problem.
National are going to have to do better in response than Steven Joyce managed yesterday. His panicked series of tweets was unhinged.
Really no.
You’re selling houses. Labour wants to build them. Spot the difference much?
Let’s hope Joyce is just lying there, because if he genuinely doesn’t understand he’s an idiot. It works like this: build a batch of houses, sell them, use the proceeds to build the next batch of houses. Repeat. The $2bn is just to get you started.
That’s a beauty! Steven Joyce is now writing Nat policy on Twitter. The promise to forego 2 years of HNZ dividend has just been made up on the fly.
Extraordinary.
And all Key can manage is to try and pass the buck to the Reserve Bank, then get all pissy when they pass it back.
National are unable to take the actions required to actually address the crisis. They are ideologically opposed to some (significant curbs on speculators, capital gains tax) and appear to be simply incapable of others (build some damn houses!).
We need a Labour / Green government.
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