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Key’s lies on housing rort exposed
Written By: - Date published: 5:54 am, September 9th, 2009 - 13 comments
As I alluded to yesterday, the claims from John Key that he has slashed hundreds of thousands of dollars from the cost of ministerial housing are rubbish. The media did a pretty good job of exposing the lie (except TV3 who just had some junior reporter toeing Key’s line). Here’s how it works. Ministerial services […]
A rort is a rort is a rort
Written By: - Date published: 10:00 am, September 8th, 2009 - 48 comments
And by any other name it smells as bad. John Key has annouced a reform of the rules for ministerial accommodation allowance. A fixed, automatic allowance will now be paid to all out of Wellington ministers of $37,500 a year for their Wellington accomodation (or $30,000 if they own the house), slightly less than the highest spending ministers […]
The emerging landowner class
Written By: - Date published: 8:05 am, August 31st, 2009 - 38 comments
Why are house prices rising at the same time as mortgagee sales are hitting record highs? More people than ever are unable to meet their mortgage, and a growing proportion of them owned only a single home. It’s not just speculators losing their shirts. With so many people losing their jobs and few people getting payrises […]
Apply the brakes, before it’s too late
Written By: - Date published: 8:45 am, August 27th, 2009 - 27 comments
The real estate agencies and the newspapers, both of which have an interest in a booming property market, are predicting that housing prices will surge over the next three years. Apparently, houses will go up 11% this coming year and 24% over the next three years. Let’s have a look at what that looks like, once inflation […]
Double bubble trouble
Written By: - Date published: 12:56 pm, August 13th, 2009 - 19 comments
It’s a rare day that I agree with Bill English but he’s right about the danger of another housing boom. The last bubble has not deflated yet we are already seeing prices start to grow again. There are now projections of 24% growth housing prices over the next three years, in a period when GDP […]
One of these things is not like the other VI
Written By: - Date published: 7:44 am, August 4th, 2009 - 48 comments
One of these things is not like the other One of these things is not quite the same. Can you guess which one is not like the other Can you tell me before I finish the game?
Sunday reading: Life in sub-prime America
Written By: - Date published: 1:29 pm, July 26th, 2009 - 7 comments
Exiled Online, a US site, has excellent coverage of the recession and the sub-prime crisis from a ground-level view. Yasha Levine moved to Victorville an ‘exurb’ of LA (100 miles from LA centre) to experience the crisis first-hand. His reports are a must read – well written, well researched, hard hitting (hope you’re not too […]
What goes up
Written By: - Date published: 5:21 am, July 7th, 2009 - 15 comments
There’s a lot of empty, over-optimistic talk around at the moment about ‘green-shoots’ in the economy. Supposedly, these are little early signs of recovery which mean that soon everything will be back to normal and we can go back to getting rich selling each other houses with money we borrowed from the Japanese. Things will get […]
1600 Dead Again
Written By: - Date published: 1:52 pm, May 17th, 2009 - 34 comments
Each year and every year, around 1600 New Zealanders die prematurely because we live in cold damp houses. This “excess winter death rate” is four times higher than the road toll. They die, most especially the young, unwell, disabled and elderly, of respiratory illnesses, strokes and heart attacks because far too much of our housing […]
Healthy Homes, Healthy Kiwis
Written By: - Date published: 4:37 pm, March 17th, 2009 - 42 comments
Well I’ll be, it seems Labour is finally starting to act like an opposition. They’ve set up a campaign website on home insulation – Healthy Homes, Healthy Kiwis – and have started a petition calling on the Government to commit to a home-insulation retrofitting programme. It’s not a bad looking website, and they’ve even managed […]
Gratitude
Written By: - Date published: 4:49 pm, December 17th, 2008 - 39 comments
I haven’t commented on the maiden speeches yet (we’re doing some analysis later) but I can’t let this stand. Aaron Gilmore, the bottom-ranked National List MP who got in by 39 votes, is having his maiden speech. He started by remembering growing up in a state house, going to school, a teacher giving him some lunch. […]
Time to reconsider Hobsonville
Written By: - Date published: 10:34 am, December 17th, 2008 - 29 comments
After initially saying they would cap the number of state houses, National/ACT’s Housing Minister Phil Heatley actually got informed. Despite the good work that Labour did increasing the number of state houses and their quality, the problem has not been completely solved – there are thousands of families still in need of affordable housing. Now, Heatley says, there […]
The housing question
Written By: - Date published: 11:15 am, December 1st, 2008 - 55 comments
Good housing is a foundation of a healthy society, and it is something that New Zealand has long lacked. Despite leading the world with our state housing in the 1930s, we have fallen behind. Housing in most other first world countries is much warmer and drier than here. That has important consequences; a study by […]
The Standard line: Showerheads
Written By: - Date published: 9:20 am, October 15th, 2008 - 41 comments
So, you’re talking with someone about politics and they say something really dumb and wrong and you know it’s wrong but you don’t have the arguments and facts at your fingertips to make a decisive point. That’s where our election series, The Standard line, comes in. The info you need in bite-size form. Today, showerheads: Counter-points: […]
Wrong time for short-term thinking
Written By: - Date published: 10:55 am, October 14th, 2008 - 90 comments
National’s Nick Smith has announced that they would cancel the $1 billion fund to insulate New Zealand houses, which the Greens won as part of the Emissions Trading Scheme. This massive programme would improve energy efficiency, create warmer, healthier homes and would provide useful employment during the downturn. A study, ironically carried out under National and mentioned to me […]
Standard Scoop: Key gives poor another booting
Written By: - Date published: 2:35 pm, October 9th, 2008 - 24 comments
No, I’m not talking about National’s tax cuts, which would hit the poorest Kiwis in the pocket – John Key doesn’t seem to be content at just that. We have received an exclusive audio recording of Mr Key’s performance at the Helensville debate on Monday. When housing was an all-important issue earlier this year Mr […]
Key still hopping on Hobsonville
Written By: - Date published: 10:27 am, October 7th, 2008 - 22 comments
At the first Helensville candidates’ debate last night, John Key reversed his position on state housing once again. Despite using the years he lived in a state house as “a great marketing ploy”, Key called the plan to build state houses along with more up-market homes on the site of Hobsonville airbase “economic vandalism”. Then he […]
Social Report shows Kiwis better off
Written By: - Date published: 12:30 pm, August 28th, 2008 - 31 comments
MSD released its Social Report today, an annual publication that collates a wide variety of standard of living measures, and produces this awesome graph. The circle represents the status quo in 1995-97 each spoke represents a different measure (income, crimes per capita etc). If the spoke is longer than the circle than the measure has improved between 1995-97 […]
Landlords: youse are better off renting
Written By: - Date published: 8:43 am, July 23rd, 2008 - 31 comments
The graphic to the left was produced by the Property Investors’ Federation and was printed unquestioned in the Herald yesterday. The PIF uses the figures to claim Kiwis are better off renting. Here’s what’s wrong with them. First, it’s comparing the average rent to the cost of buying a median house. Rental properties tend to be lower […]
Positive moves on housing
Written By: - Date published: 10:58 am, July 9th, 2008 - 88 comments
Housing has always been an important issue for Labour. The First Labour Government instituted a massive State house building project, freeing working class New Zealanders from slum landlords, creating healthier living conditions, and stimulating the economy during the Great Depression. Now, New Zealand faces some of the same conditions as existed at the start of […]
Reality check
Written By: - Date published: 10:13 am, May 28th, 2008 - 29 comments
Housing NZ’s decision to hold a conference for 94 staff at the luxury Tongariro Resort raises serious issues about extravagance in the public service. My first instinct, like others, was to assume the worst and condemn the Ministry for its extravagance with public money. Clearly $65,000 for a 90-person conference sure sounds like a lot […]
Telling porkies
Written By: - Date published: 9:50 am, May 22nd, 2008 - 44 comments
The Herald and National have started attacking every piece of government spending as pork-barrelling. Here’s some of what they’re calling ‘wasteful, needless spending’: $750 million of new health spending ($160 million for elective services) -Pork $700 million for Fast Forward Fund, food and pastoral sector research -Pork $665 million to buy the national rail operations […]
What the hell is the sub-prime crisis?
Written By: - Date published: 10:46 am, March 19th, 2008 - 49 comments
The sub-prime crisis is at the heart of the world’s current economic problems. It all boils down to financiers playing fast and loose with the rules of how money works, and the US government not keeping an eye on them. Essentially, they created a whole new class of interest-bearing pieces of paper that were supposedly […]
National’s house of straw
Written By: - Date published: 5:38 pm, February 14th, 2008 - 13 comments
Affordable housing is the topic de jour. The foundation of affordable housing in New Zealand and other developed nations has long been houses built by the government and rented cheaply: state housing. Since the construction of the first state house in 1937, it has been a history of Labour building them and National selling them […]
Affordable housing
Written By: - Date published: 9:15 am, February 14th, 2008 - 5 comments
Not in my back yard. Alright, maybe in my back yard but only if the state isn’t involved. UPDATE: No Right Turn has an interesting post on Key’s privatisation plans.
Key hopping on Hobsonville
Written By: - Date published: 9:39 pm, February 13th, 2008 - 40 comments
Just spotted this statement from Maryan Street up on Scoop which suggests at least one reason why Mr Key would like the issue of housing afforability to go away. Hobsonville is turning into an embarassment for him: In June 2006 he said on National Radio: “So you’re talking about very expensive land. I mean, I […]
Own home dream
Written By: - Date published: 7:10 pm, February 13th, 2008 - 27 comments
Is tax really the answer to housing affordability? The editorial in the NZ Herald today motivated a reader to send us these observations: ‘It has long been a dream for New Zealanders to own their own home and it is not a dream that we should dampen. Helping families own their own home may increase […]
Clark targets housing affordability
Written By: - Date published: 3:57 pm, February 12th, 2008 - 24 comments
In her speech today, the Prime Minister announced a slate of government plans on housing affordability. New land will be freed up for housing but it will not a National-style free-for-all where land would be gobbled up by wealthy individuals and private developers for over-priced, up-scale housing that will exclude most people. Rather, areas will […]
The Herald still campaigning for National
Written By: - Date published: 9:26 am, January 22nd, 2008 - 99 comments
Yesterday The Herald reported that: Demographia, an international survey business run by Hugh Pavletich of Christchurch and Wendell Cox of the United States, today issued its fourth annual report, showing New Zealand has slipped drastically on an international scale. Now quite aside from the shoddy methodology of the study to which the PM has already […]
You asked for it Auckland
Written By: - Date published: 10:36 am, December 14th, 2007 - 17 comments
From The Herald: The Auckland City Council has scrapped its plan to build affordable housing. The last council signed a contract with the New Zealand housing Trust to build 100 homes for lower income families. The contract was worth $9 million. Mayor John Banks says it was a pet-project with the last council and one […]
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