Vic Crone is trying to make a story out of the fact that Phil Goff is against foreign ownership of our housing stock, but accepted $250,000 from the NZ Chinese community at a fundraiser.
Does she not see a difference between NZ Chinese and foreigners?
$150,000 was for one auction item and was bought by someone who happened to be in China at the time. Your current location does not determine your citizenship… If I go on an overseas holiday I don’t consider myself any less a New Zealander…
Vic, like Guy Espiner this morning, was no doubt trying to link to the Labour ‘Chinese-sounding names’ story. That story was statistically sound (it is highly improbable that Auckland Chinese with the same average incomes and lower average wealth than Aucklanders as a whole are buying houses at >6.5 times the rate of non-ethnically Chinese Aucklanders – therefore a lot of the houses must be being bought by non-NZ Chinese), but didn’t fit nicely into a news soundbite, so turned sour for Labour. It was always going to be easy to find NZ Chinese who were purchasing houses to ‘refute’ the study, as the whole point was that the data isn’t separated out, and needed to be. The government responded with a new skewed register that included student and other temporary visa holders as ‘New Zealanders’ as well as foreigners who bought through an NZ trust (and thus were registered for paying NZ tax). The government’s 3% foreign house purchasing is more likely somewhere between 13 and 29%.
Back to Crone – Goff was easily able to assert that he thought NZ residents should be treated the same, regardless of their ethnicity, that this was consistent with Labour policy, and indeed his constant reaching out to ethnic communities during his 3 decades in parliament. Vic’s smear just makes her look bad as she is the one who can’t see that NZ Chinese are as Auckland as everybody else who lives here.
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