One Billion Dollars

Written By: - Date published: 1:57 pm, October 18th, 2016 - 6 comments
Categories: housing, same old national - Tags:

Treasury papers just released show National’s Housing Infrastructure Fund to be everything you expected it to be: a quickly cobbled together headline.

For National’s party conference they needed to come up with a big sounding number so that they could appear to be doing something about Housing.

Treasury and other ministerial advisers all said it wouldn’t do anything in the short-term, it might do something to help a little bit in 5-7 years.  Infrastructure does need to be built for new houses (it is one constraint), but it wouldn’t affect Auckland housing supply and prices alone, or any time soon.

Of course right from the off it was obvious it wasn’t what it appeared.  It wasn’t $1 billion dollars toward fixing the problem, it was a loan.  So real cost is just the interest.  (“20 million towards Auckland’s Housing Problem” doesn’t sound as good though).

And as Phil Goff has pointed out they could use $17 billion of the $1 billion loan available, just for Auckland infrastructure.  $1 billion sounds big, but that’s less than 1000 houses in Auckland these days…

6 comments on “One Billion Dollars ”

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  1. Siobhan 1
    18 October 2016 at 2:23 pm

    Well, yeah, but its a pretty sweet subsidy for developers.
    Should be worth a few votes to National from the developer, builder and investor class.

  2. Sacha 2
    18 October 2016 at 2:32 pm

    Allowing the Council to issue long-term infrastructure bonds would be a better fix, but central govt hates letting go of those purse strings.

    • Bunji 2.1
      18 October 2016 at 2:40 pm

      NZ does have the most centralised government in the OECD…
      Loves to put constraints on councils, but not give them ways to pay for them other than rates (and then complains when rates go up).

    • tc 2.2
      18 October 2016 at 3:21 pm

      Yes they removed the akl regional fuel surcharge setup by previous govt which was designed to fund akl’s neglected infrastructure.

      You get a much larger opportunity, sooner to plunder the regions this way whilst whining about austerity as your mates do ever so nicely out of it.

      Simple maths is required from the opposition, the numbers don’t lie…..national do.

  3. Colonial Viper 3
    18 October 2016 at 3:18 pm

    And why not a loan? Keeps English’s books and surplus looking top notch. It’s what the commentariat seem to love, and every time the NATs spend more they get hammered by the Opposition on their deficit.

    • dukeofurl 3.1
      19 October 2016 at 9:08 am

      Infrastructure spending /loan wont increase the decifit as its considered to be in the capital spending ledger.

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