6 steps to fix the Labour/Green driven affordable housing crisis

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There are quick fixes (existing housing for emergency housing) and longer term fixes (building housing), both are needed, and there are tourism and immigration impacts.
Firstly, focus our scarce building resources on building affordable housing. A focus will help bring down the price to build.  So remove government supports for private demand for building resources i.e.
  • Remove interest deductibility for tax on ‘build to rent’ businesses. This brings them into line with other rentals, so they have to stand on their own two feet without government tax subsidies.
  • Remove the ability of developers to bully build up to 6 stories in our historic green residential suburbs.
Why? Private enterprise builds housing; but to survive they must maximise profit. If a price is high, as currently for housing, they will work to keep the price high as that will maximise profits e.g. the rental market in Wellington has hundreds of rentals available but empty. This helps retain high rents on their active rentals elsewhere. There aren’t cheaper options for existing renters to go to, so they stay. Housing sales also follows same techniques to maximise profits even though the market is down.
Note: With housing values dropping are we getting affordable housing?  Real Estate Institute reports the national median house price for August 22 was $800,000.  And the median hourly wage from Stats NZ for June 22 was $29.66 — so x 40 = $1,186.40 a week, x 52 = $61,692.80 for a projected median annual salary. Houses used to be 5 times the salary. So for there to be affordable housing in New Zealand the median price for a house should $308,464. Get real, this is way off being affordable. The best you can hope for with these prices is a crushing mortgage for the rest of your natural life. Say goodbye to having children.   We are still in the thick of a housing affordability crisis despite dropping prices.
Secondly, because it is a crisis you must also suppress excess demand on our limited supply of housing.
  • Turn the immigration tap down.
  • Turn tourism down a bit. The short term rental market for tourism uses housing, e.g. AirBNB.
  • A targeted tax on short term rentals that are in houses. (apartments?). This can be policed as they must advertise.
With emergency housing using motels, where are tourists going to stay? Freedom camp? Just as Government is trying to clamp down on it. It raises the question, is there co-ordination.
Thirdly, plan where to build.
People want to be near existing services, (shops, entertainments, social services) transport. This saves on new infrastructure costs, like light rail. Savings can be used on building for the  affordable housing crisis.

 

In Wellington build affordable housing over retail car parks, and near or over train station car parks (sound proof them) on Hutt and Porirua lines.  E.g. Kilbirnie Pack n Save has a large north west facing carpark with lots of sun and views. Countdown across the road.  Over J’ville Mall carpark. Croften Downs (but no others are suitable on J/ville line).  Te Aro is full of asphalt car parks.
In Auckland build affordable housing over or very near existing train stations. So much retail and semi industrial could be accommodated under housing  (not all stations are suitable if they shade or overbear too many). Sylvia Park has huge capacity for affordable housing. Great views on that line and you’re not destroying the suburbs or your voters. Onehunga Line, create an extra rail line beside the existing lines and extend it to the airport with much fewer stops so its a faster train (large cost but can be done with Public Works Act). This better networks the public transport system and adds more value to the recent extension for the City Rail Link.
But Government must change zoning laws to allow residential to be linked to retail and transport, so down the lifts and you’re in the shops and transport. What businesses lose they gain in customer proximity. Use the power of government to bend a few private business owners. Don’t delegate your power so others can bully your voters.
Fourthly, what to build is mid rises (5 to 12 stories)  Most cost effective for the amount of housing needed and gained for the effort.
China’s building downturn means there is huge building capacity available now. (Having seen You Tube clips, perhaps we do the foundations and finishing — which would speed up building more). I suggest China because the crisis is urgent and very real and they are a major trading partner. There are obviously political considerations.
Fifthly, existing housing stock must be fully used. Government needs to get hold of houses urgently for emergency housing as it is too long to wait for building.
  • Ghost houses. Either seize these houses under the Public Works Act or create an instrument so they are repaired to an excellent standard for emergency housing. The cost to do this becomes a loan to the owner of the house with interest. If not fully repaid to the government at the time of sale, the balance is recovered at that point. Govt accounts balance with an asset, the loan.
  • A large tax on empty houses?
  • A legal requirement to rent out your rental or a large charge applies after two weeks vacant. This forces the market down and will positively impact even existing customers as they could move.
  • Change tax rules so no tax loss on ‘a’ rental is allowed. Then no advantage in having a property empty to offset to other rentals.
  • GV sale offers to rental owners looks good in this market.  If they sell the consideration is some sort of 10 year government bond/instrument (owning a house was a long term investment, so the bond is long). Government then pays back interest and principle fortnightly at a rate as if the person was getting rental income. This means the money doesn’t just pour out of the government and keeps a continuity for the person.
There are many more ideas than this.
With the building resources focused government can more cheaply contract with builders.  Once built they can sell apartments at cost to first home buyers or for a small profit. Some must be used for emergency housing. Contract to build at minimum 100,000 apartments in mid rises. The urgent need is 30,000 for emergency housing but you also want others living in the areas so ghettoes are not formed. Using exisiting housing will help and these newer houses will bring down prices.
Sixth, wake up centrist Labour and Greens and use the power of government to build affordable housing for all first home buyers. Not to delegate your powers to private developers to bully build over your voters so they don’t vote for you.  Cooperation and pandering to National has not blunted their criticism. This is your crisis and you are bungling it. Your facilitating private enterprise plans have failed because, only the government can build affordable housing.
p.s. Stuff, has not taken up the option to publish this or other articles about affordable housing. They do seem to more readily publish articles pro intensification and bully building.

51 COMMENTS

    • Reply to Castro at 5.59am ‘Hi, mass deportations? I assume you think this is funny? It’s a wonder you didn’t actually suggest something more final. Ownership for citizens – not impossible. This would be a rationing access by citizenship. Places like Monaco ration access by money, I assume that is what you want. I think John Key pretty well sold passports, so getting there.

    • Reply to Andrew at 8.02am “Hi, Yes i agree it’s Bizarre that the government is following this failed private enterprise route to deliver affordable housing. Private enterprise just can’t get it up.’

  1. Wake up the Party that was gonna fix it? Wake up the Party that even refused to admit that they were loading Rotorua with homeless from elsewhere for years? Wake up the Party that negotiated with Rotorua new Motel leases to house the homeless for an extra five year? That fucking Labour Party? the Green Party? that party that thinks biology is for suckers, kids can choose sex, and that sits on a sparkly unicorn waving dollar bills about?
    C’mon dude, you can do better.
    I know you are old school left, but seriously your point Nr 1 should be no housing subsidies for Government, no lunch subsidies for Government, min wage payement and if they then are successful at the end of their term a bonus. If that gives them the shits? Who cares, resign, make way for someone who actually cares and wants to fix this issue. This current lot deserves nothing but kicks in the guts. All of them, repeatedly until they hurt.
    Close the country? dude the country was closed until it was ‘opened’ in April this year and then fully opened about two month ago. It was so closed that to keep you and your fellow angst driven citizens safe that even Citizens were not allowed to return. Tourist? lol. Tourists are the least of your problem as the tourists from overseas have their own issues of high costs, low income and unaffordable energy and housing. You want to scapegoat tourists again? Fuck me, but who gives you these leached dry talking points?
    Force people to rent out houses? Dude, the law forbids houses to be rented if they don’t have an Air Conditioner, something most beneficiaries don’t use cause it’s too expensive. Because this country builds houses like they live in the tropics, never mind the – temps and the rain. Dog kennels have a higher building standard than houses for human consumption.
    The reason we have a housing crisis is because the people whom you expect to fix it, have no personal gain to make from fixing it. The NGO/Charity/Government Charity/ to government pipeline- the academic idiots of AUT, OTAGO University, the diploma mill of wellington would actually have to get real jobs in the real world and that would be hard work. So we let some more people fall into poverty and then like you write an op ed to ‘fix’ it, and voila money is to be made and votes to be harvested.
    . Maybe, we need a good old “land reform’ a bit like the old commies did in Russia and east Germany.
    Or just actually seriously look at the problem, do some town planning, proper forecasting and build were services are already existing, rather then do that panic throwing of band aids at corpses that are already dead. I.e. unused down towns. The country has empty downtowns everywhere, empty shop fronts of which many have upstairs flats – to be rented for ‘offices’ lol, and re-build these. But of course, why not take away some reserves from some underserved areas of town, and build a glorified ArdernVille Shanty town, that will need to be demolished for leaky building syndrome etc, in a few years, just to do the same again. Never mind the social costs to these underserved communities. So as long as the rabble is kept away from the good parts of town, where the polite and learned people live.
    You want to fix the housing crisis, demand that houses can no longer be converted into ’boutique’ office space (thanks Helen Clark), demand that office buildings that are nothing else but ‘tax write offs’ be refurbished into apartments, demand that fringes be build up. Create a rental mirror – set limits as to what can be charged in rentals, build were the amenities are and build up. There is empty ‘ space’ galore in this country it is just that no one can afford it, and that government does not want to call out the landlords – and it ain’t ma and pa nz – that don’t want to rent cause the loss made on a rental can still be used to get a tax write off against some gains elsewhere. Why don’t you ask for the closure of any loopholes in regards to property speculation and land banking?
    So many things that could be done. And here we are another write up telling us we should do the things that have not worked so far.
    Btw, the tourists rent apartments and houses – the few that come – because the Motels are full with homeless people. And the country was closed for two odd years to everyone. So please strike that from your list as clearly having the country closed did not change a thing in itself. It is the government that should be closed down and another voted in. At this stage, anyone would be better then the current lot in government on housing, and anyone would be less cynical then the so-called Left and its standard bearer the ‘labour’ party.

    • Fabulous RB good old fashioned truths.
      Unfortunately the Ardern Labour Government don’t have the mental capacity to do anything.
      Quite simply they don’t know what to do.
      Out of respect to the people they have betrayed they should resign.

    • Great response Reactionary Bratwurst!

      You make an excellent point about rural towns. This is something central government could do quickly: Initiate a policy to decentralize central government. With today’s internet access there is no reason to put all the civil service in Wellington. So, relocate entire departments out to provincial towns that desperately need an injection of population and cash. Start with Stats NZ which is supposed to be independent of government anyway.

      Benefits:
      > A boost to rural economies
      > Solves the housing shortage in Wellington
      > Reduces the cost of rents for students attending Vic uni.
      > Reduces the load on creaking infrastructure in the capital
      > Improves government resilience by moving people away from an earthquake/tsunami nightmare that could arrive any day.
      > It would force the civil services luvvies to meet some real people with real jobs.

      • What you are suggesting is just a government centralise decentralise recentralise waste merry go round. Everynow and then government departments move offices out to Hamiton and Palmerston North and back again. Change for change sake is a lucrative game for bureacrats. A new name, a new logo anyone?

      • My wife works for the public service in Wellington and enjoys her role. I have an established career. We own our home in the hutt valley with kids in primary school. And you think we and thousands of others like us (the ‘department’) will uproot our entire lives and move to Whanganui or Hastings so the public service can build “resilience” and students can get lower living costs? Comments like this are just ridiculous and so far removed from reality they’d never be taken seriously. The govt already has lots of regional headcount.

        As for Stephen Minto’s idea of forcing private property owners to relinquish their asset to house undesirable motel guests…….when pigs fly. If we want to reduce house prices we need to free up land and help councils fund the development of services with govt loans, among many other practical solutions. Not communism!

        • same choice as is offered to many ordinary workers when their employers close or relocate raf, relocate or dole you have the choice

        • RAF, then look for employment in the real world if you don’t want to move.

          In my working life I’ve moved countries 5 times on three continents to advance my career, and while resident in NZ have worked in New Zealand, Australia, USA, Indonesia and PNG.

          Yet you won’t move towns. Pathetic!

      • Reply to Andrew at 12.12pm ‘Hi, you are coming from a conservative viewpoint, so where are your market forces guiding the distribution of population. Very into a command economy point of view. I think you would meet more real people in a city if you went to one. As real as the ones you meet in the country. And a few of your points were interesting and I thought well of. I hope that doesn’t put you off them.’

        • Stephen, have you sat in a Wellington cafe recently and taken a hard look at the clientele? LOL It’s a freak show! Wellington is one enormous circle-jerk.

          I come from a ‘do what works’ perspective. These government departments are all part of the state anyway, so I’m just saying we should maybe spread their GDP around a little.

          But, given the opportunity I would shut half of these ministries and departments down because they achieve little or nothing, then give the taxpayers back the money the government stole from them. Now that IS coming from a conservative perspective! 🙂

    • Reply to Reactionary Bratwurst at 8.45am. “Hi, nobody said ‘close the country’ except you. Hyperbola doesn’t help your coherence. Private enterprise has not fixed any of the problems you talk about, so I have no idea why you think a change to a conservative government will help. In fact there is no National/ Act policy on these issues that have any substance whatsoever. No skin in the game is just jingoistic rubbish.

  2. Instead of all this talk in society these days about ridding churches of their tax exemption status, let’s encourage them to fund more social housing.

    • Reply to Dan at 8.46am “Hi, Churches should have their tax exempt status taken away because they are very much businesses now. Having weekly concert performances, strobe lights, rock bands. If they want to do social housing nothing is stopping them. If your word ‘encourage’ means give them money to do this. Then what accountability will the funder have? Many non-profits simply lack the professionalism and experience to do housing efficiently and effectively. As a govt contract is simply cheaper and more efficient. Less middle men.

  3. It’s even worse than you highlight.
    Houses used to be 2.75 times medium salary, BEFORE financialisation that started in the mid-late 80’s.
    You used to only be able to borrow 2.5-2.75 times the first salary and 50% of any second (partners) salary, PLUS the bank/building society, wanted to see that you had actually saved up (with THEM) the MINIMUM 20% deposit.
    Like USA education, once people could borrow more, price PURELY went up because they could, and due to ‘money prinring’ caused purposely by Govt/Central banks, what ‘Joe Public’ calls inflation. It is really money depreciation-devaluation.

  4. You have made some good points. I agree with point3, that significant intensification (5+stories) needs to happen around areas with good community infrastructure, such as in cities centres, near train stations and malls. Johnsonville town has too much under utilized space, and that is all on the mall owners and council.

    Tax is a tool that either encourages or discourage investment. Labour has penalised private landlords and incentivized large company investments. The new taxes added by labour are an anomaly when compared to tax in other investment classes. Labour tried to fix rise in housing prices, created due to low interest rates, printed billions and easy access to cash, by creating a tax anomaly.

    I do agree that ghost houses should get tax penalty. However 2 weeks will never fly. Houses being empty for 6 months would be more practical.

    I had to laugh at “only govt can build affordable housing”, is that a joke? Govt are good at spending other peoples money, after all someone is always there to pick the tab.

    • Reply to Benny at 10.51am ‘Hi Benny, you make some good points. I agree that the changes Labour made have favoured large companies holding housing. Particularly ring fencing just targets the ordinary person holding a house. I agree with your point about anomalies and I have written about how to fix that previously but at the same time if you want something done variations can be done by tax changes or fiscal changes. Either can work. it’s true private enterprise can’t build affordable housing. Where is it? 30 square metre or less studio apartments are no good for families. The big growth in affordable housing came with the 1st Labour government. I think Labour/Greens are desperate to fix the affordable housing crisis but everything they do is making it worse because they are listening to the wrong people.

  5. Start planning and building a set of model houses in allowing for individual living with reasonable privacy, but on a neighbourhood style and do this in remembrance of Queen Elizabeth ll. How about that along with this one day to remember someone who carried on with her duties as head of her nation and many offsiders.
    https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/474637/remembering-the-queen-new-zealanders-react-to-bonus-day-off

    Queen Elizabeth Drive we have in Nelson. What about a Queen Elizabeth hamlet* in each town and city. When I was in London I lived in a flat in a divided house in Kilburn – it had a short garden in front and at the back which was walled there was a door leading to a large playing area lying along the backs of the houses surrounding it on four sides. Excellent in closely built up housing areas. Go for that and you have a wonderful, great disruption to packing case housing put up by those with calculators where other people’s pleasure in humanity and soul would be found.

    *hamlet – (not a small ham!): a small settlement, generally one smaller than a village,
    and strictly (in Britain) one without a church.

    • Reply to Grey Warbler at 11.38am. ‘Hi, I’m not against your ideas in some places. It just sounds a bit sprawling and takes up a lot of land and that means more pipes etc. As long as it didn’t take good farm land.

  6. “Firstly, focus our scarce building resources on building affordable housing.”
    So funny… I’m sitting in a friends house looking at a wood chip mountain looming over Bluff Harbour.
    And who’s chips are those Bro? Not ghost chips, but Fletcher Challenge Chips.
    Fletcher Challenge need a wee spanking. And not in that fruity kind, aye boys?
    Fletchers and one or two others have us and our country by the balls and when we get squeaky, they squeeze harder. They also have our politics chained to a post in the back paddock, they have huge wealth and MSM clout and all you have to do is read the toothless, flavourless rag that’s rnz’s website to see how The Boys have their flat feet on the necks of our pathetically talentless and gutless dancing nancy journalists and media writers.
    All the rich, manipulative sociopaths have to do is create a vibrant and false, logical-fallacy economy by borrowing foreign money then lending on the domestic property market and Bingo ! You have a very effective control mechanism over our MSM. A flouncy smiling dipshit on high-end six figures will have costs associated with their lavish, bullshit lifestyles so they ain’t gonna rock that particular motherfuckin boat.
    Are they!? No.
    Scarce building materials my gorgeous arse. There are billions of tons of alluvial gravel, specifically in the South Island, and we have ‘an unusually consistent reserve of high-grade limestone’ i.e. cement!
    https://www.engineeringnz.org/programmes/heritage/heritage-records/portland-cement-works/ in the North.
    As a flash and high end Locations Scout I used to get to fly all over the place in helicopters ( Now drones FFS) and I’ve seen tens of thousands of hectares of pine forests and they’re the ones that get chipped bro. Chipped and shipped! Imagine milling a few hectares and building all the houses needed to HOUSE THE FUCKING HOMELESS! But just like the recent gib board scandal that mafia-like fletchers just subjected us to, they also control milled timber output.
    Nu Zillind’s a funny little thing. We have vast resources of proper stuff and things and it’s covered in the fat arses of hugh fletcher and his political minions and we, consequently, never get to fucking see it. In Nu Zillind, in case you didn’t fucking know there are strata. Our politics and our economy is stratified. Layered, like a cake, if you will. As in stratified sampling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratified_sampling
    “In computational statistics, stratified sampling is a method of variance reduction when Monte Carlo methods are used to estimate population statistics from a known population.[1]”
    That’s what they’ll use! Statistical methodologies.
    Fletchers, for example, will employ well educated people to give them an edge over us mere mortals to make billions, but wait ? There’s more! Fletchers, as an example, will also own and operate our politics. Our politicians will be, by example, all bought and paid for to act in the best interests of their business interests. Otherwise, we’d not have poverty, homelessness and general hardship.
    Poverty, homelessness and general hardship are, I would argue, a necessary part of their modus operandi. A necessary consequence of neoliberal-capitalist corporate-fascism.
    If you haven’t seen this yet… now’s probably a good time. Sit back, relax, be mortified.
    ‘Inside Job’
    https://youtu.be/T2IaJwkqgPk
    The opening bit about Iceland should be of particular interest to us AO/NZ’ers.
    Small, locally owned banks servicing a financially healthy population got parisitised by the bigger corrupt Ponzi scheme-esque foreign owned banks then those banks asset stripped the locals and left Iceland in ruins.
    “Ferguson, [ The director ] who began researching in 2008, says the film is about “the systemic corruption of the United States by the financial services industry and the consequences of that systemic corruption”. In five parts, the film explores how changes in the policy, environment and banking practices helped create the financial crisis.”
    Seriously. You must watch this documentary.

  7. I’ll bet when you walked out of IRD for the last time, it was a load of your shoulders @ Stephen! Now free to see the utter stupidity of the cistern the managerialist ideologues have created.
    If the past 5 years are not evidence enough that any of these brilliant ideas can’t happen, the next election is probably going to be.
    Me thinks things probably have to get worse before they can get better, and probably the sooner the better before you run out of life.
    There used to be an old saying in them there ‘olden days’: Too many Chiefs and not enough Indians.
    Starting in the 80s, and accelerating ever since, it’s got worse. The Chiefs job now is to monitor KPIs and tick boxes; lie (or tell “mis”truths); call meetings; capture their responsible Munster by whatever means; and inculcate the Indians with the latest managerialist ideology with various nudge nudge wink wink promises, often hinted at in their performance appraisals. And it’s worked by and large.
    Strange a it may seem, IRD are the least of the problem, and those such as yourself act, and acted ethically.
    Not so elsewhere – and it will continue until it collapses under the weight of its own bullshit and spin.
    Unfortunately the left politicians, whether Labour or Green don’t and can’t get it because they now have an investment in the very cistern that’s keeping it all going. (UNTIL it no longer can). The sooner it plays out, the better.

    • Reply to Once was Tim at 12.57am ‘Hi, thank you for your insights. My only doubt is I’m not sure its about our politicians having an ‘investment’ in the system, it’s more about a deep seated insecurity around taking actions that may cause criticism. They are economically rudderless and copy many National/Act policy approaches because of their philosophy to facilitate business. A simply look at New Zealand History shows private enterprise consistently failed and had to have government bail it out. That is why we had a Public Trust, A State Insurance, a Bank Of New Zealand. They worked because private enterprise failed. And you have far more of a deterministic framework than me. It could easily just play out to more conservative and controlling governments.

      • ” My only doubt is I’m not sure its about our politicians having an ‘investment’ in the system, it’s more about a deep seated insecurity around taking actions that may cause criticism.”
        Points taken. Criticism/critique should be welcomed though
        …and …..
        “And you have far more of a deterministic framework than me.”
        Not only is that because I, and a few others at the time have had successful employment court cases brought about by devious and lying senior public servants committed to the managerialist bullshit neoliberal agenda (even though they’d deny a neoliberal label). And also because I closely monitor what’s going on in places like OT, and the Munstry for Everything and some of the other more dysfunctional government agencies. There are some good, and some bad. Unfortunately, the bad are really bad.
        Keep on doing what you’re doing – even if progress is slow, it’s liberating 🙂
        I’ll give you a wink next time you visit S&B

  8. NZ has to look after their existing citizens without allowing more people to move to NZ often with large families that then go into poverty and need Kāinga Ora assistance.

    “Marie Tuu, Paulo Petelo and their five children Sola, Milton, Rosie, Alisi and Solema, lived in emergency housing at the Camberley Court Motel in Hastings for nearly three years.

    They moved to New Zealand from Samoa at the beginning of 2016 and stayed with Tuu’s sister before she moved to Australia.

    When the landlord of the property decided to sell, they had no choice but to move into emergency housing in 2019.”

    While some sympathy for this family, they are a large family that moved to NZ from Samoa and after being in emergency housing for 3 years are now given a NZ state house. Apparently they are crying out for workers, everywhere, but for what ever reason people either don’t have to work or the work they have is so poorly paid they can’t survive in NZ.

    More and more overseas citizens in poverty will come to NZ if you are looked after here and can get NZ residency and benefits very easily, but this is at the expense of Kiwi kids who are then competing with all the newcomers in poverty.

    Likewise today announced government are funding more overseas teachers coming to NZ. Nothing for existing teachers to retain them in NZ with higher wages.

    That is the problem with NZ’s revolving door, poorer people are coming to NZ with children and elderly parents who require a lot of NZ services, this puts pressure on existing services and standards of care for NZ children, and experienced people can’t afford to stay in NZ, while government do nothing to try and incentivise them to stay.

    Soon NZ is going to be a place full of crime and poverty, if government keep pushing experienced professional people out of NZ while incentivising large families to come here, that can’t make ends meet.

    • “Soon NZ is going to be a place of crime and poverty”

      The stats support your assertion. NZ style of immigration while it makes business owners richer makes eveyone poorer on average.

      1973 population 3 million. Per capita GDP. OECD rank #16

      2003 population 4 million. Per capita GDP. OECD rank #22

      2021 population 5 million. Per capita GDP. OECD rank #26

    • Reply to saveNZ at 2.07pm “Hi I agree with a few of your points. On education the government should have given a much better pay settlement to teachers. That would bring up the quality of the teachers and their ability to stay in the profession. Labour seems always to want to spend on infrastructure not people. National would always ‘spend’ on it’s ‘core’ people. We are a pacific nation and I welcome our pacific people coming here. Yes there does need to be rules otherwise the islands might be stripped of their best and brightest. Business people are the main people who want immigration as they are more pliable for work and pay rates. They don’t want to raise wages and they don’t want employees they perceive as difficult. So it’s not about the Samoan family coming here its the ability of the work they get as being able to support them. National has made New Zealand a low wage economy by attacking unions.

  9. Things must be bad for Labour on the subject of affordable housing …Even Bert can’t defend them on this issue…

    • Reply to Robs Mob at 3.47pm. Things are bad on the subject of affordable housing because Labour has fully bought into using National/Act policy. You should be supporting a proper Labour govt after Rob Muldoon being such an economic idiot on a colossal scale. Calling compulsory super communism and costing us hundreds of billions of dollars that could have been in an investment fund for the nation. Business would have loved it. Squandering money on Think Big. Carless days! What an idiot, and some of his supporters were idiots as they called him an economic wizard. Well he did make the wealth disappear.

      • Thank you Stephan for your reply…You say I should be supporting a proper Labour government…I would , but I have not been able to find one since the Kirk years…If you do find one let me know…You are correct about Muldoon cancelling the Kirk super scheme so it seems , but one would have to wonder if the billions in an investment fund would have survived the 1987 crash or other wheeling and dealings along the way…As you say , business would have loved it…..I bet they would have…As far as Think Big goes I don’t know enough about the details of the pricing and if it was worth it in the long run…Clyde Dam must have been a plus surely and I’m sure there are experts who can explain if the Marsden Point refinery was worth building at the time. There seems to be some displeasure at its closing. Your comment about careless days reminded me that I got a fine for driving on a Tuesday. I can’t remember how much but it was the day that was on the old Hillman I was driving at the time.Most families only had one car back then…except for the wealthy who might have had two cars…..Muldoon was certainly disliked by hardened Labour supporters and the stories of him destroying the economy have grown from strength to strength as the free market has been able to weasel it’s way into our lives and convince us it saved us from economic ruin…Great….tell that to the homeless …I’ve always had the impression Muldoon was trying to hold off the free market as his generation had seen the full effects of it. There certainly has been a downward trend in living standards since the 14th of July 1984 as my memories of before are of a decent country. I can’t remember youths and teens ram raiding shops and shootings in the streets daily and the constant murders…Homeless living in motels….What next…Pasture to pine’s and buying our daily water from an overseas management fund…..

  10. Another example of the Labour Government’s inability to govern?
    Labour using National/ACT policy?
    Don’t they have any ideas of their own?
    Last 2 elections they said they said they would fix these problems but you say they don’t have any ideas of their own so we’re they telling lies?

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