NZ Labour: Build Houses

Why can't the New Zealand Labour government build houses? They're the party that invented the state house. Housing Minister, Phil Twyford has just been sacked, fair enough he proved useless but you also have to question the entire Labour team. There is a real dearth of talent in the NZ parliament right now.

KiwiBuild: Doing Something

A lot of criticism coming Labour's way over Kiwibuild and their allowing people on somewhat higher incomes to qualify for one of the government's affordable homes.

This kind of criticism is quite unfair and forgets New Zealand history. Since the mid 1930's, NZ governments have always built houses to sell or to rent out. This has been done to mix up neighbourhoods so you don't end up with ghettos. On one side of the street State houses for rent, on the other, State houses for sale. It has worked well, NZ has led the world in providing housing for its people.

Those opposed either aren't that clever, or they're greedy. Under the last National government things drifted badly. National didn't do the construction and that lack of supply forced up house prices as the population increased. More people were chasing the same number of houses.

The winners in this scenario were existing home-owners. They did well and many National voters want to continue pocketing those capital gains. But that isn't good for society so they'll just have to suck it up. NZ needs house construction and it needs it yesterday.

Bill English: Housing Denier

It didn't take long for the incompetence to emerge after John Key resigned as Prime Minister. The new PM, Bill English, has a bee under his bonnet about housing. He wants to sell off the state housing stock to private investors, a staggeringly stupid idea. New Zealand can be proud of its past policies which have seen affordable housing built by the government. Whole suburbs such as Naenae, Wainuiomata, and Upper Hutt were built by the state (or the greater part of them) from one end of the country to the other.

The way they used to do these suburbs, was on one side of the street they'd build State Advances housing, these were houses the occupier would own, the money being lent by the government through State Advances (later becoming the Housing Corp) on favourable terms. Then the other side of the street were state rentals at a reasonable rate. They did it this way to mix the areas up with tenants and owners, they didn't want to create ghettos. 

You could always tell which houses were rentals as they never had a garage. The state helps out and houses people, it doesn't provide a place for them to park their car, if needing state assistance then they should be taking the bus or train, ride a bicycle or use Shanks's pony. 

On the side of the street that was State Advances, they could have a garage and houses could be altered at the design stage. I have a story about this, to give the reader an idea of what the pace of development was like. A few years ago the son of the state architect in charge of Wellington rang me to discuss things and in this conversation it came up that my uncle was one of the builders contracted to build the state houses in Lower Hutt. He said my uncle was building houses so fast his architect father asked him to slow down, he was building houses so fast they couldn't produce the plans quick enough. 

Now fast forward to today, few state houses are being built and we have a PM who not only wants to sell those state houses off, but in his Cabinet line-up just announced he's scrapped the title of Minister of Housing. This is nothing short of outrageous and all New Zealand should be up in arms.

Quite why English hates state houses is a mystery. Does this go back to when he was young and denied housing because someone more needy got in first? He lives in a state house himself of course, with his many kids. Yes, he's a total hypocrite.

This will just be the start, Bill English with his faux Southland accent (note he's dropping it lately) and born to rule ways must be defeated at the box office, he's nothing but a menace.