National believe in being a hands off Government. They claim by stepping back to allow the free market to take over is the philosophical preference of any Right winger.
So how is that free market dealing with the homeless and the housing crisis in Auckland?
The homeless are being drenched with freezing water…
‘Inhumane’ Auckland city businesses drenching homeless with water
Auckland business owners are dousing homeless people outside with water in an effort to shoo them away from their shop fronts, but critics are calling the method inhumane.
… Maori land is at risk of being seized…
Henare warns against housing land grab
Tāmaki Makaurau MP Peeni Henare says Māori land is at risk of being stolen again after Housing Minister Nick Smith revealed that he would use the Public Works Act to free up land for housing.
…and we have 33 000 ‘ghost’ houses that speculators aren’t allowing to be rented out because they gain more from the capital gains than they do from renters….
Ghost homes – properties lie empty in spite of crisis
Inner-city Auckland apartments and residences in Manly, Takapuna, Newmarket and Gulf Harbour rate highest for empty or “ghost” dwellings, an analysis shows.
John Polkinghorne, associate director of specialist property consultancy RCG, said a breakdown of the city’s empty dwellings showed these areas had the highest number of vacant dwellings on Census night.
Stanley Bay, Turanga, Grafton West and Glen Innes East have the next most vacancies in the top 10, he found in his analysis of the 33,330 vacant dwellings from the last Census.
This is the free market at work, prices in Auckland close to hitting a million dollars, tens of thousands homeless and hundreds of thousands living in over crowded conditions.
And the Government’s response? $5000 one way tickets out of town, slandering Marae’s that are helping, passing welfare reform that throws beneficiaries onto the street and blocking inquiries into the homeless.
Our housing crisis is a market failure because it’s been left up to the free market. National are in utter denial because they have built their Government on selling off their social obligations to others.
There are plenty of options for a hands-on government. One good way to start is to introduce a serious tax penalty (say 20% of value/year. I mean serious) on those Ghost Dwellings.
Second Andrew Little might like to clarify his “no falling prices” statement, given that Bill English has opened the door for him by advising wannabe home owners to hold off for a bit – until Green – Labour win the next election, presumably.
Little could certainly say “we won’t artificially force prices down in the private sector, but as the day approaches when there is enough housing for all…you do the math”.
The problem is that his idea of selling affordable homes, (at around $600.000) with a tidy profit for their free-market construction collaborators, will just make things worse if prices actually fell to their more credible value. Those houses might normally be expected to sell for, say, $400,000. So they would be putting those first home buyers in an an invidious position just as the market starts to sag.
They are far better off building only rental accommodation, with the rent demanded paying for the construction. They are also far better off reintroducing a Ministry of Works to build them and separating this work from house-building in the private sector, where selling to lucky (ballot-selected?) first-home-buyers, (who would not be allowed to sell for -what? – two years?) would skew the market without any hope of usefully controlling it.
Further down the track, when the market is calmed by the availability of sufficient housing, they can allow occupants to buy their houses where appropriate but not until stocks meet demand.
Those who are absolutely determined to buy can already do so. Just not in the maelstrom of the Auckland housing market.
What is “a market”?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market
Types of physical markets
Bazaar
Farmers’ market, focusing on fresh food
Fish markets
Flea market
Floating market
Grocery store
Market square
Market town
Marketplace
Night market
Public market, in the United States, an indoor, fixed market in a building and selling a variety of goods
Souq
Street market, with stalls along one or more public streets
Supermarket
Wet markets, in Greater China (in Indonesia called pasar pagi)
There are many markets, sub-markets, exclusive markets and what else one can think of.
So re housing in Auckland, we have a “residential property market” that only caters for the section of the population that has enough money or access to funds, who can play a role in it, all others are SHUT OUT of this market.
Indeed in Auckland now MOST are shut out, so we can hardly have “market solutions” for ALL people in Auckland, or let alone in New Zealand.
It is a bit like a luxury goods market now, where only the rich can play and buy stuff, the poor are not part of “the market” we presently have, so what is the purpose of focusing on such a “market”?
As we can see, it has many meanings, “the market”, it can have many forms and shapes and sizes, be inclusive or exclusive, all this talk about “the market” solving the “challenges” the government talks about are utter drivel and BS, as for a starters, we would have to create a market where ALL can participate.
This is how far neoliberal brain washing and ideology have driven us, we even have the stupid MSM go on endlessly about “the market” and bla, bla, bla, while “their market” is NOT OUR MARKET, is not there for most of us, and does not benefit us.
Therefore, we need a radical solution, and destroy or abolish this failed exclusive, sectarian, rich favouring market system, and get back to basics.
Indeed, the failure of the systems we now have leave only the state as large player there, to solve the problems, but this present government does not want to go there, for ideological reasons, and for reasons of political expediency, as it serves their voters, the property owning part of the population, or many of them at least, to keep things as they are.
Consequently, this government must go, it does not cater for all of us, it caters for the markets serving the exclusive class of people, the rich and upper middle class, and they better watch out, as we will take them to account, and tax them, to remedy the flaws that have happened over recent decades.
Screw “the market” that does not serve all of us!
See also
That’s disgusting behaviour from these business owners. I think they really don’t have any understanding of what is happening in there own city. They must be living in a bubble or something. This kind of behaviour will in the long run come back to bite them…
A better strategy would be to invite them in for a quick morning coffee or cuppa on condition that the shop front is clean and tidy 40 minutes before trading starts.
Martyn, do pls take off your Auckland-centric glasses. There are those of us who live elsewhere in NZ. Recall what the rest of England did to the London-centric pro-EU lobby in the Brexit campaign. Pls don’t encourage a similar divide here.
“National believe in being a hands off Government.”
Except when it comes to our publically owned rail!
As we see out in the provinces are having a hell of a time trying to save our declining rail services because of Government funding cutbacks so we see Government interfering directly in weakening the rail service for the express benefit of making trucking of freight more lucrative for road freight companies, and that is definitely not “a hands off Government at all is it Martyn so this Government lied again for the almost 500th time in eight years.
Once Capitalism turned homes into “assets” traded on the “free” market, it was inevitable that the majority of our housing stock would eventually be accumulated into the hands of a small number of very wealthy speculators.
Just as you can’t be a little bit pregnant, likewise, you can’t flirt with property speculation for private homes. You can build 100k, a million homes, as they have done in China, with empty apartment buildings and ghost cities for hundreds of miles, and the average citizen will still be priced out of the market. They are a store of excess wealth, and the appetite for these wealth-tokens is limited only by the willingness of the world’s Central Banks to keep printing money.
The government knows this. The Opposition knows this. They all know it! Just as they know that there is really one solution too horrible for them to contemplate…
SHUT DOWN THE COMMERCIAL MARKET FOR RESIDENTIAL INVESTMENT PROPERTY.
Building more state houses would ensure rental investors would either opt to not bother or charge more reasonable rents. A stamp duty (maybe 3%) for all house sales over 500k -the first 500k would be exempt – would generate revenue which could be ploughed back into public sector housing. CGT for all houses which are not the primary residence. Ban all non residents from buying existing properties……..maybe a combination or all of these would help
[…] room. It’s when these safety nets have unravelled that homelessness becomes a reality. And as this blog post pointed out recently, the Free Market deals with homelessness in a spectacularly cruel […]
The “free market” at work, with great success for some:
“Landlords renting out ‘unsafe’ conversions”
http://www.newshub.co.nz/nznews/landlords-renting-out-unsafe-conversions-2016071918#axzz4EpoJ2gUr
“Last year the council issued more than 700 notices in the whole of Auckland requiring owners or landlord to ‘fix’ their properties – most related to buildings being used as accommodation without consent.
But in just the past six months, the number of complaints in central Auckland alone jumped to 750 with a further 600 in south Auckland – almost 500 of which related to unconsented dwellings.”
See also that photo with an “illegal piggery conversion”!
Thank you, Mr Key, “the free market” works like a miracle, piggeries turned into rental units, just “magic” and “innovative”!
So tonight we learn, that the shocking homes that were “managed” by an apparently migrant “property manager” (see Newshub and TV3 News), were homes filled by people referred there by WINZ!!!
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/309070/work-and-income-sent-families-to-garages
Paula Bennett, Minister for Social Housing was “unavailable” again, to answer questions by John Campbell on Checkpoint.
WINZ are sending those in needs to see slum landlords to “help” them out with garages to live in!
Is this again the “market at play”?
“EMERGENCY BEDS NOT ADDITIONAL
$41.1 million had been announced in the Budget for emergency housing over four years. The money would fund about 3000 emergency beds over a 12-month period, with about 800 beds available at any one time.
However, Bennett clarified the emergency beds were not additional – they were already existing beds.”
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/80110083/social-housing-minister-paula-bennett-cant-guarantee-housing-for-homeless
I’m guessing that what Paula Bennett meant when she said she would providing more that 3,000 emergency houses was a slip of the forked tongue.
What she probably meant was 3,000 emergency garages. Easy mistake to make really, when put under pressure by a hostile left-leaning media.
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