I’m a Dr, gimme a house!
So, how many Government Ministers does it take to build 1000 KiwiBuild Houses?
3
1 to say it won’t be done
1 to say it will be done
1 to say ‘I’m not sure we ever said it would be done‘
One of my 2019 predictions seems to have already happened with Twyford’s admission he will miss the 1000 built in the first year…
Kiwibuild meltdown
If Labour had true courage, they would have recreated the Ministry of Works and built the bloody houses themselves! Phil Twyford’s terse admission that the program is for the children of the middle classes tastes bitter in the mouths of those living in shit conditions and who voted Labour in the hope for better. Kiwibuild will continue to underperform and remain a political weeping wound throughout 2019.
…there are 4 reasons why KiwiBuild is an enormous failure.
1 – Conception
What so many fail to remember about this bloody 100 000 affordable houses promise was that it was made by David Shearer at the exact time he was trying to fend off a challenge for Leadership by Cunliffe. I have spoken to the person who was Shearer’s advisor on this, and they admitted that it was a stunt to blunt Cunliffe’s aspirations and that it was never costed out because who would complain if they only built 70 000? Twyford inherited an un-costed political stunt, so let’s not be too harsh on him.
2 – Perception
What was always true about KiwiBuild was that it was for the children of the middle classes, it was never for the poor which means the homeless, those living in cars, beneficiaries, the working poor, those living in motels, the first generation of user pays – Gen Xers, and Millennials and the 1 in 5 children living in poverty were NEVER going to be able to afford these so called ‘affordable’ houses. But yay, a new Dr will get one.
Yay.
For the homeless, those living in cars, beneficiaries, the working poor, those living in motels, the first generation of user pays – Gen Xers, and Millennials and the 1 in 5 children living in poverty who voted for and hoped for a better future when voting for Jacinda, KiwiBuild is an abject failure and that could hurt when trying to rally them again for 2020.
3 – Free Market Capitalism stupid
Twyford, “believes the teething issues have come from the state of the residential construction sector, which is dominated by small firms, with low productivity, who are incentivised to build expensive rather than affordable homes.”
WHAT? The free market greed cluster fuck of a speculative housing industry with sweet fuck all regulations is geared to simply maximise profits and not build anything for the poor?
WHAT?
How is this possible? Private sector organisations only wanting to maximise returns? What on earth is that called? Free market capitalism? How long has this existed? Couple of centuries? How has that snuck up on us?
Sarcasm aside, how could the fucking bleeding obvious be a sudden surprise for Phil?
4 – Ministry of Wonks instead of Ministry of Works
You don’t solve a problem created by neoliberalism by adopting more neoliberalism. Labour always should have declared this situation as a national crisis and set up a bloody Ministry of Works and build the bloody houses ourselves, the way we did under Savage. Instead we have a Ministry of Wonks trying to cut deals with developers who don’t give a fuck about building cheap houses for the poor.
So what should happen? Bryan Bruce has some immediate suggestions...
•Better existing land use (urban sprawl just creates other huge problems)
•Long term leasing rather than ownership
•Collective and cooperative mortgages
•Temporarily restricting immigration flow
•A bottom up approach -build more social housing as a priority rather than a top down home ownership approach . This would reduce demand quicker and reduce house prices….
…on top of that, I would argue we need an actual Ministry of Works that actually builds the bloody houses ourselves rather than rely on trying to coax developers to build them. The market is built for speculation and greed, it has no interest in housing the poor, the Government has to harden the fuck up and accept that if they want to make the Politics of Kindness mean more than a photo op on the International Stage.
At some stage this new Government has to accept that it must fight neoliberalism rather than be kind to it.
Awaiting Chris Trotter’s ‘pronunciamento’ on this. It will be devastating.
Very obvious that the Ministry of Works desperately requires reinstating, and has been since the day it was destroyed. What has the govt frozen in the headlights are potential accusations from a very noisy opposition and its poodles in the media of resurrecting a modern day Titanic.
Jacinda should remain the kind face but the rest need to harden up and stoke the boilers.
Yes 100%
The suggestions of Bryan Bruce are spot on especially “Long term leasing rather than ownership”. He could go a step farther and suggest that all land should be on long term (99 year?) leases. All the land that comprises NZ should be owned collectively by all Kiwis, the Government being merely administrators. If the land cannot be sold, speculation would be impossible.
Hah, I expected this to happen also, probably even before Labour and NZ First and Greens together won enough votes to form a government. It was a flawed concept from the start, and the market environment created since the mid 1980s in NZ Inc would not even allow any government to get near building so many homes in whatever manner, without resetting the whole socio economic framework and rules.
Twyfords flirting with the NZ Initiative, Oliver Hartwich and Ockham Holdings was a betrayal of traditional Labour policy from the start.
He miscalculated, and blaming Shearer for it all, that is not going to work, Labour went with this policy for two to three elections, I remember.
Sadly Jacinda’s economic illiteracy is glaring, as is the lack of cojones amongst her ministers. But here at the TDB we all knew this would happen. Sigh! I agree time to harden the fu** up. We are with you still Jacinda ….but only just. Get tough you can do it. Revisit your Grandmother’s reasons for joining and voting Labour and cut the free market crap once and for all.
Couldn’t agree more. An awful lot of today’s problems stem from this neo-liberal monetarist/Rogernomics model such as the tertiary education and electricity sectors.
It should also be noted that only the Green Party supports the idea of mass building by the government itself
The middle class have already benefitted from our welfare state they called it the ‘middle class capture’ when I was studying policy @ uni. Mainly pakeha NZers benfitted from our welfare state cause they were the ones who had the jobs (government jobs)and they looked after their own, not Maori or PI. Now we have this going on again the same group this is not right and its not fair. And to make matters worse we have state housing land provided to build these 500k and up houses in areas these people would never have lived in before because that was where they put all the maoris and poor pakeha and PI people. And then we hear all this bullshit about who bludges of the government well whe has rally benefitted the most out of the state not fucken maori thats for sure.
Twyford is faced with severe challenges.
1, He’s out of his depth because…
2, He has no idea how building construction deregulation in the 90’s is still causing problems to this very day
3, He can’t see that investors are a problem that needs to be eradicated like small pox
4, He thinks private developers will come to the party
5, He thinks this can be achieved using NeoLib levers
6, He thinks we believe his bullshit that $650,000 is affordable.
The blame is far from Phil Twyfords making but he has all the innocence of a fresh snowflake when it comes to this cowboy – used car salesman – nest of vipers – dodgy industry that is property development, and that is like taking a water pistol to artillery battle.
I am still hopeful because Winston says the target will be met. What Winston stays, Winston delivers.
just like he delivered guilty till proven Innocent to the NZ courts, who promptly applied it to the poor instead of the rich tax cheats it was aimed it supposedly
I want proof. Guilty until proven innocent or putting the burden of proof on the accused is something the #metoo movement does.
@ LABOUR_VOTER.
Balls.
winston peters is a ‘deep state’ Machiavellian confederate designed to deflect and discourage investigation.
The image of Peters having a wee cup of tea with that monster Brash?
Lets see what brash is up to now shall we?
“ Former National Party leader, Dr Don Brash, chairs the Industrial Bank of China in NZ; former National MP’s ruth richardson and chris tremain are on the board of the Bank of China in NZ…”
Excerpt from Susan Dawson’s superb piece here.
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2019/01/19/breaking-exclusive-investigation-they-spy-with-their-little-eye-nz-spy-scandal-the-elephants-in-the-room/
If peters was consistant and honourable? Brash would have been lying, knocked out, on the foot path and the photograph would have been of peters then giving the fuck a good kicking whilst cheered on by the homeless.
The very last thing the Scum wants right now is for a government ministry to show up the pirate sector. ( Oops Freudian slip there. I meant ‘private’ sector)
The housing ‘crisis’ extrapolates alllll the way down to one basic fact; It takes a lot of societal poverty to create one billionaire.
Our beautiful AO/NZ is in $-tatters directly because of a broom cupboard full of Kiwi-as multi millionaires and billionaaires. It’s HOW they became multi millionaires and billionaires that should deeply interest any honourable government.
How terribly deeply hollow the Labour mantra ” Lets do this! ” sounds now.
Fantastic Post @ MB.
Winston is keeping up the talk, but in quiet preparing for retirement. He knows full well that this is his last term in politics, his last term in Office, the NZ First Party will not be back in Parliament in 2020, and never again after that.
Wait and see it unfold. The Greens may just hang in again, but there could this or next year be an internal bloodbath within that party, unusual for them, as they face self destruction under the present useless ‘leadership’.
Jacinda will not be back either, she is losing touch even more, while she travels to meet world leaders and big knobs at Swiss Alp resorts and in Bruxelles. She has a lot of ministers who struggle to get the handle of their portfolios, and also the challenges they face.
She is stressed out, good at PR, but lacks any expert knowledge on any particular subject, the slogans about ‘nuclear moment’ due to ‘climate change’ and so forth, they will sound hollow to most, she will not convince voters again, they will leave Labour in droves again.
Labour are screwed, NZ First are screwed, Greens are somewhat damaged, and National will create a new right party, giving it a seat or two, to try and regain power.
Problem is, next election will be a disaster for all, no solutions, Kiwis heads stuck deep into the sand, and more muddling through, with no direction, no solutions, and climate change continuing, while Kiwis carry on polluting and wasting.
Pak’n Save and others no longer collect soft plastics, the stuff is piled up in warehouses and on yards all over the country, no recycling, best solution they find is ship it to Malaysia or so.
NZ Inc is a FUCKED UP country, get it? And JT will not make a difference in Auckland, with promising cheaper petrol to the voters, with Christine, who voted for the Unitary Plan madness, screw Auckkland, screw the country, screw the idiots that keep voting in idiots and then blame the idiots to make idiot decisions.
Let’s look at the house count so far:
National – 0
Labour – 300+
They might have fallen short of the promised numbers, but at least they’ve acknowledged there is a housing crisis and are doing something about it.
For a more intelligent assessment of the housing crisis, read Simon Wilson in the Herald -as Phil Twyford says the more that is revealed about the machinations of the free-for-all building industry, it is clear that housing is a long term basket case and nothing is going to be fixed fast. There are no simple solutions, especially in NZ where ‘she’ll be right” “rough and ready” and ‘burn the furniture to heat the house’ is part of the nation’s DNA – plus the malign effects of generations of National’s free-market philosophy
AND Martyn Bradbury would have more impact if his every other word was not ‘fuck’.
Good article Bombarino. I actually agree with your summation.
Five years to set up a new MoW. Six months for an incoming National govt of neoliberal fuckwits to privatise it,. Back to square one.
In the meantime no houses are built because the Tories undermine any prospect of a new MoW.
a generation (at least) to reestablish anything like the expertise that was lost with the undoing of the MOW…and we aint got that long
One problem with New Zealand housing is we want it big and expansive. We have limited understanding of the problems urban sprawl create even though they are unfolding right before our eyes. Whereas other nations perhaps more aware of their environmental footprint are turning away from big is good; going outwards instead of up.
Our ecological footprint is one of the worst per capita in the world. And urban sprawl is a significant part of it.
Re shearer/cunnlife.
I seem to remember Labour doing that kind of thing to National over the bnz bale-out?
bloger had to use public funds to sort the bnz out to the tune of $300 mil? The money was to be used to pay for bolger’s pre election promises of increasing super an’ ? Instead? Bolger spent the money on the bnz,increased the age of entitlement from 60 to 65 then fay/ richwhite group slithered in, bought the bank, then on-sold it to the aussies? The aussies make, via what was our bnz, record profits from us kiwis because we kiwis are gutless cowards or are woefully ignorant of the ways of our politicians?
( Kiwi Build will be another elaborate swindle? )
Super was always 65. It was Muldoon who lowered it to 60.
Young people need a clear pathways to enter the trades. Young people need to be able to afford equipment or have it provided by their employeers. Young people need to earn while they train and even have their training paid for (or heavily subsidised).
Young people need a pathway to enter the trades while in High School.
This will solve many, many problems.
HOUSING .
1. Create a Ministry of works which builds houses at cost for people not profit .And use crown land = Much Lower section costs .
2.Make houses solar off grid/sewage sufficient to reduce infrastructure costs on subdivision land. Ie Reduce section costs further .Build clever smaller houses ,and bring in some fast build German kitsets to reduce construction and material costs .
3.Seriously reduce immigration to lower demand and price inflation spirals in major centres .ie: Limit population growth.
4. Remove Gst on new house sales for 1st home buyers. That’s a saving of around $ 100,000 on an average house at $ 650,000.
5.Give super low /or no interest loans to first house buyers. The NZ housing corporation used to do this and it worked .It by passes private banks . Boo Hoo.
6. Give new home buyers an e bike to ride to the train station .
Labour is dreaming if they think $650,000 is affordable.
Its just tinkering with the dials on the profit machine .They have yet to produce a workable solution .
In Davos ,Jaccinda talks about saving the world from climate change , while holding a loveable chimp and hugging David Attenborough with big wet mooney eyes .I want to believe her but…hang on …
Mean while back in NZ we have 800 new fossil fuel driven cars on the road every week , (more greenhouse gases), double the number of cows ,( more greenhouse gases ), and a boosted tourism sector with 30 % more plane flights by 2025.(More green house gases )……
How does this fantastic growth under Labour reduce green house gas emissions ? It doesn’t .It increases it .Its nuts and its bullshit .
Despite the platitudes of Davos the NZ carbon footprint is growing , not reducing .Planting a few more trees simply won’t be enough .
To save our world from ecoside we need radical decarbonisation and we need it now, not by 2050. Now .
Labours results are falling well short of a realistic vision for our kids housing or our climate emergency .The neoliberal baby boomers idea factory is running on empty .
If Jesus is coming back , he’d better make it soon .
The Ministry Of Works was originally created at of the failure of the private sector.
Initially the early electrification of New Zealand was contracted out to private British power companies to build our hydro dams. It was a total disaster, bankruptcies, missed deadlines, huge cost overruns and price gouging and mismanagement. Eventually the government of the day had to take over the construction of this country’s hydro dams and other related electrical infrastructure. And the MOW was born.
If the government really want to house the homeless and end the housing crisis they need to learn from history and follow the same proscription.
Phil Twyford is the student who swanned around school all year schmoozing and leading his fellow pupils and teachers to think he was ready for the end of year exam. He had heaps of time to prep, but he didn’t.
Come exam day, the culmination of years of turning up to eat his lunch and dicking about, means he’s been found out. Phil has flunked, big time, he didn’t know the answers because he hasn’t bothered to look, learn and listen and when not hurriedly borrowing some other kids work (Greater Aucklands transport plan), he couldn’t possibly hope to study for a test he had no idea about.
The Prime Minister must or should be very worried. There is no indication Twyford has this under control, none! This was not a test to be failed but her minister has bombed it spectacularly and he could do very long term damage not just to her government, but to his party. Who will believe Labour will know what to do in the future with this mess.
She must replace him with the most comprehensive list of competent people she has and fast. She cannot dither and fake it and continue to support her incompetent minister because he is taking the ship down with all on board every minute he remains.
So what did Phil Twyford do for his salary all those years?
Phil Twyford is the student who swanned around school all year schmoozing and leading his fellow pupils and teachers to think he was ready for the end of year exam. He had heaps of time to prep, but he didn’t.
Come exam day, the culmination of years of turning up to eat his lunch and dicking about, means he’s been found out. Phil has flunked, big time, he didn’t know the answers because he hasn’t bothered to look, learn and listen and when not hurriedly borrowing some other kids work (Greater Aucklands transport plan), he couldn’t possibly hope to study for a test he had no idea about.
The Prime Minister must or should be very worried. There is no indication Twyford has this under control, none! This was not a test to be failed but her minister has bombed it spectacularly and he could do very long term damage not just to her government, but to his party. Who will believe Labour will know what to do in the future with this mess.
She must replace him with the most comprehensive list of competent people she has and fast. She cannot dither and fake it and continue to support her incompetent minister because he is taking the ship down with all on board every minute he remains.
So what did Phil Twyford do for his salary all those years?
Go to hell, sellout Phil and dishonest sellout government:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO1705/S00386/accommodation-supplement-increase-is-a-con-job.htm
Heard on TVNZ news tonight, Twyford rejects calls by advocates such as AAAP for rent controls, at least temporary ones.
He danced with Oliver Hartwich and the NZ Initiave before:
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11553128
He wanted to work with developers like Ockhams and so forth, what a BS approach.
If you want to change the market, bring in new rules, and force the investors and developers to deliver, AND have the government take control and action, nothing else will change anything much.
Now Nats, celebrated by MSM, can call the shots, shoot Phil down, and prepare for the backlash by idiots out there, voting new idiots into power again, returning to the same BS as before.
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