After a mammoth battle behind the scenes to force transformative change in Housing past the Wellington Bureaucratic Elite, Jacinda has managed to push through some genuine punch at speculators, a diet CGT, fast forwarding brownfield infrastructure while leaving a mass State housing build and land tax off the table.
She got through some solutions, but not nearly enough to solve the Housing Crisis.
Here are the winners and losers.
WINNERS
Jacinda & Labour: When they set their mind to it they can force real change past the Wellington Bureaucratic Elites. The problem wasn’t being able to ram it through, the problem came when no one had a clear vision as to what comes next. Labour has the muscle, it needs the vision. Politically this will be a win to the majority owner-occupirs who hate speculators as well but enjoy the paper wealth from their inflated house valuation.
Diet CGT: The Bright-line extension is aimed at speculators. Sucks to be them.
Brownfield infrastructure: Throwing 3billion at the base costs of infrastructure will make an enormous difference to bringing some new houses onto the market quicker and cheaper but that number needed to be closer to $10Billion to be transformative.
Greens + Māori Party: This doesn’t remove the immediate hurt many renters are facing and gives the Greens and Māori Party vast new flanks to attack Labour from. If Labour won’t provide the vision, then the Māori Labour Caucus, Green Party and Māori Party will have to do it!
ACT: ACT just gained a vast new flood of angry rich Landlord Speculator members who are wild eyed at their property rights being molested.
LOSERS
Speculator Landlords: To all those landlords screaming they will now sell their rentals because of today’s announcement – GREAT! Flood the market and crash those prices now! We dare you! We double dare you! Scream more! We like it when you thrash around as well, do that, scream and thrash around. Great stuff.
National: Most home owners are owner-occupiers so Labour’s sharpest cuts aimed at the speculators bypass them altogether meaning there’s no where for National to win votes here. If National come out too pro Landlord, renters will hate them (more than they currently do) and turn off owner-occupiers while the angry speculators march off to ACT. National have been cleverly amputated here.
Beneficiaries, working class & Renters: Scum Landlords are already on social media boasting they will raid rents to punish renters, TDB will name and shame landlords who raise rents using this as the excuse, send them into us.
State Tenants: There’s no Mickey Savage style mass building for state tenants to remove the desperation at the bottom of the market. We need a bloody Ministry of Works that just builds State Houses!
First Time Home Buyers: The regional caps are nice but no real respite in the short term for the long suffering First Time Home buyer.
CONCLUSIONS
Todays announcement of a war on speculators won’t fix the housing crisis (if you didn’t want a war with speculators why give them $60billion to speculate with in the first place?) but it sure does felt good hearing those Landlords scream and until Labour build more bloody State Houses, a speculating Landlords scream will keep many warm at night.
This is the status quo with bells on it and the bells should not have been so hard to get through.
Jacinda has the political muscle, Labour has no political vision.
Without any realistic means towards home ownership, this is the new Treaty…
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Closing the stable door AFTER opening it for the horse to bolt is hardly worthy of praise.
Losers
Anyone not already in a house. This did nothing to reign in the ridiculous prices National AND Labour/Greens have allowed to happen. So tough shit.
This minor package is tip toe through the tulips, have a dollar each way boldness. But the unavoidable bottom line of this is to buy a flat or house is taking on a massive level of debt, if you can even do so given the crooked game the largely unregulated Real Estate industry play. Incomes vs prices are now so out of sync, it would take a couple of generations to catch up if housing in prices remained frozen. Which they won’t.
Jacinda probably thinks job done this morning, now moving right along. Wrong!
She has tried to fix a market led meltdown with market led tools. Her tinkering won’t have changed much at all. It’s going to raise its head again in the not too distant future, perhaps even this year, then what?
The housing beast needs to be slayed. All this tickle up has done is annoy it!
Right on. It’s so frustrating to watch this unfold given they have had YEARS to strategise something better.
Until the effects are known there aren’t any winners or losers here. Politically Labour have lost some ground as now there is ‘definitive’ proof they go back on their word. Whoever leads the opposition into the next election will use the word ‘definitive’ ad nauseam. These weasel words are like an elephant’s memory.
The real risk here is the effect on the wider economy. Grunter and Beetroot shamelessly pumped up the housing market to paper over large holes in our economy and the cult of Aotearoa went along for the ride. Grunter created this situation and now he is penalizing people for following the instructed lead. The irony should not be lost on anyone here nor if this is the straw that breaks our fragile economy.
In the immortal words of Ramsay Bolton this isn’t going to have a happy ending
I believe the Act up party already have the vote of angry rich landlord speculators anyway. As for the regional caps while they are too low that is only because the current house prices are too high due to supply issues. It would be foolhardy for our government to let people get themselves in such much debt and if someone can afford a 900k home they shouldn’t need government assistance.
As for landlords getting a tax break this this wrong its unfair they are already benefiting from their asset value increasing as many landlords are getting enough rent to service their mortgage/investment. Young first home buyers need to be realistic and buy within their means. And our government needs to get on with their building programs so they can offer first home buyer more choice at the capped rates they are offering while creating more affordable rental accommodation for those needing somewhere to live. We are in a very difficult situation and we only have ourselves to blame. We voted for our governments and we have allowed the unfairness we are seeing today. Greed and selfishness has become part of our NZ culture and its sad because we now find ourselves in this very tenuous situation. Housing is one of the most important determinants of health.
That word GREED turns up time and time again but only with landlords not tenants, why is that?
Why are you always harsh on Jacinda and Labour. I am not impressed. Are you not supportive of Labour?
Do you care more about a political party ‘no matter what’, or do you care AT ALL for the direction this country is heading and for the reality that many Kiwis live in right now?
Do you care more about a political party (sort of like sports team maybe????) …Or about the people who live here – or try to – and DIE here, consequent to some of the policies enacted.
Do you care more about a political party// partisanship, or about the state of the land, of what was once the most beautiful land on the planet, and could be again if it were cared for, protected, respected.
Just because we voted for a Labour mp does not mean we cant criticise what Labour does .
If necessary we will hold their feet to the fire if it is felt we need to.
Sitting say she will be right Jacinda knows best will not fix this countries problems from Housing to Medicines to healthcare to Benefits and inequality.
So expect more of it.
Because affordable housing is the biggest issue this country has, and fuck all has been done. This latest effort will make things worse for already stressed renters, and increase pressure on emergency housing.
I swear it’s like they want to fuck housing to a point where they have to make sweeping communist style changes under emergency provisions. Ask yourself who benefits because it’s not NZ.
Genuine question: Why don’t they just put a temporary ban on purchase of houses by those who already own X-number++ ?
Good question. But I would have put a 10% stamp duty on those who own investment properties buying another (excluding new builds) – the money would be used for assisting first home buyers with grant money.
Good idea but probably not that easy to implement, issues of discrimination come to mind and legislative changes.
They polished a turd but its still a turd. Speculators are still feeding on us. Jacinda, do something bold for once, cease the disappointment.
Shit flows downhill. Renters are at the bottom of the hill. The only way your situation gets better is significant (>20%) price correction driven by excess supply. Don’t hold your breath….
There is applying a rent freeze and dare National to say they would reverse that when they came into power.
Yes!
Jacinda talked about there is no silver bullet. Beep!. Wrong. There was. It was called a Capital Gains Tax. Unfortunately, back in early 2019, Winston Me Me Me Peters threatened to bring the Government down if they pressed on with a CGT. This came on the heels of a well-funded scaremongering campaign against the CGT by property investors. Just like the anti-cannabis campaign, Jacinda stood back and did zilch allowing the misinformation and fear-mongering to get legs. Big legs. We all saw the end result. The threat from Peters was so significant, the PM not only took the CGT off the table, she promised there would be no CGT as long as she was the PM. This was both a smart move and a very dumb move. Jacinda could / should have just ruled it out for that electoral term but she didn’t know Peters would be history in 2020, she didn’t know about Covid and she didn’t know the housing crisis would quickly turn into a farce. Had she not made her promise about no CGT to avoid a snap election, she could have introduced the CGT in mid-2020 when things got out of hand. The table was not tilted toward property investors. It was a table owned and operated by those same people. A situation that totally changed the way vendors listed their property so they could get in a line that saw many average homes selling for two and three hundred thousand more than the vendor was expecting. The buyers would push tenants out of the way to add yet another family home to their housing investment portfolio. It was obscene and the Government with their hands tied behind their backs could do nothing except watch. Nek minute and sometimes even on the exact same day the house was purchased, it appears on the rental market. What a fucking sick joke. These leeches were taking the piss.
Ardern’s promise about the CGT ensured things went from bad to worse but she wasn’t the baddie in this picture. That goes to Winston Peters. The man whose name has not been mentioned all through this mess.
A CGT is essential. It’s worked perfectly in other countries and resulted in a fairer tax system. Many very wealthy people are adamant that only fools pay tax. How ironic that those who are in the best position to pay the most tax, invariably pay the least.
We also need a good hard look at interest rates. They are gifting even more wealth to those creaming it.
I also believe a new law should have been introduced where all buyers of NZ properties must reside at that address themselves for at least two years. This would have been very helpful in assisting the right house buyers are the people who will own the home. NZ families that fully intend to reside in the family home they purchased.
The Government has pulled a few levers but it feels like a bit of a dollar each way. Throw enough darts at a dartboard and you’ll eventually hit a bullseye. I hope I’m wrong as this is an area they must get right. Time will tell. Still a Jacinda fan but some of the shine is fading. The way the last lockdown was handled was an abortion, especially setting up a dynamic where some of those hardest hit by the lockdown were only given 30 minutes notice of an alert level change. Try getting a cafe or restaurant ready for paying customers when you have nothing prepared and are only given 30 minutes notice. The real price for that total cock-up will be paid if and when another lockdown is called for. Jacinda has spent a lot of her currency. Not terminal especially with Chucky Collins still leading the small band of clueless smurfs.
It’s comforting that you are now casting a critical eye towards the government and Jacinda (Tony) Blair. Your last paragraph was spot on the mark and a view held by an increasing number. If National want to make inroads now is the time – I won’t hold my breath.
Dear Jacindafan (for how much longer?)
Everything you say is correct. However, you all think the CGT is the silver bullet. Let whack on CGT and suddenly we will have the missing 100,000 houses. Yeah yeah whatever, investors will still go to property as long as there is shortage and your money is worth nothing in the bank. We’ll just pay the tax and still make a good buck. There you go.
Look, yesterday tomatoes were cheap, there were lots. Today they cost a fortune…there aren’t many. Jacinda and Grant need to hammered to build cheap houses fast and faster. NOTHING ELSE WILL WORK. I think it’s too late for them. Their Kiwibuild disaster will haunt them forever. Housing will cost them the election.
One critical mistake was restricting sale of KiwiBuild homes to first home buyers – its also one they have yet to correct. The supply programmme was based on having buyers to sell to and they restricted those who could buy to those who could least afford to (and when land values were skyrocketing so getting a deposit together was becoming too difficult).
The obnvious buyers for affordable family sized homjes (with limited section size) were couples who owned flats and apartments intending to start or add to their families and downsizing empty nesters (allowing ther 1/4 acre section propoerties to be sold and used for development).
If a government had said on Friday 11am the lockdown is over from 6am Saturday people would have complained why were they not allowed to operate on the Friday from noon.
The problem was if they said on Thursday the lockdown would end from midday Friday if there were no positive cases in the Friday test results – and there were such results – then business would have taken on the cost of preparing to open and then not been able to.
Jacindas team of 5 million (not) is quickly splintering into an every man for themselves scenario. When the have-nots have seen just how rewarded the haves have been with hundreds of thousands in tax free capital gain then property crime is going to increase. You cannot exclude so many people without major repercussions. Just look at the news lately, people are stealing food destined for food banks, gangs are growing, thefts are increasing. All this pain just to make the rich richer? And its all happening on Labours watch? What has gone so badly wrong? Its incredible to see Jacinda tinker with just 10% of the benefits speculators get and think she is being bold. She still states that she only wants prices to level off, not drop? Its sickening.
The Govt hasnt fixed anything at all, useless as tits on a bull IMO, people continue to be exploited by this crisis and nothing but crickets ffn chirping from the morons in charge.
Grant Robertson just had his first “Why don’t they eat cake?” moment:
What planet is he living on
I see in the article they used the average household income to compare house value (10 times); if NZ median income is used, house prices are closer to 20 times the annual income
It’s extraordinary that none of you mentioned the influence the foreign banking cartels exert over our property market?
I don’t like to overly bang on my tired old drums but Jesus people !?
We rented a small, beach side cottage in a flasher suburb in Christchurch once. It was a beautiful little 1930’s house with a pretty garden and the estuary was about 30 meters from the front door.
I learned that the land value alone was $750 K and that was then. 15 years ago.
A bottle of wine and a rough calculation later and we arrived at a market value of around $2 million.
A tiny footprint of land and a ramshackle little house. = $2 million.
I sat and pondered the house. A small stack of 4×2’s, a small stack of rafters, bearers, joists and dwangs and cladding. A few sheets of roofing iron, 5 internal doors and two external doors, 7 windows and some flooring timber and a few nails, screws, wiring, plugs, plumbing, taps and a shitter etc.
What’s that? $10K ? Maybe $20 retail? Plus labour of course.
The land. Not quite a 1/4 acre and sure, nice to walk about on of an evening but the only way that land could justify being ‘valued’ at $750K was if one were to grow proper crops of Pot on it. Otherwise, it’s merely ornamental. So where the fuck did $750 K come from then?
Why, the mighty banksters of course. Working away against the common man and woman. Slithering around under the feet of councils and politicians while rising up now and then to sniff at their pocketsessssss.
If the banksters are not be-headed and sooner rather than after the mortgagee sales then all that effort and money becomes their discretionary income which they will use to further fuck you on the deal.
The billions you mention you wish to have poured into cheap housing is fuel for bankster empires. Adern might be standing on the bow of AO/NZ but it’s the banks who have control of the wheel house.
Before anything, that, must change.
I have just seen Robertson comment that if the rent goes up the tenant can move.FFS what rock has he been under as we see queues form at open homes and families are crowding in together in desperation. This is the same lack of the real world that Jacinda showed with regard to people staying home with no pay if they were a slight covid risk.
Yes Trev, somewhere along the line they’ve slipped through a hole in the ground, or maybe into a different dimension or something. They have lost touch with reality!!!
Regarding the pay while people staying home during lockdowns – The govt gave out huge payments… To the corporations!! To Coca Cola, Big Maccas etc etc – They should have given the payments directly to the people.
…and this morning on Hosking, Nash claimed the mean house price in Auckland was in the $600k’s. It is actually a shade over $1m.
Well I’ll be…? How timely…?
Mike Treen right here, right now.
“MUST READ: Banks have created the speculative bubble and should be nationalised”
“This is all a direct consequence of government policies that give almost complete free reign to banks to create and allocate debt without almost any control. This has been compounded by Reserve Bank printing money to buy bonds and drive down interest rates the offer banks virtually free money to lend to whoever they want.”
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2021/03/24/must-read-banks-have-created-the-speculative-bubble-and-should-be-nationalised/
What many people fail to comprehend fully, myself included, about bankster lending is, that it isn’t only about realising profit necessarily . It’s about securing sovereignty over lands, and by extension you and me.
@ Mike Treen. I agree entirely that the banks trading here must be nationalised.
The NZD (and economy) is being found out. Its not well. https://www.dailyfx.com/aud-nzd
“When they set their mind to it they can force real change past the Wellington Bureaucratic Elites. The problem wasn’t being able to ram it through, the problem came when no one had a clear vision as to what comes next.”
Ain’t that the truth!
So even if 2023 comes with a loss to Labour (which I don’t think it wil, BUT is possible), the next time the pickings of power look good, maybe have a plan. And if you’re lucky enough to get a clear mandate, be prepared to spend a bit of that “political capital”. Otherwise you might find that – as Thomas Coughlan asks in “Exactly what is the politics of kindness?” – or maybe that’s “neo-kindness” – you’ll find growing numbers start to think that.
“Holding on to that popularity isn’t just unkind, it’s selfish”. Especially as we’re on the cusp of some radical demographic change.
And just as an aside, let’s hope Munsters like “the gNashy” and the Little (who’s probably one of the best of them) are starting to realise that after 3 decades or more of the leo-niberal corportised PS, ‘officials” are not necessarily your best frenz. I’m tempted to say some of them are probably some of the worst enemas you could imagine. – lying to you straight-faced about how bad it might be.
Fuck I hope the Labour Party gets it’s shit together, and PDQ
” Jacinda has the political muscle ”
No the caucus do and leaders come and go. If the people in Labour’s caucus are really there for their constituents and not their own selfish intentions and really believe in change that will do the most good then they would be pushing to get substantial changes in the way this country operates.
My guess is most of them are feathering their own nests and will only take notice when the next election campaign is upon us.
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