Auckland friends Tim Cotton and Arthur (Arty) Gillies have been crowned The Block champions, pocketing a record $760,000 – and the other three teams are also walking away with impressive profits in the red-hot Auckland property market.
The pair have pocketed a $660,000 profit plus $100,000 in prize money, making them $760,000 richer after their house was sold at auction for $2,825,000.
Is it just me or did The Block manage to sum up everything that is wrong about our culture and economy?
Fetishised property speculation porn as mass entertainment in a country of homelessness & poverty.
I wonder if State House tenants tuned in? The auction will be the closest they ever get to home ownership.
It’s as equally harrowing as the thought of all those hungry children watching MasterChef or MKR.
I wonder if those hungry children lick the TV screens.
Someone should firebomb the house before anyone moves in and call it performance art.
Fuck this broken market!
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Of all this governments failings, housing is the biggest despair for me.
First it was the Phil Twyford led fiasco where we all found out 6 years prep for Kiwibuild never advanced beyond a beer coaster plan.
Then it was pretending the housing crisis didn’t exist.
Then it was Megan Woods proving that in the ineptitude dept, Twyford was not alone and thinking going silent and pretending there was nothing to see was the way forward.
It is the realisation that this government cannot/ will not see how damaging the current housing situation is for this country, how it is consigning people to the scrap heap, forever.
That putting whole families into a one bedroom motel is not only not an answer, it’s a travesty of injustice to do this to another human when if they wanted, this government could start a mass building program.
But ultimately it’s my realisation that Jacinda Arderns government is just so useless and so uncaring, that this problem will only get worse.
And really after that, why the fuck would vote Labour again? Or vote at all?
@xray. Quite agree.
But of course there is no housing crisis. All the ministers, their families and their friends have a house (or houses).
Nek minut these very same media outlets will be shilling some woe is me poor bugger locked out of housing market shame on you NZ story. Absolutely mental.
The NZ block auctions last night showed precisely why many developers don’t want to build homes for low income or working class peoples and their whanau as the big profits is at the very high end of the market. This is why social housing is still being knocked down and replaced for the rich and want to be rich. The problem is the land and areas the social housing sits on and did sit on was not intended for the people who are now benefitting the most. Social cohesion will never be achieved in our country when we have housing inequalities and our governments are to blame.
…”Fetishised property speculation porn as mass entertainment in a country of homelessness & poverty….It’s as equally harrowing as the thought of all those hungry children watching MasterChef or MKR”…
Often wondered these things myself, and its been going on for years. An absolute sickening obscenity IMHO. I think we all made a wrong turn and ended up in Wankersville. Seriously, the people who buy / film these programs should hang their heads in shame and take them off air. Give us more David Attenborough or something.
As the US always leads us by a few years, San Francisco is a place to watch.
Homelessness amongst what was the middle class is now not unheard of. On top of massive inequity.
This is where NZ is heading. And that’s is not a good thing!
The house appears to be painted black, or perhaps ‘charcoal’. A suitably depressing colour? to a depressing era for ordinary people forced to live virtually on the streets or from hand to mouth when they aren’t dentists!
And in the midst of booming economies – sick, sick.
Labours biggest mistake with housing was thinking that they could entice big construction companies into signing on to PPP deal, all the while being oblivious to the fact that the boards of these companies actually Hate them.
Their second biggest mistake was not having a plan B.
Given all the attention Glasgow has had over the last month hosting COP26 I was interested to see what the most expensive house for sale currently was in my place of birth.
https://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/details/59702865?utm_source=v1:5bWFDybfWx7C7AGpeagt7mP3PgcqjuqJ&utm_medium=api
All this in the best part of town. Of course they have both a land and building tax (renamed stamp duty) when purchasing and a CGT when selling.
Maybe time to cash up and return as a number of friends have in the last month.
I agree. You have descried it perfectly. It is a slap in the face to the homeless. Good, hardworking people who have been shut out of the market. This lowers the bar on television entertainment – indeed, it lowers the bar on crass reality shows.
Want equity of outcome but love sky high property prices. Elephant in room for the woke left.
The Auckland newspapers for years have excitedly reported about the great increase in house prices. Great as in massive and great as in wonderful. The housing market is like a game, a neat spectator sport where everyone can imagine they are out there in the game and it could be them scoring the winning goal.
Then, interspersed with that, it’s all the stories about people not being able to afford houses, emergency housing and the overall terrible state of housing in the country. Then it’s back to “WOW! Brilliant, house prices rise, we’re all winners!”
While The Block as reality tv was to entertain, the main point was life’s main point, to make as much money as possible.
The media complaining about a housing crisis is like a cricketer banging his hand on his bat and being pissed off that he can’t bat anymore because he’s broken some bones.
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