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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Made with NZonAir funding to boot!
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).
MORE LIKELY TO BE ‘HOUSES’ rather than house….how about all labour pollies and govt staff with more than a family home recuse themselves from input into any study/law/regulation that MAY affect them financially or positively in any way….
and don’t tell me ‘professional detachment’ if there’s one thing life teaches you it’s that ‘professionals’ are no more trustworthy than anyone else…the term is just a class descriptor to avoid scrutiny
don’t fret it’s not gonna happen
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!
and that’ll be when we get more socialism for the middle classes…when their kids are sleeping on park benches(if we haven’t taken up defendable spaces by then’
Despite ‘revolutionary romanticism’ change is made by the middle class….look at the origins of any of the bolsheviks (except the 1st cavalry army clique)…interesting fact the hippys don’t mention in the US. the vietnam war had many large demos ‘in favour’ of it, middle classes right behind it UNTIL it looked like no more student exemptions so their kids would have to fight too..suddenly ‘yoof’ got interested in the war…while it was blacks hispanics and poor whites getting the chop – all good – middle class kids ‘let’s occupy something’
interesting but irrelevant you might well say but it underlines that neo-libs don’t fear the poor they fear organised soccer mums.
…”while it was blacks hispanics and poor whites getting the chop – all good – middle class kids ‘let’s occupy something’ interesting but irrelevant you might well say but it underlines that neo-libs don’t fear the poor they fear organised soccer mums”…
Good point, – my ex Army employer of that era said the same basic thing.
The ghost of Roger Douglas and Rogernomics lives! Unabated and unchecked!
Grant Robo’s $100b bazooka at work in the housing market!
Homeowners wealth up $400b in the past 18 months!
Long Live Rogernomics and the Neoliberal NZ labour party! ffs!
…”The ghost of Roger Douglas ”…
The bastards still alive and gloating !
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.
Nomadland & Permanent Van or Car living will be the only NZ Housing future for Houseless Kiwis who will never be able to afford a Roof over their heads & that includes unaffordable rentals? Then they’ll bring in draconian laws to ban people from doing even that, what they eloquently call “Freedom Camping” but will be “Homeless Camping”! This is Housing apartheid for the haves & have nots & the breakdown of Society will be the result & the Block show just reinforces the utter depravity of Housing speculation for profit over Housing people as a Human right!
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.
That why it’s called a market. Buyer pays what buyer wants to pay.
Until the govt steps in, calls it a rort induced by foreign banks, regulates the market to enable fairness , give their people a fighting chance and goes on a housing build using state agencies. That’s what Savages govt did and that’s what can be done again.
But not so long as neo liberal worms are still in proliferation in the decision making process. In any way it happens, the middle and upper classes may have to eat a shit sandwich because of speculation and demand ramping up prices, same goes for the landlords,…. but the question is, – should it ever have been allowed to get to this?
Should the banks and speculators and the lapdog politicians been allowed to create this destructive and hateful ( almost treasonous) situation in the first place? Really?
All because they gave credence to the idea of short term monetary gains through shares and the like using the population of NZ as their victims knowing full well the instability and social disorders this would eventually cause?
And yet is it not that we are signatories to the U.N Bill of Rights regarding ‘ that every human being has the RIGHT to adequate housing?’….not some slum charging exorbitant rent eating up so much of a weekly wage, infested with cockroaches and mold or some ridiculous motel hovel that the occupants will never be able to pay back through MSW???
Hells bloody teeth Y’all !!!
Guidelines on the right to a decent homehttps://www.hrc.co.nz › our-work › housing
The human right to adequate housing in New Zealandhttps://www.hrc.co.nz › files › 2017_07_25_-_Ri…PDF
Fact Sheet No.21, The Human Right to Adequate Housinghttps://www.un.org › ruleoflaw › filesPDF
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And finally ( and don’t say you cant look this up even if it doesn’t come up as a direct link , – you are not that dumb.) there’s THIS :
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UN Declares New Zealand’s Housing Crisis A Breach Of …https://www.scoop.co.nz › Regional
Completely agree. Cheap money printed at the Government’s behest. Not capitalism but pure government intervention in markets. The GFC is evidence of this: state directed cheap loans that come back to haunt us all.
How so?
The Ardern led Labour Party we’re going to fix the housing market,one of their election campaign promises,but instead they’ve made things much worse.
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.
treating housing as ‘sport reporting’ means you don’t have to analyse anything, handy when your journos find wet paper bags a challenge’, it worked for financial reporting and politics in general…a race is more interesting exiting and more click-baity than facts and background.
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