Why Megan Woods exemplifies everything wrong with this Government

ByMartyn Bradbury

Landlords’ honesty needed – Woods on lack of rental checks

Fewer than one in 500 rental properties are being checked to make sure they’re up to the Government’s minimum standards because there’s an expectation that landlords should be honest, the Housing Minister says.

Megan Woods told Q+A she would like to see the number of Healthy Homes Standards compliance checks increased. She said, however, that the onus should be on landlords to tell the truth rather than taxpayers paying to police it.

“We also do need landlords to be honest. I don’t think any of us think that’s an unrealistic expectation. We ask people to make declarations all over the place in terms of their lives… but we are doing some checks.”

Jesus wept, doesn’t Megan Woods just perfectly sum up everything wrong with this Government?

She’s ‘trusting’ the fucking Landlords is she? Do you believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden as well Megan?

Our purposely under funded state doesn’t have the capacity or tools to actually challenge these corporate interests!

The obligation of the Government is to regulate Capitalism so that we the people benefit from the competitive dynamics of competition!

The disgusting right myth is that NZ is an over taxed, over regulated economy when that is total bullshit!

Max Rashbrooke highlighted the horror of NZs under regulated market…

The bad news is that, to investigate 200,000-300,000 terrible rentals, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) has employed a frontline inspectorate numbering … 37. Each inspector will have to check somewhere between 5000 and 8000 rentals.

…there is only 37 inspectors of rental properties for 300 000 terrible rentals?

Similar poorly funded regulation is apparent in the 82 labour inspectorates who are supposed to police hundreds of thousands of migrant worker exploitations!

Time and time and time again in New Zealand we see an old boy matrix of vested interests who occupy market dominance and act like a monopoly, duopoly or oligopoly raking in vast wealth while leaving the local small and medium sized operators outside the cosy relationships!

Up and down NZ, small and medium enterprises are unable to compete because of the lack of basic regulation in the market!

We’ve seen it with the Supermarket duopoly, the medicinal cannabis oligopoly, the Gib Board monopoly, the drainage industry and the rental market – each time under regulated and poorly regulated capitalism continues to screw over us the consumers at a time of a cost of living crisis and what’s Labour’s response?

‘Trust’ because the State’s regulators are utterly underfunded!

I’m not looking for socialism here folks, just basic garden variety regulated capitalism!

 

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27 Comments

  1. The Best bit of the interview was where Woods tried to claim the compliance checks were all targeted at the bad land lords, only to be shown to be lying because most checks aren’t targeted.
    THAT sums up this government 100%.

    1. What? How do you know they are bad until they are checked? Is there a register called “arsehole landlords” . Surely she means the checks are needed because of bad landlords. They don’t wear uniforms

        1. I am not standing up for Woods. To me it makes no f’ing sense to say random checks will only be made on bad landlord’s. Isn’t that like saying I will only breath test drunk drivers?

          1. W…Precisely… Woods is just a symptom of how much the labour movement has been undermined by the tory power structure… To the point that there isn’t a proper “labour movement” in existence any more, so no real way for true workers reps to filter through to government… Thanks Roger Douglas, Billy Birch, and John Key for destroying decades of progress, and replacing it with the modern version of what used to be called “Feudalism” … Meanwhile, the colonial descendants took back “their” country, thereby fulfilling the aim of the ex army officers who founded the National party from the dregs of the colonial government, large land owners, and the NZ Fascist party, of governing for “the right people”…

  3. If they were actually interested in having the Healthy Homes standard implemented, they’d be actually fining landlords and paying part of that out to tenants as a bounty.

    (Obviously they aren’t interested, it’s just another virtue signal).

  5. Maybe government should start with themselves, the largest landlord in NZ, aka 50% of Kainga ora homes are not meeting healthy homes standards.

    “Almost half of Kāinga Ora homes still don’t comply with the Government’s own requirements for warm, dry rental properties.

    A year out from its deadline for compliance, just over 51% of the state landlord’s housing stock is up to scratch.

    Kāinga Ora is Aotearoa’s largest landlord, owning or managing more than 68,000 homes across the country.”

    https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/129225899/half-of-kinga-ora-homes-still-not-up-to-healthy-homes-standard

    This is on top of finding that the government seem to be fine with housing people in high rise buildings for emergency housing without sprinklers.

    Tired of hearing the ‘leftie’ private sector drum beat against private landlords who seem to be the best option of most renters with all the dysfunction of government, while giving a free pass to the government – largest landlord in NZ, who have the funds, spending a fortune, but can’t even get the basics to work, that they set themselves!

    Government is too busy with ideology and grifting than actually achieving the goals that they set for the renters and landlords themselves!!!! The lefties can’t be bothered worrying about this or putting any pressure on the people involved to get their act together, even as people now have started dying and it’s not private, sector, traditional homes that seem to be the problem, it’s the new, high, rise, battery hen style, apartment living, that the Green Party is pushing for!

    I’m no fan of Megan Woods, but I would think that a NZ justice minister that just drove drunk, fled scene and resisted arrest, is of greater embarrassment both nationally and internationally for NZ.

    This is on top of the mayor of Wellington that got drunk and then left the restaurant without paying. Now apparently wants her dog to come to work with her, when it’s against the commercial tenancy rules!

    NZ has gone to the dogs, while the lefties seem to be barking up the wrong tree for what went wrong!

  6. No doubt there are some caring, professional landlords out there, who are always conducting proactive maintenance on the rentals and giving valid reasons and time frames for any rises.

    BUT there are also some terrible ones who ask for higher rent before installing double glazing or dealing with the Mould issue.

    These are the peeps we need to investigate on a regular basis until they meet the required standard. Regardless of what party is the Govt if the day.

  7. No worries, the next Minister of Housing will do it better. (Chris Bishop?). What with the Act input of getting rid of regulations and bureaucrats, free market and all that, we won’t have to worry about compliance checks and inspectors, they’ll all be gone.

    1. Ah Chris Bishop, the man who rents of his in laws. I am sure he won’t be reaching into his retirement savings to come up with a bond. What a disgrace. Megan is bad but don’t get too excited post October

  8. H&S falls mainly on the plain! In our charity we had some dishes mainly for holding fruit etc, to be washed, we didn’t go in for stuff manufactured. We could were not allowed to dry these after rinsing them, they could not be touched by even clean tea towels but left to air dry – time and space consuming.

    Then a young feller under 20 cleaning out some internal part of ship was almost asphysixiated by fumes and only found in time before serious disabling damage by mates who checked why he wasn’t at morning tea eating the cake his mother made that he’d boasted of. He has had treatment, been paid/promised some fee for his body damage which will dull him a bit over his life. But note a similar thing happened months before to an older bloke who had reported it as a near-accident and hazard – but no stringent safety measures set up and this later episode followed. Haven’t put a link but it was fairly recent in Nelson.

    Compare and contrast. Unbloodybelievable – but that’s NZ’R/USedto, today anything goes. We need unions now with testy complaints and threats, but with some sort of balance so they don’t themselves become a problem going forward.

  9. Other factors for housing are interest rates, insurance rates, council rates, GST and so forth… have yet to see the government try and make any of these cheaper and fairer for home owners and the costs would then be passed to renters. Instead practically all fixed costs are going up – the number one factor for inflation was interest rates rises. Food prices was also a big problem for people.

    In NZ they just don’t want to cut into the banks profits.
    European Central Bank introduces ‘de facto bank tax’ snubbed by Reserve Bank
    https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/european-central-bank-introduces-de-facto-bank-tax-snubbed-by-reserve-bank/JBMGBZQVKZAADNKTIK5ROBU2VI/

    Let alone stop the rip off on food in NZ.

    TikTok video documenting ‘outrageous’ prices of food at Countdown goes viral
    https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/lifestyle/2023/07/tiktok-video-documenting-outrageous-prices-of-food-at-countdown-goes-viral.html

    Government have known for years that the supermarkets were ripping off consumers, any fines? Any closures?

    Nope, just more bureaucrats on enormous salaries and more committees and lawyers and groups monitoring supermarkets at great cost. During Covid, government made people go to supermarkets and did not fine them when it was clear they pushed all the prices up and stopped all the specials they used to have! Let alone all the large covid wage claims by the food industry.

    There are so many things wrong in NZ but it seems that the lefties are stuck, stuck, stuck on what they think is wrong while not bothering to look around of what is really, really, wrong but could easily be put right if the government wanted to help people not be ripped off. If they had functioning and plentiful government housing then obviously there would not be the need for private rentals, but the government is much worse than private landlords but get away with it.

  10. There is a public list of bad landlords – the ones who have had adverse findings at Tennancy Tribunal.

    Obviously having inspectors only view 1 in 500 rental properties per year is not going to achieve close to full compliance unless failure to comply comes with a huge penalty like “property confiscation” rather than a just a fine. Then the landlord if they own the property outright will not risk noncompliance or if they don’t yet own the property the banks will enforce healthy home compliance rather suffer loss on a confiscated home.

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