Why National’s Housing policy is a recipe for homelessness, lower home ownership and prison riots

 

Let’s be very clear what National’s Housing policy will actually generate.

They have had millions in donations form the Real Estate Pimps and it is the speculators and the mega Landlords who will benefit while renters suffer.

National will give Landlords back their tax loopholes and give them the right to evict.

National will stop building State Houses and will start kicking unruly tenants out onto the street.

This is a recipe for National Party homelessness and ACT are promising to build the prisons, so state tenants get kicked out onto the street, straight into the prisons?

It’s the Right wing circle of life.

National’s acquiesce to Landlords on top of tax cuts funded by robbing 2 year olds, mutilating public transport and literally stealing from the climate change funds are compounded because National is setting the stage for a mass privatisation and real estate feeding frenzy which will lock generations out of home ownership.

Look at how the privatisation agenda is already slowly building in the background where no one is noticing…

Winton property developers

The most politically controversial business Joyce has joined is the major property developer Winton, a company that is currently locked in a legal battle with the Government. Winton claims Kāinga Ora is stymying its “Sunfield” development plans in South Auckland by not giving the company a fast-tracked development under the new Urban Development Act. In appointing Joyce, the company put out a press release to say that Joyce “has not been appointed for government relations or political lobbying.”

The company is associated with some big donations to the National Party. Back in May 2022 the party received $52,000 from a holding company called Speargrass, which is owned by Winton’s CEO Chris Meehan. This year Meehan has donated $103,260 to National and $50,000 to Act.

National and Act have both come out publicly this year in favour of Winton in their fight with Kāinga Ora, with the parties’ respective housing spokespeople Chris Bishop and Brooke van Velden issuing press releases pushing Winton’s case.

National had already received the first donation when Bishop went public with his support for Winton, but he failed to declare this. In fact, Bishop later told Newsroom that he wasn’t aware of the big donations and could not give further comments due to Winton’s court case. He also told Newsroom that there was no conflict of interest, and any question of whether the property developer would get a meeting with an incoming National prime minister was an issue for after the election campaign.

National’s foreign buyer tax policy

When National announced that its new tax policy would involve a partial abolition of Labour’s ban on house sales to foreign buyers, political commentator Matthew Hooton suggested in the Herald that, “incredibly”, the policy had been created “with the help of lobbyists” for “the property-development industries”.

Certainly, property companies would stand to benefit from National’s new policy as, if implemented, all properties worth over $2m could be sold to foreign buyers, increasing the market and demand for the houses being sold by property developers.

This week Hooton has expanded on his claim that National designed the policy with the help of property developers, pointing to Winton and its close relationship with National, and suggesting that property developers have been able to help shape National’s housing-tax policies. Hooton says, “It may well be that National has thought through its tax policy much more carefully than it has been given credit for.”

He points out that the new policy could raise a lot of tax revenue and profit: “If Winton, say, sold 5000 residences for $2m+ over four years to foreign buyers, that alone would raise half the $20b of houses and apartments National needs to make its books balance. And, of course, some would be worth more than $2m. Some of the properties Winton has in its pipeline are planned to be sold for $10m+.”

Hooton therefore suggests that with a change of government, and a new minister in charge of Kāinga Ora and housing, there might well be a law change and the green light given to property developers to proceed with high-end developments.

…housing for the poor will be pushed aside for millionaire housing developments.

The venality of National using housing to line the pockets of their wealthy Real Estate Pimp mates is bad enough, but allowing an orgy of speculation to eclipse the social obligations of housing the poor will cause irreparable damage to the Egalitarian foundations of New Zealand.

Something very evil is about to go down if National and ACT form a Government.

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