It gives me no pleasure at all to gloat over the government's apparent failure with Kiwibuild.
There are some opponents of this coalition who almost seem gleeful when recounting the disappointments of one of the government's principal policy planks. There are no winners when a bad idea is ripped apart but no-one has an alternative option.
The reason I'm not cheering in the street is that I was hoping that the state could have helped in what I've always considered is a generational disaster.
There are just not enough houses, in the right places, at the right quality and with the right design in this country. It goes back to just after the second world war. From time to time we tried like the state house expansion, but again the sprawling suburbs, the acres of unused land, the absence of transport options only added to our problems.
When this government said it would help with something called Kiwibuild, I wondered how it would work. I'm still wondering. It appears to be subsidising plans that were already happening. The worst part of their promise was not the ridiculously ambitious number but the adjective. They said 100,000 EXTRA houses in 10 years. Extra. I haven't seen extra houses. Actually, I've barely seen any houses at all.
Attacking Kiwibuild is like shooting fish in a tank. What I'm wondering about is the new Housing and Urban Development Authority. What's happening there.
Just to remind you, last November Phil Twyford announced the creation of the new Crown agency with "cut-through powers" to consolidate both Housing New Zealand and KiwiBuild in a bid to tackle housing shortages of all types.
It will have broad powers, including being able to ignore existing council designations, amend or write its own by-laws and grant its own resource consent, and councils will have no veto power. "It's going to be a tooled-up agency that can cut through the red tape." It's main goal was to make brownfield and intensification projects possible which at the moment are being stymied by NIMBYs and Council bylaws.
It's actually quite a good crisis measure. Phil Twyford promised legislation this year and the agency up and running by 2020. Haven't heard a peep yet.
If this is a crisis, then get a move on. It opens up this government to more accusations of talking the talk and not walking the walk.
Meanwhile, the fires keep burning. Yesterday, the Reserve Bank cut interest rates to a record low. They say the economy is looking tepid. Why? The global economy and all the talk coming out of the government.
Bank deposit rates will drop and there's a generation of savers looking to make the most of their nest egg in an environment of cheap loan money, now that the threat of Capital Gains Tax has disappeared.
I opened the lines yesterday and asked what are you going to do in this low interest rate environment? Virtually all said invest in property. It's always been a winner because there's never been enough.
Some are already saying a new wave of property inflation is building up and it will take off next year. Welcome back to the so called crisis. And it is not beyond the pale to blame the current government for it.
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