Labour’s housing plan – how the party plans to fix the housing crisis.

In a nutshell, here it is.

Set up an affordable housing authority. Buy land. Fast-track the building of homes. Oversee some large scale developments and in the space of ten years, build 100,000 homes. In other words, build baby build.

And there’s the bright line test to target speculators – at the moment if you sell a property, other than your principal home within two years of buying it, you’ll be taxed on the profit. Labour will extend that to 5 years.

Half of the 100,000 homes will be built in Auckland, and they'll cost up to $600,000 so in Auckland terms at least, that’s a pretty good deal.

There is a lot more detail required - who will fund the supporting infrastructure and the importance of creating communities, but it’s a plan.

And it's a plan that steers the issue away, quite rightly I think, from immigration.

The Reserve Bank’s suggestion – that the government should curb immigration as a way to help solve the housing crisis – is both negative and damaging, I think.

I’ve been in central Otago over the last week - Queenstown, Cardrona, the Remarkables and Wanaka - and kiwis are hard to come by in the service sector. The hotels, the bars, the restaurants, the car rental staff, the people who’re running the ski shops, the waitresses, the lifties, the front-line retail staff – from bottle stores to clothes shops - you name it, pretty much everyone I dealt with was European. There were a lot of Brits, French and Germans, as well as Americans, a good few Aussies, Canadians and South Americans too. Brazilians, mainly.

And they do the jobs that kiwis can’t or don’t want to do. Seasonal jobs. They're the backbone of a very important industry. But the majority of people fuelling that high immigration figure are returning New Zealanders, and you can't control that. Nor can we control migration from Australia.

A chunk are here on student and work visas - and yes, they still need rental accommodation which contributes to the housing crisis - but they typically don't buy homes. And then there's the skilled migrant category. And we don’t want to stop skilled, educated migrants moving here. That’s who we should be trying to attract. We have a skills shortage in this country. We need migrants to fill those jobs.

And so focusing on the immigration issue won't get us anywhere. We can't stop it and we shouldn't stop it. There is only one way to solve the housing crisis - you have to curb offshore investors, and I would champion Australia's policy - if you're an overseas buyer you can only build new, not buy an existing home - and you've got to build more homes.

Build, build, build.

But immigration is not the problem.