So Labour was going to build 100,000 houses in 10 years. It was an ambitious but courageous plan… except it was never going to happen. The consenting process takes far too long, the construction industry is already stretched and if we bring in more immigrant tradespeople, well… where are they going to live?
This didn’t stop Labour from promising the earth and then falling way, way short.
This government is really good at producing reports, working groups and plans, but actually doing anything… well, therein lies the problem. They simply have no idea.
And they still have no idea.
The Government has dropped its target to construct 100,000 KiwiBuild homes in 10 years, admitting the goal was “overly ambitious” and meant houses were being built in places with little demand.
These are two different issues. The original goal was always unachievable, AND they built houses in places where nobody wanted them. Let’s get real.
Instead, the Government plans to build as many homes as it can, as fast as it’s able to – measuring its success on a housing dashboard.
Yeah, OK. They have managed 258 houses in 2 years, some of which are still unsold. How exactly they managed to stuff this up so spectacularly is anyone’s guess.
It has also launched a new “progressive homeownership” initiative, where $400 million of reallocated KiwiBuild funding could support up to 4000 households into homeownership, through a rent-to-buy or shared equity scheme.
Now you may have forgotten this, but the entire Kiwibuild programme was supposed to be cost-neutral to taxpayers. Yes, they may have had to fund some projects, but the sale prices were supposed to negate the cost to taxpayers, and the refunded money was supposed to have gone to the next lot of houses.
Well, that is how I understood it. Did I get this wrong?
“We will be dropping the target of 100,000 houses over 10 years. It was overly ambitious and led to contracts being signed in places where there was little first-home buyer demand,” Woods said.
“When policies aren’t working we are honest about that and fix them.”
This government? Honest? Gee, that is the best laugh I have had all day. This is the least honest government of all time. ‘Open and transparent’ anyone?
But how would you feel if you had believed in Kiwibuild? How would you feel now if you thought this might have been your path to owning your own home?
Woods told reporters this afternoon that one component of Kiwi build that wasn’t working the way the Government wanted to.
That was the 100,000 target.
A 1,000 target wouldn’t have worked. Let’s face it. These guys simply do not have a clue. Their backdown is spectacular. Everyone knows they were never up to the job.
Not even close.
“There is no silver bullet when it comes to housing,” Woods said, adding there was no simple solution to solve the housing crisis.
A Newspaper.
Many of us, who were working with people in the construction industry during the last election campaign, already knew this. The trouble was, Phil Twyford and Jacinda Ardern just blatantly ignored the truth, or they didn’t know (which is actually much more likely), that the sector was already stretched to breaking point and that there was simply no way that anyone was going to be able to produce another 10,000 houses a year. Or even, as it has turned out, another 1,000 houses a year. Trouble is, no one told Phil.
So here we are. Another broken promise. But this was their flagship policy. If they can’t do this, they can’t do anything.
And we already know that they can’t do anything.