“Know Us By Our Deeds” – Housing

The Prime Minister loves slogans, lots of slogans. One such slogan that featured on the cover of Time Magazine was “Know us by our deeds”.

She has used the statement many times, especially with regard to the Christchurch massacre and at the Big Gay Out.

Jacinda Ardern loves bold statements like that one but are her slogans matched by action or is she just mouthing the words?

Let’s look at housing.

In oppositon, Labour actually made significant headway in bashing National for its record on housing. It’s somewhat true that National dropped the ball in that regard.

But Labour made massive promises in housing, starting with Kiwibuild. They also promised to address waiting lists for public housing and to fix the rental market.

So let’s look at their deeds in housing.

Public Housing: They promised to address issues in accessibility to public housing. Phil Twyford said, “No one else is going to fix this housing crisis.”

Labour promised to run Housing NZ as a public service with one job – to provide great income-related rental housing and to build thousands of new state houses.

This would apparently alleviate waiting lists in state housing.

The reality doesn’t even come close to delivering on their promises.

Nearly 10,000 New Zealanders have had to live in motels over the past three months, with the public housing waitlist up 50 percent on the same time last year.

That’s more than triple the waitlist number shortly after the coalition Government came to power – there were 6182 applicants in December 2017.

Every region across the country has seen demand rise – but it has been the worst for the East Coast where there’s been an 89 percent jump in the waitlist over the past 12 months.

And it takes the government longer to place people in housing even though fewer people are applying now:

The figures also show the Government is placing fewer people in public housing – and it is taking longer to do so.

The number of applicants housed was down 36 percent to 1115 in the three months to June – the average time it took to house them was 237 days, 20 days longer than last quarter.

The Ministry of Social Development has a handy chart that shows the scale of the problem has skyrocketed under Labour.

Now, the Government has managed to build some state houses. but they clearly aren’t even close to meeting demand, as the waiting lists show.

Kiwibuild: This was Labour’s flagship policy. They promised to build 100,000 affordable homes under the Kiwibuild name. That’s 10,000 homes per annum for ten years. Phil Twyford and Jacinda Ardern brazenly campaigned on this policy, but reality soon caused embarrassment.

It took the government a year to even specify what a Kiwibuild home would look like and then they reset the goals to try and make them more attainable.

But it soon became apparent that Kiwibuild was simply a slogan.

They explicitly promised 6,000 would be built by 30 June 2020. They have managed to build just 452, or 7.5% of their promise.

And just yesterday it has been revealed that the Government has “tweaked” Kiwibuild to allow up to a quarter of unsold homes into the open market.

Which is more than a tweak as the whole idea of Kiwibuild was that people would be queuing up to buy affordable homes and we would need a lottery to allocate them. Like with all of Labour’s slogans, reality came calling and the slogan was found wanting.

The reality is that no one wants to buy a Kiwibuild home. There is a stigma attached to it. So now the Government is selling them on the open market which is an acknowledgement that the people they thought would be falling over themselves to get in line simply didn’t exist. This is the problem you get when slogans don’t have the policy work done to back them up.

Phil Twyford said that they were going to bring back an “active government”, that the “market was failing” and that they were going to “change the mindset”.

At the same time, they’ve hammered property investors and made it tougher to borrow to buy investment properties. Little wonder then that state house waiting lists have soared as private landlords exited the market. But even with all those former rental properties entering the housing market they’ve been unable to keep pace with housing requirements.

Last week they heaped more pain on landlords that together with earlier “reforms” will see even more landlords quit. Contrary to their belief, this is going to make the situation worse.

Jacinda Ardern has said “know us by our deeds” and on housing their deeds have been hopeless at best and harmful at worst.

More people than ever before are crying out for state housing, private landlords are abandoning a market wrecked by the Government and the much vaunted active government and market fixes have failed.

Phil Twyford banked his political career in housing market reforms, yet he was replaced as Housing Minister by Megan Woods who has failed to solve anything either.

The Government, when challenged on the abject failure, always resorts to insults and sledges. They claim they’ve done better than National did after nine long years. Be that as it may, they told us that they would fix everything, and clearly they haven’t.

We are not here to look at National’s failings. We are here to look at Labour’s failings measured against what they promised. By those metrics they are a failure, especially in housing. It isn’t good enough to say you did better than the last government. Labour promised they had the solutions, but they didn’t and they’ve made things worse.

On one thing Phil Twyford was correct. We do need to change our mindset. The mindset that the Government can solve complex market problems by issuing a set of empty slogans that they were unable to back up with either policy or results.

Little wonder that Jacinda Ardern wants to campaign without any policy. It is rather perverse to campaign your alleged success as a government in combating the Chinese Plague when by any metric you can conceive they’ve failed on something that will be longer lasting than a pandemic and affect far more people negatively.

If we are to know them by their deeds, then we know they are a failure.