Save us from slick politicians with five minutes’ life experience under their belts suggesting we reconfigure the housing market because they, and others like them, can’t get a foot on the property ladder.
If renting is so unsustainable “in this country” (a phrase Swarbrick used several times that I find oddly offensive), why has renting endured since 1937 when the Labour government provided the first state houses?
“Two thirds of wealth in this country is held in housing. Those capital gains, I might add, are not something that is created by virtue of individual genius, capital gains come about by virtue of public investment in infrastructure and by community investment in things like walking school buses for kids.”
Well really, how much value does a walking school bus add to house values compared with hard-working mum and dad investors who scrimped and saved to invest in a rental property to house others?
Swarbrick throws metaphorical bricks through the capitalist glass houses of NZ housing investors’ windows. They aren’t even clever, she says, her academic nose wrinkling in disgust, because they have “no individual genius”. The stink of a dog turd stuck to the bottom of her shoe while driving down the motorway in her EV would be more palatable to Swarbrick than the thought of individual New Zealanders continuing to acquire wealth through the rental property market.
“A third of the population rent and a third of the homes are owned by people who own between four and more than 20 homes.”
These cretins! How dare they profit from the most basic of human needs: a roof over other people’s heads. Swarbrick says it’s not good enough for these renters who have families because they “are invested in this country” and need to be looked after.
It’s clear Swarbrick wants the votes from that one-third of the population who rent, because she says that she is working hard to give them a foot on the property ladder but doesn’t actually provide a strategy.
Renters include millennials unhappy to forgo their new EV or, to use Swarbrick’s example offered up in irritation, “if we stop getting flat whites, stop getting avocado on toast, all of a sudden, eventually, further down the track we will be able to get on the housing ladder”.
This appears to be an open and shut case of wealth envy cleverly packaged in political nous. Capitalists are the dirtiest scum of the earth whose toys will be snatched away by the nanny state and their access to investing their hard earned cash in rental property severely curtailed.
If anyone is going to benefit from property investment, Swarbrick says it should be the government who work for the common good and will distribute the wealth equitably, cough, cough.
“During my time in politics, is that no politician, or political party bar the Greens, has been willing to say house prices have to drop. If we continue with the so-called sustained moderation that’s been put on the table by even our prime minister – that is around 4% per annum increases in house prices – we are looking at the better half of a century until wages catch up to the level of affordability that we had in the early 2000s.”
Instead of drooling about punishing wicked property owners by somehow (how?) slashing house prices, how about just getting on and building good quality rental housing, or better still, let professional investors do the job for you?
Nope, Swarbrick is still figuring out to fund the new builds.
“You pull forward the investment that we are currently delaying for future generations, you could double the budget that Kainga Ora has to provide social housing in this country, you could also provide better funding towards CHIPS – those are community housing providers – but also to tackle the crises that we have at the moment with the rental market put in place rental controls.”
Does she not find it very strange that the government she has been part of promised, but could not deliver, new housing under Kiwibuild? No matter, let’s get on with reining in private housing providers.
“Rental caps absolutely, you could also look at forms of negotiation that exist in economies like Sweden where you have on the one side a representative group of renters and a representative group of landlords who haggle about where price increases are going to be.”
Swarbrick correctly observes that runaway house inflation might end badly but neglects to observe that if it does, private housing investors will carry the losses along with homeowners.
“The counter factual is that we continue with this runaway gravy train which an increasing number, 1.4M New Zealanders who rent, cannot get on and we risk a far more colossal and catastrophic crash further down the track.”
But why is renting unsustainable “in this country”? Should Swarbrick be living somewhere more aligned to her socialist outlook? China perhaps?
“Renting is not evil but we don’t have a sustainable way of doing it in this country. You know for far too long it’s been this narrative of… particularly for my generation, if we stop getting flat whites, stop getting avocado on toast, all of a sudden, eventually, further down the track we will be able to get on the housing ladder. That’s simply not a reality for far too many people who are now in their mid-thirties and forties – parents – the mum and dad investor narrative is broken. We have mum and dad investors in this country who need to be looked after.”
MP Chloe Swarbrick transcribed from the AM Show Friday 9 July
Swarbrick has facts and figures to hand, and she presents well, which makes her even more dangerous than the clown government currently running the depleted housing market show.
Please share this article so that others can discover The BFD