PHOTO: Bernard Hickey Photo: RNZ
New Zealanders who want warm, dry, affordable and secure housing should move to Australia, columnist Bernard Hickey says.
He first made the comments in a column he wrote last week, which he says the was the ugliest and most despairing he has ever written.
“I now think it’s unrealistic to say to those people, you can have affordable housing in your lifetime. And we’re essentially now a country where you have to be born into wealth, to be able to expect to have your own home and be able to build a stable family life,” Hickey told Jesse Mulligan.
Having covered the housing market for over 20 years he has now given up hope there will be affordable houses to buy or rent for a generation.
Up until a couple of years ago he still had some hope that the problem could be solved, he says.
“So that’s why I’ve decided now, having seen the results of several attempts by politicians and the grown-ups, if you like, of New Zealand’s political scene to solve this problem, and having seen all of them effectively give up – that’s what the Prime Minister did when she said she would never in her lifetime try to tax capital gains or effectively, wealth.
“And that is the one of the core problems here along with of course, the fact that a lot of people who now own these homes are willing to do an awful lot to ensure the value is protected and keeps growing. And one way to do that is to stop new housing supply.”
The Public Finance Act starves councils of the funds they need to build infrastructure and therefore release more housing, he says.
“So, the Public Finance Act, which this Government has signed up to, essentially says you must run net debt at a very low level, and much lower than every other country and you must keep the size of government around 30 percent of GDP.
“And no one’s challenged that – neither side of politics has challenged. But until you do that, it means that councils will be forever saying, oh, sorry we can’t do that development because we don’t have the money for the infrastructure.
“And the government will say, as it did two weeks ago, oh, we can’t fund that new suburb because we want to keep a lid on debt, when clearly, there’s no real market or economic reason to do that – it’s simply written into the law.”
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