The country faces long-term issues that experts say have not been sufficiently addressed
After winning a second term in a historic landslide, experts say the pressure is on for Jacinda Ardern and her Labour government to make good on promises to address housing affordability in New Zealand.
In 2017, Ardern campaigned on a promise to tackle the nation’s housing crisis – and three years on, Jan Rutledge, managing director of Auckland emergency housing service De Paul House, told Financial Times that the situation has got worse.
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“The Labour government came with the intention of building houses,” Rutland told FT. “I don’t know if it was naive, but it didn’t happen.”
Labour’s flagship $2 billion affordable housing program, Kiwibuild, was meant to address the supply shortage, with a stated goal to build 100,000 homes in 10 years for first-time home buyers. So far, FT reports that only 602 homes were completed in August 2020.
During the campaign, the opposition National Party slammed the government’s affordable housing efforts, with the party’s finance spokesperson Paul Goldsmith saying in October that “everything in relation to housing has gotten worse under Labour.”
“By now there should be 16,000 houses built, but only 602 have actually been delivered,” he said during the campaign. “That is less than 4% of what was promised. KiwiBuild, with a price tag of $2 billion, has been a giant waste of taxpayer money.”
Arthur Grimes, professor of public policy at Victoria University of Wellington, told FT that long-term issues such as insufficient housing construction and high immigration were still not being addressed.
“We have seen probably the biggest widening of the distribution of wealth that we have ever seen in New Zealand between people who own a house and those who do not,” Grimes told FT.
