The solution is not more government building programmes, the party says
ACT New Zealand has proposed strategies to address barriers to building homes to enable more houses to be built at lower prices and “ensure young Kiwis can achieve the dream of homeownership.”
“Anyone who has tried to build a house recently will have realised the costs are out of control. We hear ya,” said Brooke van Velden, ACT’s housing spokesperson.
What’s causing housing to be too expensive, the party said, was the high difficulty in gaining consents, the inability of the council to afford infrastructure, and the chronic shortage in building materials or labour.
“The solution is not more government building programmes,” Van Velden said. “Having builders contracted by the government does not solve the underlying problems with consents, infrastructure, and materials. Even if government programmes actually built any houses (and KiwiBuild suggests they won’t), they just compete with the private market to build homes that would have been built anyway.
“Earlier this year, there was even a plasterboard crisis. Plasterboard is literally a sandwich of plaster and cardboard. What first-world, industrialised country gets itself into such a pickle where we have a nationwide shortage? An overly bureaucratic one. Labour has blamed greedy corporates for New Zealand’s building materials costs without first looking in the mirror.
So, what’s ACT proposing? The party said it would:
- automatically allow building materials approved by jurisdictions with high-quality regulators and similar seismic situations to NZ’s (e.g., Japan and California) to be used in the country
- require councils to accept any “equivalent material” certified by MBIE for use in building projects
“We know that good substitutes for name-brand plasterboard and other scarce building products exist,” Van Velden said. “Our policy would require councils to accept them and let builders and architects get on with building houses.”
What do you think about ACT’s proposed solutions? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below.
