Spending capital (Patreon)

For 3 1/2 years people on the left have been crying out for Jacinda Ardern to do something with all the popularity she'd amassed. Labour was rewarded with a near-perfect response to Covid with a majority at the last election, and still it seemed the party was wracked with timidity to do ... anything.

And then yesterday they did something.

I'm no expert on the intricacies of the housing market, not by a long shot, but it seems that they've pissed the right people off. Andrew King especially. Seeing his tears brings me joy. Fuck him.

The best explainer I've seen on the more high-level impacts came from Hamish Rutherford's column in the Herald [link here, but it's paywalled].

The most striking line of Hamish's piece is:

The policy it announced this week runs a strange but significant political and economic risk: it might work better than expected.

Hamish doesn't claim to know exactly what will happen - and truth be told nobody seems sure. There are so many competing views out there as to who the WINNERS and LOSERS are as to make it impossible to properly ascertain.

Nevertheless, people have said that housing is a massive concern. Numbers of people who want to enter the property ladder have been screaming out for something to be done, and now the Government has done something.

And that's a plus, right?

Jacinda Ardern has taken her political capital and spent some of it.

And it's not entirely dissimilar to John Key's GST raise, in that Labour was fairly unequivocal about not increasing the "bright line test" during the election campaign, and now has done exactly that.

That part doesn't bother me personally; I want my politicians to change and move as the situation warrants, but I can see why some people might get all het up about "breaking a promise" made on the election campaign. How can you trust that the party you want to vote for is going to do the things it says it will if breaking promises becomes the norm?

I hope that the $3 Billion poured into freeing up more land actually goes more towards brownfield housing than greenfield, my preference is for housing to be on existing transport lines rather than creating a sprawling mess, but we'll see how it goes.

One part of the Government's plan that I really liked and haven't seen a huge amount of coverage is the expansion of the Apprenticeship Boost initiative. That's longer-term thinking; it's acknowledging that we have a shortage of supply, and a shortage of people/companies to build houses so the Government is expanding that scheme as a longer-term view to increasing stock. I like to see long-term thinking in my Governments. So often we fall victim to short-termism, just to get a quick win or boost in popularity.

Overall what do I think about the housing package? I dunno. We'll find out how successful it's been in ... a few years? But at least Labour has done something. Which is more than National really did when it was in Government, and it's more than this Labour Party has done before today.