That was the starting point for the bold Kiwibuild election bribe promise. 100,000 new, affordable homes for first-time buyers, built over 10 years. Easy-peasy. You can say anything you like in opposition. No one cares and no one has to deliver.
Then along comes Winston and drops you in the deep end. Oh dear!
How hard would it be for someone to ask BCI, NZ, for some data before making such outlandish promises. A Newspaper could ask that, so I presume a flunky in the Labour party could also ask.
The completed build outputs for the top 11 home building companies in NZ for the year ending April 2019 are shown in the table below. The total number of new houses on this list is 4,996. Obviously, there are other smaller companies also building houses.
If the top 11 can only build 5,000 homes in a year, where on earth did Labour think that they were going to get the workers to add an extra 10,000 per year over and above what the private sector was building?
As they have discovered they cannot even get an extra 1,000 built in a year and the hundred or so they are claiming were built by companies in that list anyway and thus were not ‘additional’.
Solving the housing crisis? Yeah/Nah.