With great fanfare, and after ‘nine years of neglect’ resulting in the worst housing crisis since mud huts were invented, Phil pass-me-a-hammer Twyford announced the grand plan:
“100,000 affordable homes for first-time buyers over the next 10 years.”
“We will build 10,000 homes per year for 10 years.”
“These things take time to gain momentum, it will be 1000 homes in the first year.”
“We are on track to complete 300 Kiwibuild homes this year.”
Well, there are 84 houses that we have bought off developers who had already had them planned and started before Winston dropped us in the deep end. (Maybe not his actual words)
Oh, so they would have happened regardless?
The total extra number of houses added to the national housing stock, this year, as a result of all the hot air expended pontificating about what this government is going to do to solve the nine-years-of-neglect housing crisis is actually ….
ZERO
and the last of the KiwiBuild targets has been dropped.
Quote.The Ministry in charge of the Government’s flagship housing programme is now calling its one-year anniversary targets an “artificial deadline” and it looks almost certain to fail to build 300 homes by then.End quote.
When asked how many KiwiBuild houses will be built by the June 30 deadline, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said: “I couldn’t give you a number specifically for June 30.”
The first annual target had already failed. It was supposed to be 1000 Kiwibuild homes in a year – slashed to just 300 in January.
“We’ve got about 300 homes that are either completed or contracted to be completed,” Housing Minister Phil Twyford said at the time.
But when asked to confirm that, Ardern said on Monday: “I just couldn’t tell you that.”
Twyford was confident the target would be met just over a month ago. He told Newshub: “My advice is that we’re well on track to meet the 300.”
But on Monday, the Prime Minister denied that the end of the first year of KiwiBuild was ever a target.
“We never had targets for those dates.”
