The ‘Queen of Covid’, Jacinda Ardern has decided to blame the housing crisis on the ‘team of 5 million’. So much for we are all in this together. Talk about arrogant:
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is putting some onus on the public for the housing crisis, saying the Government had tried taxation to ease the soaring market three times without public support.
It comes after Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr last week said the issue with housing wasn’t identifying the problem, but rather the appetite for accepting policy recommendations on the part of politicians.
He suggested taxation and resource accesses as two measures that might direct some demand away from housing.
Orr said the ball was in the Government’s court.
However, Ardern this morning told TVNZ1’s Breakfast that “the appetite for some of these policies also needs to come from the public”.
“We’ve tried three times now to do things that specifically sit in that taxation category and there hasn’t been wide support for that,” she said.
Then-coalition partner New Zealand First stopped Labour from bringing in a capital gains tax last year.
The policy had been one which Ardern personally wanted to get through and campaigned hard on during the 2017 election.
TVNZ
Talk about petulant, arrogant and hilarious all at the same time. The ‘Queen of Covid’ is
actuallyblaming voters for high house prices because they didn’t support a Capital Gains Tax.
Plenty of other countries have a CGT AND soaring house prices. The problem is largely constraints on supply. The globalists have for years pushed an ‘up not out’ expansion policy for cities. Every city that has done that has seen property values soar.
If Labour had actually bothered to implement some of their policies in 2017, like abolishing the Auckland rural-urban boundary and infrastructure bonds for new subdivisions etc, then they might have actually made a difference. But they failed to progress them because they had an idiot in charge as the minister who focussed on trying to build a hundred thousand houses, instead of fixing the underlying issues.
Actually blaming the public for the decision by Jacinda Ardern to rule out a CGT for all time is just pathetic. She made that call unprompted, albeit with a modicum of pressure. She could have simply said there would be no CGT during the current term of Parliament as there was no majority for it. But no, she ruled it out forever (so long as she is PM).
David Farrar points out that pesky things like facts don’t support her disingenuous stance now:
Her argument that the public rejected it, not her, is not well borne out by the facts. A 2017 ONCB poll found 58% supported a CGT and 34% opposed. In 2019 it was 46% support and 41% opposed.
Kiwiblog
Another underlying issue that the government fails to do anything about is the near monopoly and vertical integration and control in the building markets. From aggregates, cement, to insulation, to building retailers, roofing and everything in between, the market is essentially controlled by one or two players, who margin everything up the line.
Instead of tackling that, or RMA reform or indeed anything else that would increase supply, she’s taken the easy option and blamed the very voters who put her lazy, incompetent bottom in the big chair.
How about some accountability, Prime Minister?
