Your Daily Ten@10 - 2025/155

This is edition 2025/155 of the Ten@10 newsletter.

Hi all,

This is the Ten@10, where I collate and summarise ten news items you generally won't see in the mainstream media.

Enjoy!

• 🏦 Five Key Challenges — Don Brash highlights NZ’s major issues: slow productivity growth, unaffordable housing, racial division, unsustainable fiscal policy, and a foreign policy dilemma.
• 🏠 Severely Unaffordable Housing — A Herald report shows Aucklanders need $213k/year to “comfortably” afford a median $1.08M home, with mortgage payments eating 47% of household income — far above the 30% benchmark.
• 📉 Productivity Impact — BusinessDesk cites research linking rising house prices to low productivity, as capital flows into mortgages and land speculation rather than innovation, tech, and business growth.
• 🌍 Global Pattern — IMF and other studies find similar housing-related productivity slumps in Canada, Australia, the UK, and Spain — suggesting a broader economic distortion.
• 🏗️ Zoning & Policy Failures — Restrictive urban limits, especially around Auckland, inflate section prices and drive up overall housing costs. Labour promised to remove these limits in 2017 but failed to deliver.
• 🏛️ National’s Reforms — The new National-led government pledges RMA reform, easier land zoning, lower council liability, and more flexible building rules to improve affordability and boost housing supply.
• 📉 Declining Prices — House prices have dipped slightly, hinting at improved affordability and reduced speculative buying, with potential social and productivity benefits.
• 😨 Prime Minister’s Panic — On 22 August, PM Christopher Luxon said he wants “consistent” house price growth, echoing Jacinda Ardern’s stance of avoiding price declines, prioritising political popularity over affordability.
• ⚖️ Voter Dilemma — Rising house prices win votes among homeowners but worsen inequality, reduce productivity, and hinder living standards — creating a long-term economic trap.
• 💡 Lesson from a Father — A man advised his kids against buying homes as “depreciating assets” and instead funded their businesses — now they’re among NZ’s wealthiest, highlighting the value of productive investment over property speculation.
• 📅 Brash’s Warning — Brash urges policymakers to resist political incentives to keep prices high and to focus instead on restoring affordability and driving genuine productivity growth.