2,000 new homes? Yeah, right

In last year's Budget, Prime Minister John Key made a clear promise to the New Zealand people:

In terms of housing, the Government is itself planning to build more than 2,000 houses over the next two financial years

So, how many new homes did the Government build last year? Just 68. And the year before it built only 56 [PDF, p. 22]. Against that background, Key's promise looks... overambitious.

So are they actually intending to act on that promise? If they were, I'd expect to see a line in the Budget 2012 Estimate of Appropriation for Vote Housing [PDF] labelled "capital expenditure: build 2,000 new houses over two years". No such line exists. In its absence, I think we can treat this promise as pure hot air.