Wednesday, July 01, 2015

An ideological exercise

Today the government introduced a new Social Housing Reform (Transaction Mandate) Bill. The purpose of the bill? To enable the government to sell Housing NZ's state houses out from under it, reducing its ability to provide them to people in need. It also redefines the objectives of HNZC to make it facilitate such sales, despite thei inconsistency with its other objectives.

So is this policy justified? This bit from the bill's departmental disclosure statement says it all:
socialhousingimpacts

That's right - they've done no cost-benefit analysis whatsoever. This is a purely ideological exercise aimed simply at degrading a core public service for the sake of it - the ultimate in wrecking behaviour. But isn't that so very, very National?