Housing Minister Nick Smith has so far only managed to secure 25ha of spare Crown land for housing in Auckland after promising to deliver 500ha in last year's Budget.
The plan to find pockets of publicly owned land to turn into housing in Auckland was a key plank in National's Budget last year which Dr Smith said could result in thousands more houses. Dr Smith later took media on a tour of Auckland to inspect some of the sites. However, he revealed on One News that only 25ha had since been secured for housing and the $54 million budget for the project had been exhausted.
However, he had not given up and was still confident he could get to 500ha in the long term, saying he expected to make further announcements soon and had asked Finance Minister Bill English for more funding in next month's Budget.
...which at the rate Smith is paying, is going to cost just over a billion dollars. I think we can all predict Bill English's respone to that.
Unless of course English decides to pillage ACC and the Cullen Fund again. He's already using them as a slush fund to provide revenue for tax cuts and build subsidies for farmers; maybe he'll get them to pay top dollar to Auckland property developers for land to build houses on as well?