The Queenstown Lakes District Council wants luxury homes to be exempt from the government's foreign buyers ban.
Some expensive homes owned by the exeptionally wealthy may not sell if they are only available to New Zealanders, it said in its submission on the bill.
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The council said the district had benefited "significantly" from people who have purchased in the luxury home market.
"Not only have we seen traditional investment in local business, but we have seen the launch of ground breaking social enterprises and incredible impact investment," the submission said.
That part of the housing market attracted high net worth people to the country who help the economy by bringing expertise, connections, investment and philanthropy, it said.
Yeah - people like anti-democratic vampire capitalist Peter Thiel and his silicon-valley doomsday prepper friends. Or the various foreign millionaires who have restricted access to public land. Or foreign criminals stashing and laundering money. Why would we want people like that?
The proposed law doesn't apply to anyone who actually lives here, so what QLDC is saying is that non-resident foreigners should be allowed to own parts of New Zealand for use as emergency boltholes for when they've fucked up the world, or as a commodity, effectively a house-shaped gold bar. And I just don't see why we should accept that, especially when said house-shaped gold bars are fucking things up for the rest of us. While QLDC is correct that the luxury property market is effectively a foreign market, utterly out of reach of almost all kiwis, those empty luxury houses are still taking up land which could be used for real homes for real people - something Queenstown is desperately short of. If they are devalued by the law, then maybe that land will be used for other purposes. The only losers in that will be the foreign speculators and the parasitic developers and real-estate agents who service them. But I guess the latter are exactly the sorts of people who get elected to local authorities and use them as a platform to promote their own economic interests.