We are in the middle of a housing crisis. The average asking price for a house in Aotearoa is now more than a million dollars, effectively locking anyone without inherited wealth out of home ownership. Unsurprisingly, kiwis aren't happy about this: three quarters of us want house prices to fall, with half of us wanting them to fall by "a lot". Which is understandable: its the only way people have any hope of getting the landlord's boot off their neck.
This inequality-driven radicalisation should be an opportunity for an ostensibly "centre-left" government. But they're not exactly falling over themselves to respond. Instead, we've just got the usual Labour scam of "pretend they're fixing it" (they're not, and not fast enough). As for the explicit question of prices, the Prime Minister spent a year pushing for "sustained moderation" (continued increases) to protect the asset values of the rich. She's now abandoned that now explicitly supports a decrease - but only a small one; she still opposes a collapse. And of course she continues to oppose land, wealth, or capital gains taxes. At which stage its worth pointing out that she owns a house worth $2.7 million, and which has increased in value by almost a million dollars since she bought it three years ago. And she's hardly alone: our elected representatives own an average of two houses each, and have racked up more than $50 million in capital gains in the last year - an average of $400,000 each. The foot-dragging and opposition of politicians in response to this crisis looks a lot like them protecting their own wealth, rather than acting in the public interest or the interests of their voters.
The problem for the government, and the political class as a whole, is that such naked self-interest has a corrosive effect on their legitimacy, and the legitimacy of our political system as a whole. But it seems that they'd rather burn the house down than give up any of their ill-gotten capital gains.
