Taking the piss

National is busy cutting social housing, which has resulted in increased scrutiny of politicians' housing entitlements. First, there's Social Development Minister Louise Upston, who is being paid $1000 a week to live in her own house while cutting payments to everyone else. She's "comfortable" with that, and of course she is - because she's being paid $1000 a week when she doesn't even have a mortgage! But the worst case so far is NZ First's Andy Foster. Foster is a former mayor of Wellington, and he's lived there for over twenty years. But now, for entitlement purposes, he's suddenly contriving to "live" somewhere else, so he can trouser more money from the rest of us:

Despite owning a home in Wellington for 26 years, Foster is claiming a $36,400 per year taxpayer-funded accommodation subsidy intended for non-Wellington MPs. Foster’s parliamentary expense reports show he claimed $22,700 in 2025, starting with $3,100 in the April-to-June quarter, followed by the maximum possible amount of $9,800 in every quarter since. He confirmed to The Spinoff that he continues to claim the allowance.

MPs are eligible for the accommodation subsidy if they live “outside the Wellington commuting area”. In 2025, Foster purchased a second home in Wairarapa, where he intends to run as a candidate in the 2026 election. He now lists the Wairarapa property as his “family home”. Foster still owns his Karori home and stays there during parliament sitting blocks but told The Spinoff it was “no longer my primary place of residence”.

At this stage, I must point out that this is not theft and it is not fraud, because - as the politicians love to say - it's "all within the rules" (which the politicians wrote to suit themselves). I must also point out that paying MPs to live in Wellington so they can do the job properly is good. We don't want only rich people or people who live in Wellington to be able to be MPs. But in this case we're not paying Foster to live in Wellington. Instead, we're paying him to not live there, so he can campaign for election elsewhere. And that's just taking the piss. Its not necessary for him to do his job, and arguably is an unlawful use of parliamentary funds for a political purpose (subsidising his election campaign).

MPs rorting their expenses like this delegitimises parliament and is one of the reasons they regularly feature below real estate agents on public trust surveys. Fortunately there are solutions. They clearly can't be trusted to manage their own accommodation arrangements ethically, so its time Parliamentary Services bought an apartment block to house them. And if this results in them being less comfortable than they are at present, they will only have themselves to blame.

(And while we're at it, we should do the same for ministerial housing, and electorate offices. If these thieves can't help themselves from double-dipping, then the decision needs to be taken completely out of their hands, and suitable workplaces and accommodation provided for them).

A vicious, corrupt and insane policy from a vicious, corrupt and insane regime

Albert Einstein reportedly said that insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. And that's basically National's housing policy. Back in the 1990's, they sold state houses, raised rents, and handed out money to their landlord cronies via the accommodation supplement. The result was poverty, overcrowding, the resurgence of third-world diseases, and the creation of a permanent underclass. There was some relief from the Helen Clark-led labour government, which built state houses to replace some of what had been sold, and replaced market rents with income-related ones, but it didn't undo the damage. Then, in the 2010's, under the Key-led national government, Paula Bennet did it all over again. That time we got all the previous bad effects, plus a homelessness crisis, people living in cars, then WINZ putting them up in motels at enormous cost (and then trying saddle them with odious debt) to avoid the resulting bad headlines, and finally a bipartisan acknowledgement that it hadn't worked. The following Labour governments again managed to undo some (but nowhere near all) of the damage, started a building programme and so on. And now its 2026, the end of the first term of a national-led regime, and Chris Bishop is back, doing it all again, this time with the added insult of pretending state house tenants are "lotto winners":

"If you're in a state home and you compare how much income you have with someone in a private rental who's got exactly the same income as you, you're $110 a week better off," she said.

"These changes are about making the system fairer. At the moment, people in social housing effectively have won the lotto, they get so much more support than a family with just as lower income in a private rental. That's not fair, and our changes are about fixing it."

So her solution to that unfairness is to make things worse rather than make things better. To kick those on the bottom of the heap and steal from them in order to enrich her cronies. Because increased accommodation supplements don't help renters - they go directly to landlords, who immediately hike rents to capture the entire increase. So the only people who benefit from this policy is them. And the national MPs they kick back to with donations, of course. It is a vicious, corrupt policy from a vicious, corrupt government. And thinking it will lead to a different result from the previous times it has been imposed is pure insanity.

An attack on democracy as well as the homeless?

Over the weekend the regime announced its long-expected policy of "move on" orders for homeless people. Having massively increased homelessness while slashing emergency housing, National's "solution" is get get the police to kick its victims round our cities, threatening them with fines or jail if they don't "move on". Which is pointless and cruel and far more expensive than actually housing them - but the regime clearly thinks there are more votes in performative cruelty than in actually solving problems.

Its a terrible policy, of course, which is going to further ruin lives and waste a lot of time and money doing so. But its not just the homeless under threat. The regime's proposed amendments to the Summary Offences Act allow orders for "disorderly, disruptive, threatening or intimidating behaviour" and "[o]bstructing or impeding someone entering a business". Which, given both common protest tactics and the prevailing interpretation of police that public protest is inherently "disorderly, disruptive, threatening or intimidating", seems like a clear threat to the public's right to protest. While the bill hasn't been published yet - the regime doesn't like to do that in advance, preferring to spring its legislation on people by surprise - unless it includes significant safeguards, we should regard it as an attack on our democratic rights as well as an attack on the homeless.

National's New Zealand

National came to power in part because it promised to reduce the cost of living of ordinary New Zealadners. But two years in, the reality is different. Stuff today reports that we are paying 80% more for food than the Australians are, despite (or perhaps because?) farmers telling us they're "feeding the world". And meanwhile, RNZ reports that people with jobs are forced to live in cars:

Lower Hutt vinyl layer Dylan Holdaway, 35, said he had been sleeping in his silver Toyota Wish for the past five months.

He told RNZ that living this way had led to him losing 25 kilograms and dealing with several infections.

[...]

He worked 30 hours a week, and said living in his car made it hard to maintain his appearance on the job.

This is National's New Zealand: a country where we are gouged by landlords, supermarkets, banks, and power companies; where ordinary people with jobs can't afford a place to sleep and are slowly starving to death because they can't afford food. Because National's low-wage, cartel-dominated economy doesn't provide the income for people to have even the basics anymore, and their gutted government doesn't provide the services to make up for that.

In 2016, similar stories shamed the Key government into actually doing something to ease homelessness. But this bunch are shameless. They have made things this way deliberately, grinding down working conditions, giving a green light to gougers, gutting Kainga Ora, and giving away the government revenue which could have helped solve this to landlords with gratuitous tax cuts. They are not going to fix this, because doing so would mean admitting they were wrong - and because they and their mates are profiting from the misery they are inflicting.

The only way this will change is if we change the regime. But that's not enough, because the next government needs to actually do something about it, rather than just trying to perpetuate the grossly unjust status quo. And that means restarting Kainga Ora's building program, to build the homes people need; forcibly breaking up the cartels and regulating the fuck out of the pieces to prevent price-gouging; regulating landlords to prevent them gouging for rent; restoring the benefit system; and taxing wealth to pay for it all. And if Labour won't promise that, then you should vote for someone else who will.

Is this what government is for?

Aotearoa has an infrastructure shortage. We need schools, hospitals, public housing. But National is dead set against borrowing to fund any of it, even though doing so is much cheaper than the "public-private partnership" model they prefer. So what will National borrow for? Subsidising property developers:

The new scheme, called the Greenfield Model, would see the Government’s National Infrastructure and Financing Agency (NIFFco) lend to a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) at a “very competitive” interest rate during the early stage of development.

The debt would then be re-financed to private markets, such as a bank, once the development is complete. It would ultimately be re-paid by the new homeowners via a levy.

This would be a good idea if it was for state houses, a public asset. But essentially what National is planning is low-cost loans to private developers - just a direct subsidy to their profits. And the people who buy those houses will then have to pay a special tax to pay for National's financial shenanigans.

Wouldn't it be much simpler for the government just to borrow and build themselves?

National's war on renters

When the National government came into office, it complained of a "war on landlords". It's response? Start a war on renters instead:

The changes include re-introducing 90-day "no cause" terminations for periodic tenancies, meaning landlords can end a periodic tenancy without giving any reason.

[...]

Landlords will now only need to give 42 days' notice for ending a tenancy, instead of 63 days, if they want to move themselves or a family member into the property, or if the tenancy agreement notes the property is usually used to house employees, and they want to move an employee into the property.

Landlords will now only need to give 42 days' notice for ending a tenancy, instead of 90 days, if the property is subject to an unconditional agreement for sale requiring vacant possession, according to the Government.

So they're going to make it easier for landlords to throw people out of their homes. And they have the gall to call this "pro-tenant".

So I guess if your landlord throws you out any time over this term, you know who to blame: Chris Bishop. And you should take your revenge on him and his party at the ballot box at the first opportunity.

We know how to make rent affordable: crush landlords

In question time today, Housing Minister Chris Bishop, in response to questions about the Kāinga Ora waitlist, said that the government's policy goal was to “get rent affordability better under control”. He seemed to think this was a matter of everyone but Kāinga ora building houses, plus of course the (bullshit) trickle-down effect from giving huge tax cuts to landlords. But an article in the Guardian last night on the UK's housing crisis shows that the policy solutions to high rents are known and tested:

In the 1970s, when [Tory MP Edward] Leigh’s contemporaries were buying their first homes, they were the direct beneficiaries of an imploding private rental market. Rent controls, secure tenancies and high interest rates had conspired to decimate the sector: it shrank from nearly 60% of dwellings in England and Wales in 1939 to just 9% in 1988, towards the end of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. This was welcomed by Conservative governments and Labour councils alike: the former rejoiced that rack-renting landlords were having to sell up to new owner-occupiers, while the latter enthusiastically repurposed existing private lets into new social housing stock.

Of course, it was Margaret Thatcher who fucked this up, with policies designed to ensure that "the letting of private property will again become an economic proposition". That went against the past 50 years of political consensus, that it should not be an economic proposition, founded on solid evidence that it led to nasty, squalid, and over-priced housing as landlords sought to maximise their profits.

We need such a consensus here. Or at least, a left-wing coalition committed to the eradication of landlords. And we know how to do it: tax and regulate the shit out of them. Tax land and vacant property. Control rents, make tenancies secure, and require them to be decent. When landlords sell up, tax their capital gains, and use the money to fund an expansion of Kāinga Ora and council housing to outcompete the private sector. We shouldn't pursue the traditional solution of hanging landlords from lampposts, but we should absolutely do the economic equivalent to drive them out of business.

The Guardian article notes that one of the few things that Adam Smith and Karl Marx agreed on was that landlords are bad, a complete economic dead-weight. It goes on:

Even if we leave aside the appalling conditions and precarity that private renters face, anyone with an interest in lower taxes, lower wage bills and increasing the number of first-time buyers must equally be interested in smashing the private rented sector to bits. Homebuyers are now forced to compete with landlords, who chase sensational yields in our unregulated rental market, and £85.6bn a year (which comes, of course, from wages and taxes) is wasted on rent. A renewed collapse of landlordism would represent not just the tenants’ revenge for the housing crisis, but a much broader and more valuable moment of social progress.

Obviously, I disagree with the "reduce rent so we can pay people less" line; instead I'd argue that reducing rent would be a huge way to improve living standards, moderate the cost-of-living crisis, and lift people out of poverty. That is something the National Party claims to be interested in; it is certainly something the Labour Party should be (the Greens and Te Pāti Māori, representing groups who overwhelmingly pay rent, already are). The question is, why do the major parties continue to ignore the known solutions, in favour of handouts to landlords and tinkering around the edges? Is it because their MPs own too many houses themselves...?

This is corrupt

Earlier in the month, a panel of "independent" experts in Wellington produced recommendations for the future of housing in the city, and they were a bit shit, opposing intensification and protecting the property values of existing homeowners. Its since emerged that they engaged in some pretty motivated reasoning on the latter issue, but why? BusinessDesk has the scoop: they had huge undeclared conflicts of interest:

Members of a controversial panel setting the agenda for Wellington’s housing own more than $7 million worth of property in the capital city, with five of the six properties not declared in the independent hearings panel's published conflicts-of-interest register. The properties include homes in Mt Victoria and Te Aro, suburbs in which the eight-member panel (IHP) recommended expansions to character precinct designations, which would hinder the construction of new housing.

I don't know about you, but making a decision which you will profit from while hiding that fact seems pretty fucking corrupt to me. And it should be enough to have their recommendations tossed for apparent bias.

But not just that. We've prosecuted, convicted, and even jailed people in the past for lying on their CVs in order to obtain a position. Lying on a conflict on interest statement seems to be no different. So, will these people be prosecuted? Or is fraud OK when it is done by rich people?

Drawn

A ballot for five Member's Bills was held today, and the following bills were drawn:

• Parole (Mandatory Completion of Rehabilitative Programmes) Amendment Bill (Todd Stephenson)
• Goods and Services Tax (Removing GST From Food) Amendment Bill (Rawiri Waititi)
• Income Tax (ACC Payments) Amendment Bill (Hamish Campbell)
• Companies (Address Information) Amendment Bill (Deborah Russell)
• Local Electoral (Abolition of the Ratepayer Roll) Amendment Bill (Greg O’Connor)

The last one is going to be a flashpoint for current tensions over housing, rent, and landlords, given that it would remove a democratic anomaly which currently gives absentee landlords multiple votes in local body elections.

There were only 59 bills in the ballot today, so someone has been slacking.

National's giveaway politics

We already know that national plans to boost smoking rates to collect more tobacco tax so they can give huge tax-cuts to mega-landlords. But this morning that policy got even more obscene - because it turns out that the tax cut is retrospective:

Residential landlords will be able to claim back tax that they paid under the previous Government, the National-Act coalition deal indicates.

Such a retrospective law changes would be “highly unusual and unorthodox,” says one tax expert. Retrospective law-making is generally frowned upon.

And it’s one more oddity in all the toing-and-froing by lawmakers over the residential landlords’ tax break.

Today, CTU economist Craig Renney releases a report concluding the lost revenue cost of accelerating the restoration of interest deductibility will be about $900 million for the new Government – that’s on top of National’s original $2.1b costings, and a new hole in its tax package.

It is unclear whether landlords will be required to give a retrospective rent cut to their tenants, but... probably not.

This is a perfect example of National's giveaway politics, and how lobbying for such giveaways, whether financial or regulatory, is the true business of New Zealand "business". Landlords are getting a giveaway. The fossil fuel industry is getting a giveaway. The cancer industry is getting a giveaway. Farmers and polluters are getting a giveaway. Shitty foreign "gig economy" businesses are getting a giveaway. Seabed miners are expecting one. Even favoured charities are getting one. Meanwhile, actual people who need help or government services like housing, health, and education get nothing. The problem for National is that the latter vote, while businesses don't. But maybe they'll try and "fix" that too?

A pallid shade of Green II

Last month, the Greens introduced their clean power policy, promising loans and grants to upgrade homes to add solar panels and be energy efficient. Two weeks ago Labour released their response - a weak "pilot scheme" of energy efficiency grants, which I described as a pallid shade of Green. Today, they've followed that up with an incentive scheme for rooftop solar panels and batteries. And like their earlier energy efficiency effort, its good to see, but also a bit meh, offering too little money and too little ambition. And the latter is really on display in their plans for state houses: the Greens had promised a full refit scheme, with panels and batteries (and consequent zero summer power bills and massive improvements in tenant welfare, plus pressure on the private rental market to offer the same) for 30,000 state homes. Labour is promising to do a mere one thousand. Why? Because they'd rather loot the ETS funding which would pay for that in the name of "fiscal responsibility". Which, when we're facing a $24 billion bill if we fail to meet our climate commitments, seems to be the opposite of "responsible".

As with Labour’s previous offering, I'm left with the question: why vote for bullshit half-measures, when I could vote for the real thing instead?

A pallid shade of Green

Last month, the Greens introduced their clean power policy, promising loans and grants to upgrade homes to add solar panels and be energy efficient. Today, Labour responded with their own version: a "pilot programme" to improve energy efficiency, funded by the ETS. Details are light, but the big difference with the Greens' scheme appears to be that its mostly grants, with no interest-free loan component (so benefits the capital-rich who can afford the extra), and is narrower in focus, exclusively about insulation and electric heating and excluding solar panels, batteries, and EV chargers. So less money and more control-freaky, which is very Labour. And of course there's no commitment to a massive investment programme to put solar panels on state houses, because that would be spending money.

All in all, while its welcome to see any movement from Labour in this area, its also kindof weak and half-measures. A pallid shade of Green. The sort of policy National would offer. And the obvious question is why vote for the weak imitation when you can vote for the real thing?

Finally...?

At the 2020 election, Labour promised to regulate property managers. In February 2022, they said they were actually doing it. In November 2022, they repeated that claim. Now, less than two months from the election, they've finally introduced the legislation. Whether doing something grudgingly, at the last possible minute, and after years of foot-dragging counts (and when it won't actually pass before the election) counts as keeping their promise is left as an exercise for the reader.

As for the legislation itself, it would require property managers to be licenced, with criminal penalties for doing business without a licence. There will be a complaints regime, allowing licences to be suspended or revoked, but weirdly failing to comply with the Residential tenancies Act won't be a grounds for complaint, and there'll be no automatic notification tot he disciplinary tribunal if a property manager is found to have done so by the Tenancy Tribunal (these seem like good things to push for at select committee). Delivering services "in a way that falls short of the standard that a reasonable member of the public is entitled to expect" is grounds for a complaint, and I suspect that clause is going to get a real workout.

The legislation might get a first reading before the election, but it won't be getting any further until afterwards. Which means that if you want it to pass, you need to vote for a party which will support it, rather than a landlord party which won't.

The Greens' clean power policy

Over the weekend the Greens released their clean power policy, promising a "clean power payment" of up to $6000, interest-free loans of up to $30,000, deductibility for landlords, and a massive investment program in putting solar panels on state houses. Unlike the current Warmer Kiwi Homes programme, it won't be means-tested, and it will fund a much wider range of upgrades: not just insulation and efficient heating, but also solar panels, batteries, double-glazing, and fast-chargers for EVs. So basicly, if you own your own home, the Greens will make it much easier to make it warm and efficient. And if you live in a state house, the Greens are going to make sure you get free power in summer.

Looked at just as a solar energy programme, its obviously not the most efficient way of installing panels. Take the state housing upgrade program, which would see solar panels installed on 30,000 (of 67,000) state houses: putting them on rooftops would cost ~$525 million for ~150MW, about five times the cost of an equivalent-sized array stuck in a field. But this is about encouraging distributed home generation for home use, for the direct benefit of the people who live in those homes. State house users not having to pay power bills for a quarter of the year or more is going to significantly improve their welfare, and that is going to have flow-on effects elsewhere. And the same is going to apply to homeowners who use the grants and loans to install panels and batteries.

And of course, its not just a solar energy programme, but about insulation, heating, transport, and the elimination of fossil fuels as well. Aotearoa needs to make a massive transition in the next two decades to a cleaner, more efficient economy, which means upgrading all of those things. And this is about pushing that. Banks are already offering similar loans for these upgrades. But government grants will push things faster, and interest-free government loans will keep the banks honest.

But while this is excellent news for people who own their own homes, that's an ever-declining proportion of us. The big problem for the national upgrade is landlords, who face very weak incentives to provide solar panels, heat pumps, and EV chargers for the benefit of their tenants. Tax deductibility may help a little, but its probably better to see this as a carrot to go alongside the stick of the rental WOF scheme. And its not hard to see that being eventually extended to require such things alongside insulation, heating, and ventilation. And of course I'd like to think that if state houses provide them (at income-related rents, too), private landlords will feel some pressure to compete. Alternatively, i am more than happy to see the government build, buy, and upgrade more state houses, and put the private landlords who won't compete out of business.

"Lets lynch the landlord" as policy

Last month the Greens released their tax policy, was was basicly eat the rich. Over the weekend they followed it up with their rental policy. The short version? lets lynch the landlord:

Rents controls would limit how much landlords could increase the rent by each year. The cap would never be higher than 3 percent, which is the upper limit of the Reserve Bank's inflation target.

Landlords would not be allowed to raise rents beyond this limit unless they have made substantial improvements to the property.

The controls would also be property based rather than tenancy to prevent landlords putting up the rent between tenants.

A Rental Warrant of Fitness would guarantee all rental homes were safe, warm and healthy to live in.

A national register of all landlords and property managers would keep track of how many properties were rented, ownership, how much rent was charged over time, and compliance with the Rental Warrant of Fitness.

Less headliney, but also important: relaxing Labour's austerity limits on Kainga Ora, allowing them to build even more state houses. Which would restore some balance to the rental sector.

Naturally, landlords hate it, making their usual threat to sell up. Which is a feature, not a bug, because unless they turn arsonist, the houses will still be there. They'll just be parasite free. Economists also hate it, but given that their "discipline" is basicly making excuses for the rich, they would. And as with MMP, the Wal Footrot principle applies: want a reason to vote for it? Just look at the people telling you not to.

[With thanks to the Dead Kennedys for the post title]

Naked corruption

Last week Transport Minister Michael Wood was stood down after failing to properly declare a conflict of interest. He owned shares in Auckland Airport, a company he was responsible for regulating while Minister, and while the amount of money involved was small compared to his $296,007 ministerial salary (but large from a normal person's perspective), it simply wasn't acceptable. Meanwhile, Stuff has reminded us about a much larger conflict of interest: Chris Luxon's seven houses:

Five of Christopher Luxon’s seven properties can have more townhouses or apartments built next door under the Medium Density Residential Standards (MDRS) –a law which was passed with bipartisan support, but which National has now said it will repeal if elected in October.

That includes his five-bedroom Remuera home, which shifts from being zoned for standalone homes up to two storeys with landscaped gardens, to allowing three homes of up to three storeys under the MDRS.

While individual landowners could benefit in the short-term from the ability to subdivide a property into more homes under the MDRS, a shift away from higher density is forecast to lead to higher prices in the long-term.

Luxon’s property portfolio has fallen an estimated $6.7 million in value during the current downturn, according to CoreLogic data.

...which means they can be expected to rise by a similar amount if the policy is reversed. And yet, Luxon is not considered to have a conflict of interest, despite directly advocating for a policy which would personally enrich him by millions of dollars.

This is simply corrupt. There is no other name for it. And if rich politicians can't stop themselves from behaving corruptly, then voters need to stop them from doing it, by simply not electing them in the first place.

Labour doesn't deliver

Grant Robertson is currently reading his budget speech, to the usual applause from the performing seals on the backbench. More childcare subsidies for multinational childcare providers! Eliminating prescription charges! Subsidies for computer game companies (who already have the subsidy of being exempt from employment law)! Some of this is welcome, some of it is sensible, some of it is not. But all of it misses the target.

Look at the three key metrics. Housing? Nothing. Tax? A minor tweak to the trust rate, but nothing significant. Climate change? More research funding as a substitute for action, a little bit for public transport, but nothing really to reduce emissions. On the big issues they're just kicking the can down the road again. Which means it'll be that much more expensive when the bill comes due.

As I said earlier this morning, we need change. This budget shows that we will not get it from Labour.

We need change

Over on The Kaka, Bernard Hickey is calling the Loafers Lodge fire a symptom of our bipartisan, low-tax, low-debt, no-housing, fuck-the-poor, asset bubble for the rich political consensus. And he's appropriately cynical about the response:

So far, the response in real financial terms by the Government is business as usual: investigate the individual disaster, change some regulations and blame the residents and/or the landlord.

But will there be more spending on social housing, and on benefits, so people at the bottom aren't warehoused in firetraps, waiting to be burned to death because neither government nor landlord is interested in paying for basic safety (let alone dignity)? Finance Minister Grant Robertson says "wait for the budget", but we know the answer will be "no". Quite apart from pre-election risk-aversion, the Labour party is completely uninterested in fixing anything, in changing the toxic status quo. They're the party of excuses. That's all they ever offer. Excuses for why nothing can be done, for why things have to stay the way they are. And meanwhile the Ministers making those excuses are sitting on their $296,007 salaries (plus slush), and on their piles of hoarded houses (paid for by the public, thanks to generous parliamentary allowances and rortable expenses), collecting their tax-free capital gains. They are the problem. They are profiting from this mess. Of course they're uninterested in fixing anything.

We know what the solutions are. More social housing and higher benefits, so everyone has a decent home and enough to live on. Taxing the rich, with wealth taxes, land taxes, and inheritance taxes, both to pay for that and other public services, and to break the intergenerational cycle of hoarding which drives inequality. And rapidly lowering emissions, so our homes aren't all flooded, burned, or blown down by the consequences of the richs' pollution. These are popular policies, but Labour won't offer any of that in the budget tomorrow. While they may pretend to offer some of it come election time, the moment they're elected it'll be back-burnered and it'll be back to excuses and the status quo, just like it was in 2017 and 2020. If we want those things, we need to vote for parties who will offer it: The Greens and Te Pāti Māori.

Finally

At the 2020 election, Labour promised to regulate property managers. Now, they're finally doing it:

The Government’s announcement that rental property managers will be regulated has left the industry asking for more detail, and tenants calling for landlords to be regulated too.

Regulating property managers was one of the Labour Party’s campaign promises in the last election, because the industry is not currently regulated.

Earlier this year the Government proposed a licensing scheme for them, and on Tuesday Housing Minister Megan Woods announced a new regulatory system for the industry.

It would involve compulsory registration and licencing for both individual property managers and their organisations, training and entry requirements, practise standards, and a complaints and disciplinary process which would be administered by the Real Estate Authority (REA).

Property managers are unhappy, but they would be, wouldn't they? Now they'll have to behave like the professionals they say they are, and they'll be able to be held to account for unprofessional behaviour. Which seems to be a Good Thing from a basic consumer rights perspective. But bad I guess if you like having unaccountable power over your serfs.

But while this is a good thing, there's a big gap in the system: private landlords. They need to be regulated and licensed, to ensure basic standards. And if they're unwilling to meet such standards, they should leave the industry.

Time to freeze rents

For the past few years Renters United has been calling for rent controls to stop gouging landlords. Now, that call has been taken up by the Human Rights Commission:

The Human Rights Commission/Te Kāhui Tika Tangata is calling for an immediate rent freeze and an increase to the accommodation supplement to give renters a reprieve during the cost-of-living crisis.

Too many New Zealanders are sacrificing their fundamental human rights to pay the rent, says chief commissioner Paul Hunt.

“We’re very concerned that some students, low-income or single-wage families are having to make trade-offs between the right to adequate food and the right to a decent home,” he said.

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the government implemented a six-month freeze on rent increases to ease the pressure on renters. The commission is suggesting the government re-instate a temporary freeze.

This seems like a good idea. Currently the government is gradually building its way out of the housing shortage, and that's a long-term solution. But in the short-term, people are suffering as greedy Boomers gouge them for every cent they can, while rapacious property managers screw fees out of their captive market. Capping rents and controlling the rate at which they can increase will alleviate some of that suffering. Its what an actual left-wing government would do. The question is whether Labour is still interested in voters, or landlords.