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.

A bad joke

That's the only way to describe National's announcement today on replacement Cook Strait ferries. A year ago they cancelled iRex, which would have given us two new, rail-enabled ferries in January 2026 for $551 million (plus port costs). Today, they're promising two smaller, non-rail enabled ferries sometime in 2029, and the cost is secret. But it was leaked last night: $900 million. Excluding port costs, of course, plus contract break fees , and the costs of setting up a new SOE to shift them off KiwiRail's books. Once you include the contract break fees, we're paying twice as much to less, later.

This is not a competent government. Instead, it is one driven by spite and penny-pinching. And this is a perfect example of how this ends up being more expensive in the end. The quicker we throw this bunch of muppets out on their arses, the better.

Willis made no complaints about the PREFU

From the day she took office, Finance Minister Nicola Willis claimed that the previous government had cooked the books and left the new coalition with a financial mess to clean up. It was a serious allegation, made all the more serious because we have institutional protections against exactly this sort of thing, in the form of the Public Finance Act and the Pre-Election Financial Update (PREFU), dating from the last time a government did this back in 1990. Essentially, Willis was claiming that the PREFU was inaccurate. But if that was the case, you'd have expected her to have raised any inaccuracies with Treasury, the agency responsible for its preparation.

So did she? I used the OIA to ask for all communications from the Minister of Finance or her office with Treasury on the accuracy of the PREFU. And surprise, surprise, there weren't any. You can draw your own conclusions about the honesty of the Finance Minister and the accuracy of her claims from that.

"Savings"

So, Nicola Willis has presented her nano-budget, which wasn't really a budget after all, just a list of money she is planning to reprioritise. And the headline is that she's found almost $7.5 billion of "savings" to fund tax cuts for landlords. So what are these "savings"?

The mini-Budget outlined the $7.47b in savings, made up of $2.61b from stopping work on initiatives including Let's get Wellington Moving and Fair Pay Agreements, $2.0b from the Emissions Trading Scheme, and $2.8b from tax and benefit changes.

So, cut spending on vital infrastructure, on decarbonisation, and on the poor. Which might make the books look better in the short term, but at the cost of having to pay for it later. That cut infrastructure spending means higher economic costs and greater expense later. That "reprioritisation" of ETS revenue from decarbonisation to landlord tax cuts means higher emissions, which we will pay for in 2030. And cutting benefits and ECE means higher social costs later. In other words, these aren't really "savings" at all, but piling up costs for the future. Its exactly like a shitty council Keeping Rates Low by skimping on road and sewer maintenance. And we all know how that turns out.