If you’re a renter it’s probably your biggest expense, if you’re a homeowner it’s probably your biggest asset. So what do the parties want to do about housing? Here’s the two-minute version – see Policy.nz for more.

See more from our policy in two minutes series here.

Polling during the past two elections showed housing was far and away the most important issue. It ranked at the top of the IPSOS issues monitor from 2018, when the poll began, until February 2022, but it has now dropped to third behind inflation/cost of living and crime/law and order. 

While it might not be number one any more, housing never really leaves voters’ minds: if you’re a renter it’s probably your biggest weekly expense and if you’re a homeowner it’s probably your biggest asset. 

Building more houses

A large part of the reason New Zealand’s housing market is so crazy expensive is because for decades councils have restricted the number of houses that can be built – think excessive heritage and character protections, Nimby neighbours who can complain to stop new builds, and strict rules on height limits. Some of the most important policies up for debate this election are aiming to fix that. 

Labour passed two very important pieces of housing policy with two very boring names, both based around preventing councils from stopping new housing. The National Policy Statement on Urban Development (NPS-UD) means six-storey apartments are allowed anywhere within walking distance of a centre city or a railway station. The Medium Density Residential Standards (MDRS) mean developers are allowed to build three-storey townhouses on basically every section in a major city. The Greens and TOP support both of these policies. 

National will keep the NPS-UD, but wants to give councils the ability to withdraw from the MDRS. They will still make the council’s zone for growth – but this will probably mean more distant suburbs rather than growth in the centre of towns. National also wants to give councils money to reward them for consenting more buildings – starting with $25,000 per dwelling above their previous average. 

The Greens want to introduce development bonuses that will allow property developers to build a third higher than zoning allows if the building is universally accessible or environmentally friendly. 

Act opposes the MDRS but would be happy with two-storey townhouses by default. It would let developers build above zoning rules if 70% of the homeowners on the street approved. NZ First opposes the NPS-UD and the MDRS. 

First home buyers

Labour introduced the progressive home ownership fund, which included various shared equity and rent-to-own options, most notably the First Home Partner scheme.

Act wants to abolish both the progressive home ownership scheme and the First Home Grant. National supports the First Home Grant and says it supports the “concept” of progressive home ownership, but has criticised the government’s execution of the scheme.

The Greens want to expand the progressive home ownership schemes, and provide government-backed mortgage refinancing for people who bought their first home in the past four years  and are at risk of hardship due to interest rate increases. 

NZ First wants a select committee inquiry to look into improved policy for first homes.

Renters

Labour would require property managers to be registered – but with an exception for landlords who manage their own properties. The government also banned no-cause terminations, and limited rent increases to once a year. 

National wants to bring back no-cause evictions and remove the rollover of fixed-term tenancies into periodic tenancies. 

The Greens want to stop landlords from being allowed to increase the rent by more than 3% each year, add a rental warrant of fitness, a landlord register, and introduce new warm bedroom requirements. 

Act would allow landlords to issue a 90-day notice without providing a reason or applying to the Tenancy Tribunal, and wants to let landlords charge an extra bond for pets. 

Public housing

Labour is promising 27,000 new public houses by 2027, and the Greens want even more public houses: a target of 35,000 in the next five years. 

Rather than government-built public houses, National prefers to fund community housing providers; charities that build and own houses for low-income families and receive government subsidies in exchange for low rents. 

TOP also liked the subsidised housing model and wants to bring in a $3 billion development fund for community housing providers to build more homes. The Greens want to scale up community housing providers even further with a government-backed underwrite to help new developments get off the ground. 

The Greens want Kainga Ora to build more prefabricated houses and give long-term contracts to manufacturers. They would also expand the Income Related Rental Subsidy to council tenants. 

NZ First generally wants more social housing for seniors, and Te Pāti Māori wants 50% of new public housing to be allocated to Māori. 

National wants to create a “Social Impact Bond” to pay providers who can shift families out of emergency housing into more stable homes, and are promising families who have been in emergency housing for more than 12 weeks will be moved to the front of the queue. 

Act’s public housing policies are mostly about making it easier to evict disruptive Kāinga Ora tenants and move them to the bottom of both the public housing and emergency housing waitlists.

Infrastructure

To build new houses, you need basic infrastructure: pipes, electricity, roads and flood management. That stuff is really expensive, and it relies on the support of councils and government to build and operate. 

Labour has introduced a $1 billion Infrastructure Acceleration Fund to support councils and developers to build infrastructure, which it says will enable up to 35,000 new homes. 

National has its own plans to encourage new infrastructure, including some legal reforms for council debt, and new rules that require infrastructure for new subdivisions to be paid for by the homeowners and developers through special rates or levies, rather than being spread across the entire community. 

NZ First wants a Ministry of Infrastructure to help unlock new land to be developed into housing. 

ACT and TOP both want to return GST on new residential builds back to local councils to fund new infrastructure.

Tax

Interest deductibility on investment properties is a sweet tax break for landlords and is a hot topic this election. 

The Labour government cancelled interest deductibility with the exception of new builds, which incentivised investors to buy new developments rather than compete with owner-occupiers on older homes. National, Act and NZ First have all promised to bring back interest deductibility for landlords.

Another biggie is the bright line test, a form of capital gains tax on property bought and sold within a certain timeframe. Labour expanded the test to 10 years, National wants to bring it back to two years, and Act wants to get rid of it entirely. 

TOP wants to remove both the bright line test and interest deductibility and swap it for a Land Value Tax of 0.75% of the value of urban residential land, paid annually. The Greens have proposed a Wealth Tax of 2.5% on all assets above a $4 million threshold.   

Te Pāti Māori wants a capital gains tax on all property set at 2% of the appreciation per annum – other than on the whānau home, as well as introduce a tax on undeveloped land and vacant home. 

National would partially reverse the foreign home buyers ban for sales of homes worth more than $2 million with a 15% tax on the sale price.

Policy.nz is an excellent resource for learning about what political parties are promising to do if elected. But some sections are surprisingly empty. Which ones? And why? 

Not every party has a policy for everything. Some parties – Animal Justice, Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party – are focused on a single issue (exactly the one it sounds like). Others simply aim for broad-spectrum, middle-of-the-road policies that appeal to the (squeezed?) middle voter. Labour and National’s most high profile and fleshed out policies largely fit in this category, although they have other policies around the edges too, like National wanting to create a ministerial portfolio for… space? 

Then there are the minor parties. Te Pāti Māori focuses almost exclusively on policies that promote the interests of Māori. As Policy.nz editorial director Ollie Neas said in an interview with Gone by Lunchtime, Labour and National get media attention because they’re likely to be leading the next government, while the Green Party and Act often have to release policy to achieve the same result. 

Despite the many hundreds of policies released by parties this election, there are also some important areas which have been largely neglected, or have at least been neglected by major parties. Opinion columnists have already talked about the holes in disability and artificial intelligence policy, and Spinoff writers Duncan Greive and Sam Brooks have observed the absence of media and arts policy respectively. From a trawl of policy.nz, here is a non-exhaustive examination of some of the other missing issues.  

Foreign policy, especially aid and refugees

New Zealand is a small country in a big universe – which must be why Christopher Luxon has announced a proposed ministerial portfolio for space. But while Luxon looks to the stars, his party offers very little policy about the rest of the world. National has a few business oriented policies: free trade deals with India and Pacific and Gulf states; recruiting more international students; removing tariffs for international trade. But it has no policies for defence, international aid or refugees. 

While there have been previous high-profile campaigns to increase the number of refugees New Zealand supports, raising the refugee quota to 1,500 in 2020 and creating the community resettlement scheme, there is very limited refugee policy being promoted in this election. TOP says an investor visa could help pay for refugees; the Green Party wants to expand resettlement support and remove the health test limitation for refugees and, along with Labour, wants to add a rainbow sub-category for refugees. Act, New Zealand First, National and Te Pāti Māori have no refugee policy at all. National does say that it will “ensure our foreign aid budget is deployed effectively and in places where New Zealand can make the greatest contribution to humanitarian and economic development efforts,” but this statement is entirely devoid of detail.

New Zealand spent $820m on international aid in 2020, which was not even 0.3% of the overall Gross National Income – well below the target of 0.7% set by the OECD. “It’s a small percentage, and the government hitting its target would make such a difference,” says World Vision’s head of advocacy Rebekah Armstrong. 

Much of this aid goes to the Pacific, which has been allocated $1.8b between 2021 and 2024, as well as to humanitarian crises like the Turkey-Syria earthquake earlier this year. While this is a big chunk of money, there are very few policies around how to spend the international aid budget. The Green Party wants money to go to climate change adaptation in the Pacific, and Te Pāti Māori wants to support Pacific leaders. Labour says only that it will “continue providing overseas development assistance”. No other significant party has any public policy about foreign aid. 

“At the moment we are all feeling the crunch of tax and the cost of living, the issues that the parties are campaigning on, but [overseas] these are life and death issues,” says Armstrong. “There are people dying of hunger every few seconds.” Previous elections, in which the refugee quota was more prominent, featured more discussion of New Zealand’s international obligations, Armstrong says, but since Covid the issue has fallen off the agenda – even though the number of global refugees is higher than ever.

A lack of policy makes it harder for New Zealand to address international humanitarian issues. “It puts an increased burden on NGOs and has a direct impact on the significant human rights and humanitarian crisis where children most often pay the price.”

Scams 

New Zealanders lose millions and millions of dollars to scams each year – $4.2m in the last quarter alone. Telecommunications companies, banks and the government are all targeted, and widespread scams erode trust. It seems like an obvious bipartisan issue that the public would support action on, and yet most parties have a blank space for this policy, with only Labour saying it would create an anti-scamming unit. 

“Scams are really bad for business,” Consumer NZ CEO Jon Duffy said in an August interview with The Spinoff. National, which likes to see itself as the party of business, has not yet used this line to support action to prevent scams. 

Social media

The Labour government spent ages talking about the TVNZ/RNZ merger only for it to be incinerated on the policy bonfire after Chris Hipkins took over. In a term that has seen widespread misinformation, including on social media, no significant party has more than one or two sideways mentions of social media in their policy. Given that nearly every single party has a candidate that has either shared misleading information or said controversial things online, perhaps it’s in all of their interests to make sure that these powerful corporations are being engaged with in some way? 

Labour says it will continue engaging with social media through the Christchurch Call process and Act wants to loosen proposed rules that would let the Department of Internal Affairs regulate what is being said on social media. A plan to make online media safer made waves earlier this year – but discussion of social media has been basically non-existent this election.

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Oceans and fishing policy 

While New Zealand is small, the oceans around our islands are large. We have one of the largest exclusive economic zones in the world, covering more than four million square kilometres. It’s important from a business perspective, too: in 2017, the value of the “marine economy” was estimated at $3.8b from shipping, fisheries and offshore minerals – not to mention incredibly valuable ecosystem services. 

The oceans are also crucial in responding to climate change: water absorbs heat (as catastrophic marine heatwaves have shown). Warmer water impacts land temperatures and rainfall too. Despite this, oceans are a notable hole in some parties’ policy. Labour (which added oceans to the fisheries portfolio in 2020) and the Green Party both have relatively comprehensive oceans policies, which include expanding protected marine areas, protecting the Hauraki Gulf (which advocates have said is “stuffed”) and addressing marine biosecurity risks. 

However, National’s only ocean policies are opposing recreational fishing licences (which aren’t currently in use anyway) and reversing the ban on offshore oil and gas exploration. Act also wants to remove the ban on offshore oil and gas exploration. The party has endorsed ocean action in the past, including the troubled Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary, which was initially announced by John Key in 2015. The ocean is mostly blue – it’s missing an opportunity for some branding synergy, if nothing else.