Phil Twyford. Photo by Phil Walter/Getty Images

PoliticsOctober 31, 2018

Housing crisis reality overshadows Labour’s KiwiBuild dream

Guest writer

Phil Twyford. Photo by Phil Walter/Getty Images

Housing was in the news this week, and there was a striking indication of where the Ardern-led government’s focus lies, writes Guyon Espiner of RNZ

There were two big housing stories this week, two quite different approaches to them and one clear signal where the government’s focus lies.

The first was a government generated “media opportunity” aiming to set the news agenda for the week and catch the after-glow of the mostly complimentary “year in review” stories.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Housing Minister Phil Twyford welcomed 18 families into KiwiBuild homes in Auckland’s Papakura.

Yes, that leaves 99,982 more homes to meet the promise over a decade. But no matter. This, we were told, was cause for celebration. It was history.

The prime minister invoked Michael Joseph Savage and the first Labour government’s state housing policy. “I won’t be carrying a coffee table today,” she said, with a nod to the famous photo of Savage opening the first state house at 12 Fife Lane in Wellington in 1937.

Instead Jacinda Ardern carried a Mandarin tree, a Chinese symbol of abundance. The couple who got the house said they felt like they had won Lotto.

There’s no need to name them here. They were simply taking what was on offer and have already received grief on social media for their involvement in the government’s media event.

But the circumstances make for an interesting historical comparison and also an indication of what the policy may deliver in the future.

At 12 Fife Lane, Miramar in 1937, the first tenants of the first state house were David and Mary McGregor (inconveniently for Labour’s narrative they didn’t buy the house until National introduced measures allowing state tenants to do so in the 1950s).

David McGregor was a tram driver for the Wellington City Council, earning less than five pounds a week.

Fast forward to KiwiBuild 2018 and among the first buyers are a doctor and her marketing manager partner in their mid-20s. The couple got the four-bedroom home for $650,000, a good price in an Auckland market which has flattened out but at a median of $810,000.

To qualify for a KiwiBuild home a couple can earn up to $180,000 – nearly double the average household income.

Is this what KiwiBuild is about? Well, yes apparently. This week Phil Twyford disabused anyone still under the illusion KiwiBuild was for low income earners.

“It is not a programme aimed at low-income families because they may not be able to service a KiwiBuild mortgage,” he said. He went on to say that a shared equity scheme was being developed for low income earners and more state houses were being built too.

But when you talk about a housing crisis and helping people into homes are you thinking of couples in their mid-20s with an income approaching $200,000?

Ricardo Menedez of Auckland Action Against Poverty isn’t. “Facepalming my way into oblivion at just how much of a failure Labour’s housing plan is,” he wrote on Twitter. “You can’t find your way out of the housing crisis by building private homes for high income earners.”

You also can’t accuse the government of doing nothing for low income earners. Its Families Package lifted incomes for 384,000 families. But two of its big policies – free tertiary fees and KiwiBuild – seem to give big benefits to the upwardly mobile.

Stats NZ data released in October showed that “the highest spending households saw the lowest inflation” in the three months to September. One of the reasons for this was free university fees. “The decrease in tertiary education (spending) resulting from the government’s fee-free first-year policy … was reflected most in the highest-spending households,” according to Statistics New Zealand.

It was the lowest spending households who featured in the other big housing story of the week.

RNZ’s Checkpoint revealed compensation due to state house tenants wrongly evicted under the dodgy meth testing regime is being delayed because the money could affect their welfare payments.

Auckland Action Against Poverty spoke out on this too, saying it was “cruel” to leave people hurt by the evictions in a bureaucratic money-go-round and that the snag should have been spotted early and averted.

Again it was the prime minister and housing minister fronting the issue, this time on Morning Report. Mr Twyford said he only realised last week the move would require a regulation change. Ms Ardern said she hoped they would get their money before Christmas.

This article originally appeared at RNZ

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A Lockheed Trident missile. Photo: US Department of Defense

PoliticsOctober 31, 2018

New Zealand needs to close its doors to carnivals for the war industry

Golriz Ghahraman

Guest writer

A Lockheed Trident missile. Photo: US Department of Defense

If we’re serious about our commitment peace, we shouldn’t be hosting a ‘forum’ sponsored by a giant arms manufacturer, and we shouldn’t have troops involved in illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, argues Green MP Golriz Ghahraman

Last week, as harrowing details emerged of the targeted murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Donald Trump provided the one sober statement of fact about that tragedy. He said the United States would not be holding Saudi Arabia to account, because that would require cancelling US $110 billion weapons sale. We are now openly putting a price on human life, though of course anyone familiar with the horrors of war personally or from the perpetual cycle of it on our evening news, must already suspect that war is a lucrative industry.

That callous, American style, approach to “national security”, the war industry is coming to Palmerston North today. Appropriately timed for Halloween. It comes in the form of a massive, eerily secretive, Defence “Forum”, in part sponsored by one of the world’s largest and most powerful weapons manufacturers, Lockheed Martin.

Both Auckland and Wellington no longer host the event, due to public outrage and local government refusal to make spaces available to something so antithetical to our values and wellbeing.

The secrecy surrounding the forum means in previous years we have only known war weaponry was actually on display, in surreal trade fair style stalls, through leaked photographs. We do know that the Defence Industry Association will likely host around 500 people including representatives from 150 manufacturers and companies selling, examining and purchasing the latest weapons and components. Represented will be Lockheed Martin, who sell the latest in war tech, like self-steering bullets, Israel Aerospace Industries, making tiny killer drones, and some mega American and British weapons manufacturers.

At this moment in global history can we really afford to stand with the nations who easily put an industry price on human misery? Because there is no longer any doubt that war is an industry. The defenders of this Forum will openly argue that what small revenue there is for NZ justifies our promotion of this industry, reeking the very worst havoc all over the world.

I’ve seen what that looks like on the ground. It looks like a sea of amputees that poured into Iranian cities from the frontlines during the 1980s. It looks like child soldiers conscripted as they kicked a football on the street. It is the face of the most repressive regimes, perpetually in power, replaced only with war mongers equalling in zeal. It means that half the world feel like second class citizens, as we did in Iran, given our lives and our misery are not as important as the profit being made from war. Can New Zealand really take part in any of that?

Instead, we should stand as an independent voice, as other like-minded nations have done recently. We must divest from war profit. Refuse to hold war industry forums. Our millions of dollars are better spent on humanitarian and development aid that actually provide pathways to peace, away from what we know has only wrought more violence.

Finally, as a mark of our commitment to peace, I’m calling on the minister for defence to withdraw our troops from the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Only then will our voice have the weight of impartiality, so we might help mediate and broker peace on the diplomatic stage.

Golriz Ghahraman is the Green Party’s defence spokesperson