Not enough houses have been built in the right places, for the right prices. This was confirmed in a review of emergency housing yesterday, a day after the door was thrown open to more migrant workers writes Anna Rawhiti-Connell in this excerpt from The Bulletin. To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday morning, sign up here.

Spanish wine and staff shortages

I went out for dinner for the first time in a while last night. We were told immediately that one area of the restaurant wasn’t open because they were short-staffed and that the food would take a while. After obnoxiously ordering a Spanish outlier from the wine list, I could tell the poor guy behind the bar was new and still familiarising himself with the list. All the stories I’ve read about understaffing and, in all likelihood, the impact of rising Covid cases, were distilled into a personal anecdote. I could see why the immigration changes announced on Monday and described by BusinessDesk’s Pattrick Smellie (paywalled) as “a massive immigration policy bombshell”, were welcomed by business.

Basic human rights standards sorely lacking in emergency housing

While the prime minister’s hot mic might have dominated yesterday afternoon’s news agenda, a decidedly cool appraisal of emergency housing from the Human Rights Commission also landed yesterday. The Commission found that basic human rights standards were sorely “lacking in parts of our emergency housing system”. The report coincided with the government’s “reset” of emergency housing as it responded to a review of the system and accepted all of the review’s recommended actions. Thanks to the work of journalists like Kristin Hall and her Sunday feature on emergency housing in Rotorua in September, emergency housing has loomed far larger this year than in any of the years since its introduction in 2016.

The root cause of the housing crisis 

In responding to the review, housing minister Megan Woods said it confirmed the root cause of the housing crisis. “Not enough houses have been built in the right places, for the right prices, and of the right types to meet people’s needs,” said Woods. The government will investigate increasing supply of supported housing in Hamilton and Wellington. This is where we arrive back at the immigration announcement. In a detailed analysis of that and its interplay with infrastructure investment, Bernard Hickey writes “Aotearoa Inc hasn’t invested nearly enough in housing, water and transport infrastructure to cope with past population growth, let alone future growth. Labour’s determination to address the infrastructure shortage through tighter migration settings, rather than higher taxes, debt and investment, lasted just a few months.”

Why the government moved on immigration despite our infrastructure challenges

At the post cabinet press conference on Monday, Hickey asked why the government was going ahead with another loosening of migration settings when it had no advice about the likely effects on inflation, rents, employment or infrastructure shortages. Smellie suggests two reasons in his column: “the government’s stocks are in the toilet with most of the business community” and that in a cost of living crisis, more workers will inevitably drive down wage inflation. Those may be the answers, but Stuff’s Dileepa Fonseka rounds out a year of sharp immigration policy analysis by posing another question, asking why the government can’t articulate a clear vision of what they want out of immigration. It’s a far more consequential question than the one I asked last night about a little glass of Albariño.