Eitsop:
quickymart:
I applaud that target, but making land available is not the only lever
They can give RBNZ enough tools and choices to help maintain inflation and house inflation.
RBNZ Made a mistake in Last 2 years lowering the interest rates, and allowing the house price boom
They could have
- set interest rates ultra-low
- still required ration of 4:1 debt to income
- required banks to ensure borrowers could pay when interest rates returned to normal levels
The first Step is to agree that high Inflation is bad
Second step is to agree high house price inflation is bad
Then to ask RBNZ, what tools they need to achieve stability
We can put up tents cheap !
Unless the price of materials, labour, etc also falls then housing will always be hard. We are already losing skilled people to Australia because of the higher wages.
Building consents is simply another way for councils to gather revenue, revenue they need to upgrade infrastructure. The alternative is to massively increase rates. With climate change, we could easily be looking at up to a $trillion to replace infrastructure, move whole communities, change our entire transportation systems back to rail, and then on top of that potentially lose a lot of export revenue as other countries go "MAGA" and bring production back home to get their economies going, reduce unemployment and gather more tax to enable them to spend for the same reasons.
Worse there are likely to be wars as large countries try to grab as many resources as they can, eg damming rivers and starving down stream nations.
LOW interest rates are what caused the problem.
4:1 ratio would have seen fewer people able to buy, a household on 2 average incomes makes about $110-130k, 4 times that is not enough for anything but a tiny home on a pocket section.
There is no "simple solution", the worlds population is billions of people too large for that now.
Too many people, too few resources. Mexico city is sinking 1/2 a meter each year because the aquifer has been drained and the habitat made unsustainable....22 Million people could be without water this year.