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Wednesday 11 September, 2013

Kiwis Back Opposition Policies to Solve the Housing Crisis Tonight On Tv3’s the Vote

Viewers voted that the Opposition offers the best solutions to New Zealand’s housing crisis during national debate programme The Vote, which screened tonight on TV3.  

This month, The Vote tackled housing, asking “How do we fix New Zealand’s housing crisis?” with a special multi-party debate. Duncan Garner led the Government team, featuring Sam Lotu-Iiga (National) Peter Dunne (United Future) and John Banks (ACT).   Guyon Espiner led the Opposition team, with Labour’s Phil Twyford, New Zealand First’s Winston Peters, and Metiria Turei representing The Green Party. 

Broadcaster and lawyer, Linda Clark was again charged with keeping the debaters in line and on topic, as they debated three key areas of the housing debate: foreign ownership, first home buyers and the housing shortage.  This month, instead of asking viewers to vote ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to the moot, Clark invited them to vote GOV or OPP to indicate who offers the best solutions to the housing crisis, the Government or the Opposition.

Guyon Espiner and the Opposition team were declared the winners of the debate at the end of the hour-long show with the votes tallied at 28% GOV, 72% OPP.

Controversial moments in an at-times heated debate included Metiria Turei asserting: “I want tools in place so that young families can get access to buying their own homes and that means that those who are holding on to the wealth now are going to have to be prepared to let some of it go.”  And National’s Sam Lotu-Iiga declared a $130,000 deposit to be “not out of reach” for first home buyers

Viewer votes:

The theatre audience voted before and after the debate.  The results are:

Dubbed ‘competitive current affairs’, The Vote sees co-hosts Duncan Garner and Guyon Espiner each month lead two teams to debate a hot topic, with Linda Clark keeping order as referee.

The Government arguments:
• 25 percent of Aucklanders are born overseas. I’ll be honest with you, I’d be offended if I turned up on a Sunday afternoon to bid on a property and be asked for my passport. It doesn’t work, it’s not workable and it doesn’t work in Australia, if you ask the Australians. – Sam Lotu-Iiga
• Let’s talk about some facts first and not all home buyers will be required to pay the 20 percent, there will be 10 percent which banks will have discretion over and Kiwibank and ASB banks have undertaken to still lend under the 20 percent deposit, there are programmes out there that the government have put in place – Welcome Home Loans, the KiwiSaver subsidy – $20,000, up to $20,000 per family in which they will be subsidized, so there are, there is assistance out there to help that first home buyer. – Sam Lotu-Iiga
• [Metiria] wants to depress property prices, so you depress the Capital Gain, so the amount of revenue that’s going to ‘solve all our problems’ it’s going to take ten years to raise anyway, is going to be considerably less because of her own announcement tonight that she wants to depress prices. This is absolute rubbish but they put it up as a red herring. – Peter Dunne
• I tell you one thing the government hasn’t done and the government would never do, set out to depress the market home prices that you will when you said this evening you want to bring market prices down … The Greens will destroy people’s equity, that’s what you promised.  – Peter Dunne
• The Resource Management Act is part of the problem. If you want to build a haybarn on a farm in Walkworth it cost you $10,000 dollars but it used to take you three years to get resource consent, and $4000 for the resource consent.  It’s crazy stuff! – John Banks
• The Herald runs stories of 25 year olds wanting to buy in Ponsonby, well there are seven homes under $500,000 dollars in Ponsonby … go where you can afford a home. And I tell you in Maungakiekie, my electorate, there are over 1100 homes that are under $500,000. – Sam Lotu-Iiga
• The Greens say that if you collapse the mortgage belt in New Zealand, you’ll have more people able to buy homes. The problem is, if you own a$450,000 home in Ellerslie with a $350,000 mortgage and you collapse the house price market in that beltway, then they lose their equity, they lose their home and they lose everything. – John Banks
• What this side is saying [clearly] to middle New Zealand, that you are effectively speculators, that the value of your equity needs to be driven down – and you cannot be trusted to own your own home. That’s what they’re saying and that is not the Kiwi dream. It never has been. – Peter Dunne

The Opposition arguments:
• Why should young Kiwi first home buyers be outbid at auction by offshore speculators? – Phil Twyford
• Yes there is evidence … if we stop this foreign speculation then it will help to bring down prices, along with other measures. It’s one part of the solution. – Metiria Turei
• Look 80 percent of first home buyers say they are now locked out of the Kiwi dream because of these new minimum deposits, the 20 percent rule …We would intervene. Labour will always intervene on the side of first home buyers – this Government intervenes on the side of speculators! – Phil Twyford
• If you stop all the speculating and foreign buying, the price will come down … it’s that simple … when we were a great country, we built New Zealand homes for New Zealand people – that’s still our plan but you want to have it internationalised so all your shonky mates can come here. – Winston Peters
• Well, yes actually [I would like to see house prices fall in New Zealand].  We would like to make sure that they are affordable. Oh – shocked look on your faces, how dare, how terrible if young families could actually afford to buy a home. – Metiria Turei
• It’s not about the house prices being too high in New Zealand, they’re too high in Auckland and this bubble is inevitably going to burst so we should deal with it in reality now.  – Winston Peters
• The point of it, of course, along with other measures – is to reduce speculation. There are thousands and thousands of young families locked out. You know, Rachel and Tyson are locked out of home ownership because these people will not change the economic tools that put the power in the speculators and those that are making money from housing as opposed to making sure that there’s housing for every single family in this country, that’s what we want to see. – Metiria Turei
• Look, interest rates are relatively low at the moment but in the last three years first home borrowers are borrowing hundreds of thousands of dollars more than they were before … When the interest rates go up, as everybody’s is predicting they will in the next year, the danger is that those people are going to lose their shirts. The key problem is that house prices are going through the roof, and it’s all happening under this government. – Phil Twyford
• I want tools in place so that young families can get access to buying their own homes and that means that those who are holding on to the wealth now are going to have to be prepared to let some of it go…Why is that such a problem for you? Why do you lock them out? – Metiria Turei

The Vote is produced by TV3’s News and Current Affairs division with funding from NZ On Air, and screens once every four weeks in the same timeslot as 3rd Degree.

ENDS

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