There were comments about the omission of Kiwibuild from budget announcements
Newstalk ZB: No money for flagship housing policy KiwiBuild in the Budget
There have been plenty of winners in today’s Budget, but one of the big losers has been the housing portfolio.
Apart from $283 million for transitional housing, and $197 million to boost emergency housing, there’s not much in budget 2019.
One thing in particular stands out is the Government’s flagship housing policy KiwiBuild, which has not received any additional funding.
@HenryCooke explains:
I don’t understand why people are writing about KiwiBuild not getting any new money like it is interesting. it wouldn’t have got any even if the policy was going well. the $2b envelope has been fairly firm and its problems are NOT down to a lack of cash.
Maybe you could make the argument whatever comes out of the reset will require new cash, but two billion dollars is a lot of effing money.
If anything the Budget shows Kiwibuild’s one great success so far – because the money ain’t being spent it is making the short term surplus bigger.
Stuff: Govt made right call in leaving floundering KiwiBuild out of the Budget
Fixing New Zealand’s housing affordability crisis was one of Labour’s key policy goals going into the last two elections.
But KiwiBuild has been conspicuously absent from the Government’s vocabulary in recent months, and yesterday’s Budget was no different.
The Government might not have given up trying to improve housing affordability, but it seems to have realised that KiwiBuild is not the answer to the problem.
The bulk of the additional $90 million per year allocated to Housing and Urban Development in the Budget will go towards emergency and transitional housing. It’s not sensible to throw good money after bad, so the silence on KiwiBuild is welcome.
But:
Minister Phil Twyford is not short of cash to use for KiwiBuild’s supposed “recalibration” anyway. Just 101 KiwiBuild homes have been completed – and the majority of those had already been financed by developers and were under construction before Twyford put a KiwiBuild sticker on them.
So it’s not like the Government has used much of the $2 billion of capital set aside for the programme. Even by July 2020, the Government only expects to have completed 1535 homes, which is woefully short of its initial target.
The fact that more than 10 per cent of the small number of completed KiwiBuild homes have failed to sell reiterates the policy’s poor design.
Kiwibuild was not a problem in this budget, it has been a problem since it was conceived.