Media letting politicians off the hook for housing issues

Hugh Pavletich recommends what he calls “an excellent interview of National’s finance spokesman Bill English by Bernard Hickey of Interest Co.NZ.”

Hugh highlights however that whatever you might think about English’s talk of “stability,” Bill’s Blue Team has totally dropped the ball on housing, highlighted perhaps by yet another major review on housing underway by the Productivity Commission. Because the problem with housing is not any lack of reports …

Within the above interview [says Hugh] Bernard Hickey let Mr English “off the hook” regarding the National Party initiated Commerce Committee Housing Inquiry of 2007 / 08 (chaired by none other than Hon Gerry Brownlee), assisting them to win the 2008 election (which this writer applauded them at the time), but alas very little was done over the following 3 and 4 years -- as was explained late 2012.
    … Mr Hickey and other media people should be reminding politicians of the long history of the housing issue, and press them harder on their lapses along the way -- including National’s failure to follow up their few fine words, and Labour’s major lapse 2002 through 2008 which  first allowed the unnecessary housing bubble to erupt.

And now, twelve years on, after both parties did their best to make the housing and construction market not work, doesn’t it make your teeth grind to hear them talk about market failure needing correction by their further intervention!  (Not to mention the RMA itself, brought in by National over twenty years ago, giving councils’ the power to constrain land supply they’ve been exercising so lavishly.)

Something of the same was going on in this thee-way interview in which Sean Plunket failed to properly hold to account either the evasive Phil Twyford or the odious Nick Smith,the only real sense coming from the NZ Initiative’s Oliver Hartwich…