MATT MCCARTEN : HAND-WRINGING ABOUT HOUSING AFFORDABILITY IS ALL BUNK

Former Labour Party chief of staff Matt McCarten has described the Labour Government's recent housing policy announcements as 'an embarrassment' that will do nothing to help solve the growing housing crisis.

THE HOUSING CRISIS has underlined the complete failure of New Zealand  mainstream politics. The absurdity and desperation of it all was highlighted this week by National's Andrew Bayly. He argued in the NZ Herald  that the solution to the housing crisis is 'more private development'. In other words the answer to Labour's failed and catastrophic  market approach to the housing crisis is even more market involvement. Bayly wants to dig an even deeper hole and keep digging. This, folks, is the 'alternative' being provided by New Zealand's main opposition party in Parliament. Meanwhile Green co-leader and Associate Minister of Housing Marama Davidson is largely missing in action and almost has to be guilt-tripped into saying anything at all.

The former chief of staff of the Labour Party certainly doesn't agree with Bayly and he's had more to say than Marama Davidson. Writing in E-Tangata this week, Matt McCarten has blasted the Labour Government's recent policy announcements on housing as 'an embarrassment' and that they will do nothing to make housing more affordable. Anyone fed up with the complacent centrist nonsense of both Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson will find McCarten's comments refreshingly honest and direct. He writes:

'There is a housing crisis - but only for the working class. Its a bonanza for the owning class. Successive governments have pampered the property owners who get rich off the back of their renters. They get rich without lifting a finger. It's called bludging.

'When Jacinda Ardern is applauded by the rich because she won't tax their unearned wealth, then she has  to come up with how the working class, who pay the bills, are going to get a fair go.

'Labour, under David Shearer, promised 100,000 homes. Ardern's government  abandoned that goal. Labour's recent announcements were an embarrassment. They tinker. This government  and the property class in this country won't do anything that will reduce the house prices.'

With rising house prices and soaring rents driving ever more people into poverty and desperation, only Labour's most dedicated cheerleaders - like RNZ regular Neale Jones for example - could possibly disagree with McCarten.

Matt McCarten does provide some solutions and they are solutions that others have also championed. They include a significant state housing building program because, says McCarten, 'the government is the only entity that can provide homes on any mass scale.'

I favour the compulsory purchase of empty homes in order to stop 'land banking' and provide affordable housing that would also put significant downward pressure on rents.  This is a policy that Jeremy Corbyn's  UK Labour Party had planned to implement if it had become government. McCarten, on the other hand, suggests that empty houses could be taxed at two percent which, he says, 'could solve our homeless problems overnight'. Shockingly there are as many as 40,000 empty houses in the Auckland region alone.

The plain fact is that the housing market does not work for working people because as economist Shamubeel Eaqb notes, 'There is never a market for poor people, it is not possible to build affordable houses for poor people'.

There is no greater indictment of capitalism than its inability to provide affordable housing for everyone. There is also no greater indictment of our political system and our parliamentary parties who continue to defend the status quo. 

Matt McCarten says that the choice is clear and that 'either the government housing policy is to provide homes for all its people or it's to maintain wealth opportunities for the few. The only impediment is the courage of our leaders to determine whose side they are on.'

But over three decades of loyalty to neoliberalism and the interests of the one percent have already amply demonstrated whose side our leaders are on. The onus is now on us to decide what we are going to do about it. It certainly can't be to shrug our shoulders and vote Labour again because they are somehow preferable to National.