Judith Collins - Housing and Urban Development

31 January 2019

The Prime Minister is claiming KiwiBuild is going through a ‘recalibration’ as she is forced to drop all interim targets, but in reality the scheme is flat-lining, National’s Housing spokesperson Judith Collins says.

“Mr Twyford has tried to claim he’s only six months into a ten year project, but KiwiBuild was allocated $25 million as early as December 2017 when he announced the first KiwiBuild houses in Mt Albert.

“The Government argues it didn’t kick off KiwiBuild until the middle of last year but the programme has been underway for more than a year, and it still only has 47 houses.

“At her weekly post-Cabinet press conference the Prime Minister said this year is the year of delivery, but the next day she’s admitted the Government won’t be delivering on its flagship scheme. All interim KiwiBuild targets have been ripped out of the picture.

“But even stripping KiwiBuild back to its bones isn’t going to change the fact that the scheme is turning out to be one of the biggest public policy failings this country has seen in a long time.

“KiwiBuild has been allocated $2 billion and all it has delivered is 47 houses.

“Mr Twyford clearly didn’t do his homework in Opposition, and now the Government is left with flagship policy in shambles and it’s doing everything it can to turn it around. But that’s unlikely to happen because it’s not building the houses people want so they’re not selling.

“There is no point in wasting taxpayer money to fund a policy with a key objective to increase the supply of affordable housing if you’re going to build houses that people don’t want. It’s a flop.

“By removing interim targets the Government is removing any way for New Zealanders to measure its progress and hold Mr Twyford to account on his shambles of a housing scheme. That’s incredibly poor.

“The Prime Minister shouldn’t bother trying to revive KiwiBuild. It’s a discredited policy, and instead of wasting $2 billion of taxpayer funds the Government should focus on reforming the RMA like National has proposed.”

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