Panel Discussions
HOSTED BY PAUL HOLMES

In response to BILL ENGLISH interview

PAUL HOLMES
Welcome to the panel this morning. Dr Raymond Miller from the Auckland University; Deborah Coddington, the former ACT MP now political commentator; and the mayor of Porirua, Nick Leggett, the youngest mayor in the country. A very good morning and welcome to all of you. Raymond, is this becoming a political problem?

DR RAYMOND MILLER - Political Scientist
It is a political problem for the government, because we’re talking about a large slice of New Zealand, young New Zealanders in particular, wanting to get into their first home, and they’re not able to do so because of cost, particularly in places like Auckland and Christchurch. Paul, you remember when there was quarter-acre pavlova paradise in New Zealand, and large swathes of suburban New Zealand were developed in the 1960s and 1970s. And, really, what we’ve seen from the minister is a very cautious response. It requires decisive action, because it is a major problem.

PAUL Well, he is being quite interventionist this morning. He’s talking about really opening up, you know, having a look at all of the possibilities. But, I mean, we are broken. When you look at 30% of all Auckland households pay more than 30% of gross household income on housing costs. Auckland Council: 10,000 homes a year need to be built in Auckland. We’re building 4000. It’s a serious problem.

DEBORAH CODDINGTON - Former ACT MP
Yep, that’s right. And, I mean, in Auckland, it is this huge problem, and what this Productivity Commission found was that an equal house in Auckland, especially, costs 30% more to build than in some cities in Australia. Now, that is just ridiculous. It’s the cost of land, too, and that is because some councils have minimum blocks for subdivision. The cost building consents, subdivision consents. There’s no conversations between councils and developers. They’re at war with each other. This all pushes up the cost of land and makes it all so expensive. And the time, the delay, so people go and borrow from their bank, and they’re paying interest on that loan while they’re just waiting, waiting, waiting for their house to even start to be built.

PAUL Yes, that is right. Auckland Council says it’s got 18,000 sites available.

NICK LEGGETT - Porirua Mayor
I don’t think it’s a problem, Paul, with availability. It’s a problem with people being able to afford. People of my generation are not buying homes, and these are working people as well. We’re not talking about very low-income people, in a lot of cases. And we have been, as a generation, I think, disenfranchised somewhat from the housing market. If you look at my grandparents’ and parents’ generations, they had state advance loans, they were able to buy state houses. There were a whole lot of mechanisms that actually allowed them to enter the market, and that’s what I think the government need to do here. We need to really look at a way to really get people on the property ladder who are struggling-

PAUL Well, they pay $15 billion a year already on accommodation supplements and social housing.

NICK But that’s for people to rent, and what we’re talking about is actually getting people out of renting, building an asset, you know, for their future and their family’s future. And we know that homeownership encourages a civil society. It encourages people to take part in their community, to take part in their neighbourhood, and the people who own houses don’t move as often.

PAUL Interesting, though, an admission from Bill English - the housing market is not working. Market is not working. That’s a big thing from a National minister, I guess.

NICK It certainly is, but he’s got to do more than just tinker.

PAUL Right-oh. I mean, why are the costs of building less in Australia?

DEBORAH Building materials? A lot of what the Productivity Commission actually pointed out was that we all want, as they called it, bespoke houses. We’re a little bit fussy, Paul. We want our little bit of Provence.

PAUL Yes, yes, yes. Our housing, we’ve got to have more the terraced housing, such as they have in the UK.

DEBORAH Yes.

PAUL And someone was telling me this morning, a very informed man, telling me this morning that our housing footprint is the biggest outside of the United States and Australia. So we’re building Ford Falcon houses; we need to be building Toyota Corolla houses.

DEBORAH Yeah.

NICK And they need to be in denser areas. I mean, we’ve got to move away a little bit from the quarter-acre pavlova dream and actually get people living close to amenities and transport.

PAUL But as Bill English said, this is going to be politically unpalatable in some parts of cities for brownfields housing, where you put a lot of people in one place.

DEBORAH Well, there’s the other thing about the Resource Management Act that you have the ability to object to some development which has got nothing to do with you. It’s miles away from where you live.

RAYMOND And, of course, the trade-off is that it doesn’t gobble up masses and masses of greenfields outside of the cities themselves. I mean, we just have to look at the whole notion of denser accommodation. A lot of people want to live in the city. They don’t want to travel 35km every day to work.

DEBORAH What does it matter if it gobbles up greenfields? If people want to live in greenfields, why shouldn’t they live out there?

RAYMOND Well, it denies everyone else the greenfields.

PAUL Because it builds up the cost, it puts up the cost-

DEBORAH People want to have a house. I mean-

NICK I agree with that choice, but, actually, to get them into the housing market, they often have to pick something cheaper and smaller, and that’s what we’re saying. You need to open those opportunities up.

DEBORAH Which might be in the greenfields. Why shouldn’t they be there?

PAUL And the problem you’ve there, as Bill English pointed out, there is an absence of good quality, lower-priced housing being built. And you expect if it’s lower priced, it’s going to be leaking in about 18 months.

NICK Well, that’s the problem with this efficiency drive that he’s talking about and councils taking too long to process consents. Now, I’m not an apologist for local government in the sense that we can always do things better, but last time we dropped standards in terms of materials, we had a whole lot of leaky homes, and we actually can’t afford to compromise a lot of these building consent standards.

DEBORAH Well, that wasn’t just because of dropping standards.

NICK But that was part of it. That was part of.

PAUL But, I mean, it’s a hell of a problem. I mean, here is the basic fundamental problem: people can’t afford to get into a home. If, in Auckand - I’m sorry to bring up Auckland all the time, but this is the stat I have. If you’ve got an income of less than $50,000 a year, half of people who go into housing on that kind of salary will be paying more than 30% gross incomes on housing. These numbers don’t work.

NICK So let’s redirect some of those subsidies that are going into rental properties and put those into actually people being able to pay off their home. Let’s subsidise them to buy their house and develop an asset.

PAUL Just quickly to finish, the Greens have a worry about greenfields development, which is you start to put up the cost of public transport and so forth.

DEBORAH Well, the infrastructure costs that Corin Dann was talking about, the developers actually have to pay that. And the infrastructure is an investment. Why shouldn’t the ratepayers and taxpayers pay for that, because that lasts forever and ever. So that’s an investment for future generations anyway.

PAUL Thank you very much.

PANEL DISCUSSIONS
HOSTED BY PAUL HOLMES

In response to LIANNE DALZIEL and CHESTER BORROWS interviews


PAUL HOLMES
On our panel today is Raymond Miller, Deborah Coddington and Nick Leggett. So, let’s deal with this very simply. What is this bill [Alcohol Law Reform Bill] going to change? Anything about our drink habits?

NICK LEGGETT - Porirua Mayor
I don’t think it’s going to do much for our drink habits because it doesn’t address the fundamental evidence that says that pricing is where you start. But what it will do is it will hand back power to communities. What we’ve seen is this liberalisation in drinking laws since 1989, and what we are going to see is that with local alcohol plans, which aren’t compulsory and should be, might I add, and local licencing committees is that at least communities will be able to have a say in how many outlets and new licences and actually control the density-

PAUL So local government can see some positives.

NICK Yes, it can, because, I mean, communities know what they need and know what’s acceptable.

PAUL Yes, but you look at those statistics of Professor Sellman, and the statistics are frightening.

DEBORAH CODDINGTON - Former ACT MP
Well, I’m one of those statistics too because I like two or three wines a night, and why not?

PAUL Bottles or glasses?

DEBORAH I mean, I’m probably a heavy drinker too. But why should we all be punished because of these people? There’s a huge amount of hypocrisy in this debate. Where are the parents of those kids? I suspects the parents can’t control them so they want government to do it for them. And why shouldn’t we hit those-? Under the Summary Offences Act, it’s still a crime, you know, you can be fined for being offensive in a public place. Why aren’t the police up there finding these people who turn up at Accident and Emergency drunk every night and causing mayhem. Why do we all have to get punished with this minimum pricing and all of this thing? I mean, most of us don’t vomit in public places, swear at everybody, fall about the place. So why should we all be punished?

NICK Minimum pricing actually punishes those who drink the cheaper alcohol, which I assume is not you, Deborah. It actually-

DEBORAH Yes, but everybody who drinks cheap alcohol doesn’t all get drunk and cause mayhem.

NICK No, that’s right, but they are the people that do. The people that drink the cheap stuff tend to. And, I mean, what we need to do is also use the tools that are available - things like alcohol bans. We know in local government, in local councils, that if you ban alcohol from an area, you quickly clean up some of the problems.

PAUL Yes, or you produce a black market or some kind of black activity going on. Raymond, what do you think?

RAYMOND MILLER - Political Scientist
Well, I mean, the statistics are terrible, but we all have a responsibility. You know, this is where I disagree with Deborah. I mean, so, Deborah is a very responsible drinker, but we see binge drinking, and something has to be done about it.

PAUL Yes, so this bill. This is my question - in a year, will we see any effect whatsoever on our binge drinking culture?

DEBORAH No.

RAYMOND We probably won’t.

NICK Because it doesn’t go far enough.

DEBORAH We won’t. New Zealanders have been binge drinkers since women were campaigning for the vote.

RAYMOND Can I just put in a word here about this conscience voting thing because viewers may not be aware that the alcohol age is a conscience issue. Now, I don’t see where the morality is in that issue. It should be just like any other legislation. It’s different from same-sex marriage. It’s just something where the party should come forward, and they should act responsibly-

NICK And base their decisions on evidence. There’s plenty of evidence.

PAUL Yes, there’s plenty of evidence. That is right.

DEBORAH Well, it’s Labour that’s doing the conscience vote.

RAYMOND Yes, but the initial vote on age is a conscience vote. I can’t understand why. It’s not a moral issue. It’s not a moral issue. There’s too many conscience votes.

PANEL DISCUSSIONS
HOSTED BY PAUL HOLMES

In response to JULIAN ROBERTSON interview

PAUL HOLMES
Raymond Miller, Deborah Coddington and Nick Leggett. He [Julian Robertson] did say to me, actually, on the telephone yesterday, ‘Well, there are some people you don’t want here.’ So he’s not indiscriminate completely, I suppose. But he makes it clear it’s not necessarily easy to buy into New Zealand, Raymond.

RAYMOND MILLER - Political Scientist
No, that’s right, and it’s been a lightning rod issue now for 20 years or more, since, you know, many voters felt the family silver was being sold off. I mean, there’s foreign investment and foreign investment. I haven’t heard members of the public complaining about Julian Robertson or James Cameron the film director or Shania Twain buying land in New Zealand. I think it’s when large companies, iconic companies, are bought and moved offshore and a profits are taken away with them that people get most concerned.

PAUL Yeah, but the trouble there that’s a shareholder decision.

RAYMOND True, but I’m talking about public-

PAUL They’re not giving the companies away; they’re selling them.

RAYMOND Yes, that’s true, but I’m talking about public opinion, and that’s where the government has to be very careful.

DEBORAH CODDINGTON - Former ACT MP
Don’t you think that’s because they were white, though? I mean, there was a lot of controversy over Crafar farms and the Chinese investment, and I think that there’s still a lot of racism around who invests in this country whether we like it or not. And I find that quite amusing and ironic because, after all, you know, it’s not so long ago that whitie came here and bought up the land from- or took it from the tangata whenua. And now we don’t want anyone else to come here.

NICK LEGGETT - Porirua Mayor
I think New Zealanders are concerned that $4 billion a year profit leaves through foreign-owned banks. I mean, I think that that sort of thing is of concern.

PAUL Well, there you go.

NICK The profits of foreign-owned companies are generally moved offshore. That’s not to say they don’t employ people here, but that’s where the profits go.

PAUL You know the study I referred to in that interview, a recent study back in August? This was from New Zealand Initiative, and I was amazed to read that 49 countries are ranked ahead of New Zealand in terms of accessibility for foreign investors. We are the most restrictive place in the world. I mean, you talk about our manufacturing base on the point of collapse. We are the most restrictive place in the world for manufacturing foreigners. While the opposition parties, of course, are saying there’s a manufacturing crisis.

DEBORAH Yeah, well, we could learn from these manufacturers if they came here. They could help us.

PAUL But, I mean, here we are crying out for initiative, Raymond, and the Overseas Investment Act of 2005 reads, ‘It is a privilege for overseas persons to own or control sensitive New Zealand assets.’ The New Zealand Initiative says this epitomises insularity and self-satisfied smugness. In other words, we’re crying out for development.

RAYMOND Yeah, no, I do recognise that, you know, people have to see that we now live in a global economy, and you can’t put barriers around. New Zealand is the first to want free trade with other countries and so on. We’ve prided ourselves on the open market that we’ve got, and I do think this is something that we as a nation have to debate more in a responsible way, because we have been insular. We have been very protective in the past, and, in a sense, that’s a relic of-

PAUL We debate it all the time and move no further forward.

DEBORAH That’s right.

PAUL Yes.

NICK Well, there isn’t a plan, unfortunately.

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