Why can't our kids afford to buy a small home? Or even a trolley full of groceries, for that matter.
There's someone making gangs of money, by design. And it ain't the people who work for a living.
What are charming but manipulative real estate story. In 1960 a 15 year-old boy and a 17 year-old girl spent their pocket money to buy a small section of land on Waiheke island that is now worth well over a million dollars.
100 pounds in those days amounts to a measly $6,000 New Zealand dollars now.
That would buy them just 1/200th of that property today, not the whole property.
It's a heartwarming story and it's an indictment of our system.
Young people (and even older people) today can’t afford housing.
Housing is a now an investment asset for a landlord (with taxpayer-subsidized mortgage interest thanks to the current government), not a roof over a family’s head.
We have let the pursuit of growth and profits rule over everything: housing, education, public safety, healthcare. To 40 years of governments (and especially to this current but hopefully temporary one) profits matter, people don't.
It reminds me of those pictures you see of modern India: with thousands of people still crowding railway car built by the British in the 1940s. So backward, right?
No, not exactly. There’s a backstory there, and in every colony and pillaged place from Haiti to the Congo to India.
The British Empire hoovered 45 trillion dollars out of the Indian subcontinent during their reign. What can you get for 45 trillion (yes trillion with a T). Bullet trains and flying cars.
The banks and multinational corporations have done something similar to New Zealand households. It’s still happening, even today, with legal larceny: the multinational supermarket duopoly stiffing us on food costs, private equity making dangerous inroads into our primary healthcare and siphoning profits to Australia and elsewhere, Public-Private scams that are abounding in road-building and civic works, which will drain our coffers for generations to come.
We are fast becoming a nation of renters. We don’t own the houses we live in or even the asphalt beneath our tires. Our patrimony is being sold off for someone else’s profit.
What’s left to try to sell to corporations, the very water we drink?
(Why, yes, they are trying to do that too.)
We are now a nation of people who can barely afford their home loans.
A nation of homes owned by mortgage bankers, and of young people with no hope of ever owning their own home.
A generation of people around the world have betrayed those who have come after them: despoiled the environment and raised a financial moat around housing and schools and health care that people today simply cannot get across. And now we have governments shamelessly doubling down. A sell-off.
A diminishing of the public sphere in New Zealand.
As a simple example that hits close to home, New Zealand used to have (per thousand residents) around 12 hospital beds. We now have closer to 2!
That's not progress, that's poverty. Yet in that time our productivity has boomed. Where the heck did all that money go?
It has been siphoned off, by rotten public policy and even more rotten tax policy, to (always and everywhere) benefit property investors and corporate owners.
Their worth has skyrocketed, while wages stagnated, inflation busted people’s retirements, and mortgage debt crippled NZ.
My local hospital was built around 1960. At the time it was modern, big, new and able to keep up with local demand.
New Zealand has grown so much in that time we should have literally three hospitals that size by now. It needs them to take care of a population that has BOOMED. And aged.
Instead we've got the same decrepit hospital, 60 years old and the victim of gradual neglect and ‘deferred maintenance’, and now this lot of politicians are arguing about whether to delay its rebuild even longer and use the money to pay for the vast $2.9 Billion in tax breaks they've given to property investors.
It's scandalous. Unless you're really wealthy and then it's a gift from the gods.
When I went to work last week there were buckets out in the corridor catching water leaking from the pipes above. 60 year old pipes have done their dash. We outgrew this facility a generation ago.
Our health infrastructure in New Zealand is like those 80 year old trains in India, creaking along. Yet every year these governments let in 120,000 new, additionaly residents with absolutely no provision to take care of them…no plan to feed them, house them, or educate them. It's just cheap growth for growth's sake. With profits flowing upwards, as always.
Of course there are winners in all of this. The top 1% have absconded with an extraordinary amount of wealth in New Zealand over the last two generations. And banks have sent back to their international owners an unbelievable amount of NZ workers’ wealth each year.
It is only the regular folks that are getting screwed.
Good luck on buying that house, kids.
What appalling statistics re numbers of hospital beds! Wouldn't you just love to ask Lewis, Luxton, Willis or Simeon why that is (would be a waste of time unless there was a strong non-patsy reporter recording it too). And yes the housing situation and costs is a tragedy too. Another good article thanks Gary - even though it's left me saddened & enraged yet again...
Tragic! Unspeakably, criminally insane!!