For years, New Zealand’s housing minister, National’s Nick Smith, has pushed for policy reforms to housing aimed at boosting supply, and has set an ambitious target to improve the affordability of New Zealand housing back to its long-run average of four times household incomes from around seven times currently.
Over the past year or so, Labour’s shadow minister for housing, Phil Twyford, has entered the fold delivering brilliant sermons on how unaffordable housing is destroying the New Zealand economy, increasing inequality, and damaging the younger generations (see here and here). Twyford has also called for reform to the way that housing-related infrastructure is funded, so that its cost is not lumped onto the initial purchase price of a new home (see here).
