For transformation to succeed
Never mind how much revenue you might or might not collect from it, surely the real value is the leverage it exerts. If it puts people off paying more, excellent. If it brings on 20 years of plateaued prices, perfect. That gives us 20 years for earning power to catch back up.
‘‘Oh but people will leave the rental property market and there’ll be no houses to rent,’’ people say. If people will leave the rental market because they can’t get a capital gain, then again: excellent. Long live the plateau. Let the government buy those houses and rent them at affordable rates because the return they seek can be social, not commercial.
Calling ‘‘the right to get on the property ladder’’ a Kiwi dream is fatally misleading. It’s not a dream.
It’s a slow-motion Ponzi scheme nightmare.
What if we were to move to a new model? It might not be How We Do Things at the moment, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t become the way we do it better. Kids might like to live in apartments.
They might like high density with plenty of public transport so they don’t need to be stuck on a motorway burning fossil fuels and wrecking the planet. It’s calamitously wrong to tell them the way we do things now is the way to go.
How about we look out ahead, a little? Most of our councils have signed the Local Government Leaders’ Climate Change Declaration. It recognises the urgent need to address threats of climate change, and involves harebrained ideas like promoting walking, public transport and committing to renewable energy.
Sandra Goudie, ThamesCoromandel’s mayor, was on my radio this week talking about it. She wouldn’t say whether she believed climate change was happening. She called the whole thing incredibly ‘‘highly politically charged and driven’’.
God save us from people who say ‘‘Yeah nah’’ and: ‘‘no, just keep things the way they are’’ and to hell with the consequences. Transformation is what we need. Transformation is what’s going on here, with tax, with moves towards a clean economy.
Transformation will always be more complicated than keeping things just the way they are and doing nothing. Things will go wrong. People will make mistakes.
When it happens, maybe we should take a breath before we say ‘‘morons, what did I tell you’’ because mate, have you ever tried doing something new and run into unexpected problems and made mistakes but got there in the end and were bloody pleased when you did? Well: that.
Why on earth wouldn’t we try a tax to put an end to the mania by applying it to every last house?