The housing crisis doco we don’t need to see

Indulgent, race-baiting project should never have been made

‘There’s been about a trillion dollars that has left China in the last year or so,” intones the voiceover ominously, over flowing strings while spreadsheets roll past. We see images of hanzi characters flash up in cutaways to real estate signs, to bank signs, to shopping districts. There’s talk of “Chinese investors”, “trade missions to China”, “Chinese buyers”, “multimillionaires” from China.

All in service to a question: Who owns New Zealand now? The hourlong documentary, which screened on Three last night, positions itself as a sober attempt to find an answer, to have a “grown-up” conversation about our housing crisis.

This is clearly a laudable goal, and one many journalists have been grappling with in recent years: The Nation’s reporting on families living in cars. The Hui on the work of Te Puea marae. The Spinoff’s Unsettled.

Unfortunately, along with neoliberalism, which functions as origin story, the answer to the titular question appears to be China and the Chinese. This would be tense enough even if we had perfect data, able to prove convincingly that our rampant house price inflation was unequivocally attributable to Chinese capital.

Only, as Bryan Bruce rightly points out, our data collection has long been awful. One of this Government’s many failings on housing has been a stunning lack of curiosity — we know far too little about what has been driving the precipitous inflation of house prices.

Yet, absent knowledge, Bruce doggedly infers that it is speculative Chinese money. This makes Who Owns New Zealand Now? functionally a deeply unpleasant echo of Labour’s “Chinese-sounding names” fiasco of 2015.

In terms of format, the hour-long documentary hews very closely to its predecessor, World Class? Inside NZ Education — A Special Report