In support of nurses and midwives

People are going to miss out on KiwiBuild houses. Needy families who could really use the help will be left out while a couple of doctors making $80,000 each will happily move into a nice new home.

The inverse will also happen: cashrich professionals will miss out to strivers on the average wage who get lucky.

That’s the nature of the ballot system the Government has proposed for its KiwiBuild homes. There is no weighting for need or income, as there is for state houses. At this point it’s going to be basically a lottery, with thousands of interested buyers vying to get into the 1000 homes planned for the next year.

The Government announced the wide-open eligibility criteria for the KiwiBuild scheme yesterday morning. If you don’t already own a home, chances are you will be eligible – 92 per cent of first-home buyers are. As long as you are a citizen or permanent resident, earn less than $180,000 as a pairing or $120,000 as a sole earner, and don’t already own a home, you’ll be eligible.

That sky-high income cap immediately struck some people as ridiculous. Why help those who don’t

need it with a Government scheme while potentially letting those who do miss out?

Housing Minister Phil Twyford’s argument is basically that, in Auckland, high earners still do need the help. Households earning between $97,600 and $118,000 have seen a 13 per cent drop in home-ownership rates over the past decade, while households on $64,400 to $80,200 have seen an increase of 2 per cent.

It pays to keep in mind that the original policy didn’t have income caps, and if it works as designed the houses won’t be ‘‘subsidised’’ at all – they will be sold at cost. There’s also the effect Twyford hopes it will have on the wider market.

If you believe the Government is going to be building 12,000 affordable homes a year in three years, then prices across the board are likely to stabilise or even drop – the private market is building only about 30,000 new homes a year, so it would definitely have an effect on wider prices.

And if richer renters currently paying sky-high rents in Auckland and Wellington get out of the rental market and buy new homes, it frees up those rentals for poorer households another step down the ladder – potentially keeping rents down too, especially as Twyford tries to build as many new state homes as possible.

This is all reliant on the scheme actually going as planned.

Twyford’s points have some merit, but politicians rarely do things for one reason.

Setting the income cap so high also invites quite a lot of middle-class buyin. A whole lot of well-off people who assumed they would never get Government help to buy a home would have woken up yesterday to a pleasant surprise. Just like NZ Super and free education before it, making a policy universal (or close to it) buys a lot of voters. And there’s a decent chance Labour won’t be in power for the entire decade KiwiBuild is planned over.

It also means plenty of Kiwis who might be feeling like this Government isn’t doing much for them – those without kids, who are missing out on the tax cuts National had promised – are getting something: the possibility of a well-priced, well-built new home.

It’s not going to be particularly likely that people living in state homes now will be able to get on the housing ladder with KiwiBuilds, no matter how well the shared equity scheme which the Government promised the Greens works out.

After all, while $650,000 – the cap for three-bedroom builds in Auckland and Queenstown – is more affordable than most other new-builds in the area, it’s not affordable for a lot of people.

One of the worst possible outcomes for Twyford is that he build these houses and then they sit empty. Opening up the criteria to such a wide swath of people almost guarantees that whatever they do build will be bought.

All these reasons don’t answer the question of whether it is fair. It won’t be. No ballot process is going to be entirely fair. But what would be fair can’t be fixed by one policy or one government.

What would be fair is for today’s young people not to be facing down a housing market with prices nine times their income. What would be fair would be for a rich country with a low population to be able to house its citizens. What would be fair would be enough state homes and private rentals to keep the waitlist somewhere south of 8000. There’s no way 1000 affordable homes by next July is going to fix all that. One of the most talked about issues this year in New Zealand has been that of the pay of nurses and midwives. So now the question is should we support their strike action or not?

Nurses and midwives have taken care of many people throughout history. Whether that be soldiers coming in from war, or an extremely sick baby in need of attention, nurses and midwives have been there. Without them, where would we be as people? Where we would be as a community or country? Would we even have a future? It is a worthwhile profession.

But it’s the future nurses that we worry about. As a concerned pair of female high school students, we worry that the current wages are something that would deter young people from taking up nursing.

That is why we are in full support of the nurses decision to strike on July 5th and 12th and we truly wish them the best of luck, as they deserve proper pay without working over 80 hours a week.

The DHB needs to understand the need for nurses and not push them aside as they have been for years.

Aimee Holton and Lennon Fleet (Year 13 high school students), Hamilton