The market has failed to deliver

Great that the Government is beginning to address the housing crisis, but priorities are completely wrong.

First-home buyers will benefit, but their numbers are infinitesimal compared to the one-third of New Zealanders renting and whose plight now worsens (ie demand increases, supply reduces).

Wellington is swiftly becoming unattractive — they’ll study, work a few years, then leave.

With median rent now $615 p/w, household after-tax income of $137,000 is needed to meet the Greens’ sensible policy that accommodation costs not exceed 30 per cent of income.

Whanganui perceived itself as value for money — if anything bemoaned a lack of house-price growth — but housing affordability is the most-rapidly deteriorating in New Zealand . . . Whanganui is leading the charge.

Oliver Hartwich of the NZ Initiative says: “High house prices aren’t a sign of a city’s success but rather failure to deliver the housing its citizens need.”

When house prices are 10-plus times the average income, how do you slowly deflate a bubble moments away from bursting, while the sizzling sun on the housing market threatens to make that outcome even more likely?

The necessary connection between income one derives from an asset and its capital value in the case of rentals snapped long ago but now many landlords are trying to reconnect the two, claiming their asset is worth this much and so they

now expect more rent.

Prices must come down even if it means a collapse . . . We have become slaves to bricks and mortar. Incomes will in no way double or treble over the next decade.

State intervention is needed on a massive scale — proper taxing, state/ community housing, disruptive building technologies with scale. Don’t leave it to the market — it has failed utterly to deliver. Government must be bolder, otherwise New Zealand faces unprecedented hardship and division. [Abridged]

MARTIN VISSER

Whanganui

Bereavement leave

New Zealand recently passed a new law giving bereavement leave of

three days to parents who lose their child through miscarriage or stillbirth.

This recognition of the grief and trauma of the loss of a child will help many parents to face and cope with what had been a difficult or even taboo subject in society. Purely practically speaking it means parents do not need to use sick leave or holiday pay to get a few days to work through their loss.

It is also a recognition of the fact that it is a child that has died, the parents are not grieving the loss of “a bunch of cells”.

While people around the world spoke of how “compassionate” New Zealand is, some linked this new law to last year’s law making abortion freely available as examples of what a “progressive” country we are.

While it would seem that the recognition of the trauma of the loss of a child is the opposite of the removal of all legal protection of life of the child, at least one MP was “uncomfortable” that the bereavement leave law did not include parents who had, in my opinion, killed their own child in an abortion.

It would be truly bizarre to not only allow parents to, in my opinion, kill their own child, but then offer them paid bereavement leave for the death of that child.

K A BENFELL

Gonville