Jane Clifton
To get things moving, the Government is set to become a master builder.
Never mind policy flip-flops. The Government is doing the sort of dramatic handbrake turns that, if executed on the streets of Lower Hutt or Henderson, would lead to a swift car-crushing order. And it’s not even the Government’s car. In the past week, National has pinched two of Labour’s policies in order to do these spectacular wheelies. Though, it has to be said, it has pimped these vehicles down, rather than up, as is more traditional in boy-racer circles.
The most surprising conversion was Finance Minister Bill English announcing that the Government was getting into the house-building business. If we had a new house for every time English has mocked Labour’s state house-building policy in Parliament, the housing shortage would already be solved. He’s had the time of his life portraying Labour as mired in a fusty fantasy era in which, if the state didn’t do it, it wasn’t worth doing. He has rejoiced in describing Labour’s policy as Soviet-style compulsory benevolence, under which the state would do everything but wipe toddlers’ noses. Why could it not also supplant Fletcher, GJ Gardner and co, he would jeer.
Now, having divined that the private sector is going to take a bit long to get its A into G, and with no apology to Michael Joseph Savage and his dated delusions, the Government is going to move things along by becoming a master builder itself.
In policy-change terms, this is serious smoking rubber. Not two years ago, the plan was for Housing New Zealand – which English stopped just short of deeming incompetent – to be divested of its entire stock. This was a sacred tenet of National’s new policy masthead, the social contract. Private providers would do a better landlording job, English said, adding bitterly that they could hardly do worse than HNZ. Now, English says HNZ will more than double its housing stock in Auckland under a vigorous new state building plan to provide affordable housing.
The divestment policy hasn’t actually been rescinded, but this new Bob the Builder “Yes, we can” era has been superimposed over the top of it.
BULLDOZE OBSTACLES
If this seems confusing, there are two probable explanations that no politician would willingly concede in public. First, as usual, is the polls. National’s soundings will be telling it that voters don’t think it is being proactive enough in solving the housing shortage or affordability problems. Second, the Government has concluded it is, after all, the entity most able to accelerate housing provision.
Ideally, a large, experienced foreign mass-building firm or two would have emerged to get things rolling by now, and doubtless the private sector will in time gear up to meet the demand. But meantime, only the state has the power figuratively and literally to bulldoze obstacles out of the way.
Labour, while disconcerted at having its policy nicked, can at least still carp that the U-turn is only a third the size of its KiwiBuild policy for 100,000 houses.
But it barely had time to work out which setting on the Gloat-o-Meter to go for when there was another dramatic skid: new immigration restrictions. After strenuously rejecting even Treasury and Reserve Bank warnings that inflows were more than the economy could decently handle, the Government has suddenly capitulated.
It’s culling about 5000 from the familyreunification and skilled-migrant categories, and from
Labour barely had time to determine its Gloato-Meter setting before another dramatic skid.
a lower overall planning target. Curiously, it has left untouched the most controversial category, unskilled migrants, who are somewhat counterintuitively filling jobs legions of locals could do, such as managing coffee bars and running supermarket tills, and depressing wages overall.
It’s hard to account for the Government’s leaving this gap open except as an ideological marker. Ministers have defended the right of employers to import the workers of their choice, to the point of implying the local unskilled labour force is workshy. There’s also a problem filling low-paid jobs in resort towns because of prohibitive accommodation costs, and the perennial horticultural-harvest labour shortages. And we might even give thanks that much of our pastoral industry is now conducted in Tagalog, possibly giving us the world’s only bilingual national dairy herd.
But perhaps there’s also a degree of reflexive political pride in leaving the immigration valve on a still-generous setting for now. No Government likes admitting to having been wrong, or even to changing tack. There is an art to U-turns. A minister must seem to spring fresh and dewy from the sea on a scallop shell, as though the previous policy had never existed. Botticelli would have had a chore with Immigration Minister Michael Woodhouse, who gamely depicted the new limits as “part of a regular review” to “ensure we get the mix right”, and in no way a policy change. To point out that the “regular review” has never adjusted the “mix” to this degree before would be to rock the scallop shell.
POLL-DRIVEN GIMMICK
This time, Labour and New Zealand First had to compete for Gloat-oMeter time, but Winston Peters has permanent residency on the issue of immigration. He termed the adjustment a poll-driven gimmick. He has rightly pointed out how slow officials have been to get on top of rorts such as immigrants posing as students while in fact working for buttons in relatives’ service stations and restaurants. The number of chefs we import, given that we do actually train thousands ourselves, is a marvel. And under our – generous by global standards – family-unification policy, we have let in 87,000 people since 2000, many of whom need never work and now qualify for National Super.
By coincidence, Germany’s Speaker, Norbert Lammert, is here this week to celebrate our 20th anniversary of MMP, the system originally imposed on Germany after World War II to ensure extremist parties would struggle to prosper. This has worked until recently, but now Germany is having unsettling flashbacks as antiimmigrant parties are rapidly gaining dominance, well beyond MMP’s thresholds and into the mainstream.
It’s a mind-focusing juxtaposition that his other mission while here is to urge us to take more Syrian refugees. We probably will, but would it be poor manners to ask if we could specially have ones with trade certificates?
Under our generous family-unification policy, many we have let in need never work.