It’s much easier to preserve the status quo than to transform things.

on a rent-to-buy basis? (The Greens wanted that, it’s in their agreement with Labour.)

What if they do enough to change the look and shape of urban living with, say, suburbs of apartments springing up alongside a tram route, like they have in the nicest parts of Europe?

What if those many more houses soak up demand and take the inflationary pressure out of the market and it flattens out and prices just stay where they are or even fall?

At some point does it stop looking like misguided middle class welfare and more like actual meaningful change?

You may say I’m a dreamer and, if you do, you won’t be the only one on Twitter doing the hard yards for the Opposition.

You might say Phil Twyford is looking more than one step ahead. You might also say he needs to keep looking. The real test will be whether there are enough changes to get people seeing things entirely differently and losing the mindset that property fever is the way to wealth.

Our great problem for years and years has been an incapacity to look any further ahead than next Friday. In this, both the the administration of the last nine years and the Clark administration that preceded it were lamentably at fault. What did they do to calm the fever? Nothing.

People who claim to be investors in this particular field flatter themselves greatly. A truer description would be a combination of panic buying, and parasitism predicated on making free money from a rising market that makes a home progressively less attainable for everyone who comes along behind.

You consider yourself a proud capitalist investor? Then run that actual flag up an actual pole! Put some money in some actual real productive investment, and show you’re a believer.

It’s much easier to preserve the status quo than to transform things. This government is trying to achieve transformation in all kinds of areas. The likelihood they will make mistakes is approximately 100 per cent. That doesn’t worry me unduly, just as long as they keep thinking more than one step ahead.