Coalition tried too much too soon
already forgotten the family package that took effect in July 2018 and increased the Working for Families benefit and accommodation supplement.
The cost of $5.5 billion over five years was covered by a reversal of National Government tax cuts.
The second year of the cycle is usually about trying to recover from all the mistakes of the first year and launching something that will look good at the next election.
The third year is essentially electioneering, especially in the current climate.
All that makes it difficult, especially for an inexperienced bunch like the Labour-led Coalition Cabinet, to get complicated things done. It is easy to throw money around and recalibrate a few settings but it takes street smarts, a ruthless streak and experience to set up programmes from scratch.
The Coalition, perhaps because it had too many interests to please, had another basic problem: It failed to prioritise.
This failure led to a confusion between housing people living in bad conditions, such as two families in a two-bedroom house and a garage, and the less pressing problem of housing affordability.
Both need action but when you only have limited resources to build homes, you devote them to those most in need and focus on areas where they live.
Most of those people are in South Auckland and a targeted, military-style campaign, marshalling land and labour, to build more houses in that problemheavy locale was needed.
Even then the problem would not have gone away.
With the private rental stock declining, mainly because many landlords just can’t be bothered any more, the queues for social housing will keep growing.
And the harder the Government comes down on landlords, the more bottomless the pit becomes.
Helping more low-income workers into their own homes with a package of easier finance, guarantees and lower deposits was commendable. Every Government needs to show it doesn’t exist just to help those at the very bottom.
But the programme needed to prioritise. Lack of housing affordability is most severe in Auckland and Wellington and weird places like Queenstown. The premium on land prices in those places is astronomical compared with the rest of the country.
The Coalition could have concentrated on Auckland, for a start anyway, and worked out what the obstacles were before promising anything.
The easy move was stopping foreign speculators from buying existing property. But landbanking, getting subdivision consents through faster and getting developers on board are far more complex tasks and take more time.
KiwiBuild is not unsalvageable and will be better for an injection of realism. But its failure will hurt Labour.
What it has shown is that Labour can do the easy stuff, such as doling out money on a first-year fees-free policy, the Pike River recovery effort, the winter energy payment and the Provincial Growth Fund.
But only two years into its term, it has conceded the failure of one of its big transformational programmes.
It bit the bullet this year to avoid the humiliation next year.
Another big test is coming. The Coalition has budgeted $1.9b to revamp mental health services.
Remember the Wellbeing Budget. The funding includes a $455 million package to offer frontline services for 325,000 people who need mental health support before they experience major problems.
KiwiBuild was billed as an ambitious project that would ‘‘over the coming years transform the way housing is delivered to New Zealanders’’.
Much the same was said of the mental health services package.
Labour can’t afford to squander any more of Jacinda Ardern’s electoral capital on another failure.