Bishop details National's new MDRS-lite housing policy, but with some new twists and some old problems; I include my highlights, lowlights, cliffhangers & a suggested alternative
Bernard, your idea of 0.5% levy on owner occupied houses is interesting. Who would decide the paper value? Would it also apply to retirees who might have no income to fund such a levy? Taxing an unrealised value appears to be a dangerous precedent. Will you be able to offset losses if the value drops on the previous year? We can all agree that tax on a realised capital gain is relatively easy to administer. I’m not sure taxing unrealised gains will be seen as a fair tax.
My modest (130sqm) rental house has improvements valued at 485k, whereas my much larger personal house (renovated under building consents) has improvements value at 270k.
The suggested 0.5% levy would drive a rental increase of $117 per week to cover the additional costs, already can't write off genuine interest charges so can't subsidise more new charges.
a person paying off a mortgage on their own home cannot write off interest charges. therefore a business or person paying off a mortgage on a dwelling they rent out must not be able to write off interest charges (although for new builds they still can). allowing interest to be tax deductible on rental and speculative residential properties gives their owners a colossal financial advantage over people who are purchasing a residential property they live in and this policy caused the raging inferno of increasing residential property prices which resulted in the current unaffordability of residential properties in NZ. the problem is GREED!!! I hate GREED.
Hang on Robert. A person living in their home gets the benefit of a place to live, a landlord has no usage right once they let it out, and still have to provide their own place to live. Different situations altogether.
The government taxes the rental income on the property, without allowing an offsetting expense for all costs, that drives up rent to deliver a fair return on the asset. Not greed, economics, but the government significantly lifts its share of tax on the whole transaction - now who was being greedy?
Our rental properties were a service to an elderly person and a young family, neither of whom were in a position to buy a warm comfortable home. We charged rent that never increased while the tenant stayed, in one case 9 years. The rules changed, so we decided to sell one, and that young family didn't have a place to stay any more.
Nobody was better off, but it must make you feel relieved
a person paying off a mortgage on their own home cannot write off interest charges. therefore a business or person paying off a mortgage on a dwelling they rent out must not be able to write off interest charges. they still can for new builds which gives them a COLOSSAL financial advantage over people buying a new home for themselves (that is nasty).
your second paragraph is bs.
greed is a serious problem in NZ. also, you were better off compared with all people who were purchasing a dwelling for themself.
what is desperately needed in NZ is the rapid construction of at least 100,000 public/state houses of the sizes and in the locations needed, to be rented at affordable (to the tenants) rents.
Not ignoring the fact, that was clear in my comment.
I pointed out that a person living in their own house gets a direct benefit - they live in it, and save rental costs, naturally that has a cost. A person providing a home for others, does not get the benefit of living in it, so the situation is different.
Of course I'm better off, I've been saving for 30 years. I bought a ratty home in an outer suburb when we earned a pittance, many hours to make it better, we did the same thing again after moving for work, any gains a direct result of my physical labour and time commitment.
I agree, building more affordable houses is a sensible and practical solution that requires a competent government to do it. 5 years on we haven't got that....... but law changes, building failures and fiscal/monetary policy means that things are even worse for renters.
Yes but rates are payment for services supplied, water, waste, and social amenities. How do a retired couple on a fixed super income pay a year on year levy. Not all homeowners are loaded.
first time I've heard of a deferred payment system for rates. I should be grateful if you would advise/state where this information is publicly available.
Taxes are also payments for services supplied. Welfare, education, health, law and order, defence etc. Social amenities, without which our society would be unrecognisable. Perhaps less direct than what some of your rates pay for, but still service. I think this is where a great deal of society's ills arise - tax is seen as an evil to be minimised or avoided, not a contribution to society that benefits us all. We get to vote every 3 years on how we want that benefit to look and feel on the ground.
Thanks BOP. Yes. Using same land value as for ratings purposes. For any owner, but doesn’t have to be collected until sold, albeit with low interest rate. Maybe 10 year government bond yield.
Better if the tax is on owner-unoccupied real estate. It's the landlords and rentiers who are the parasites. But that needs to be backed by an increase in pensions, so retirees who own real estate do not need to charge everyone else rent to afford a decent retirement. Pensions can be paid as they come due. There is no "tax pay-for" and no need for superannuation with a fiat currency on a floating exchange rate. Who pays for the pension in real terms? Answer: Today's workers who produce the output retirees desire to consume.
May 29, 2023·edited May 29, 2023Liked by Bernard Hickey
How would the value of a property for the 0.5% be calculated? This is obviously fraught already for local body rates which is at worst placing you as a pegging against the base (ie your % of total rates collected) as opposed to an absolute number which this would require?
On a related note, I can't understand the carve outs for primary residences for CGT which seem to be taken as read in the wider discussion? The argument is often 'you buy back into the same market'. All that says to me is people think they are more entitled to buy their neighbour's house because they already own their current property, compared with the renters on the other side who have to save via wages.
It also doubles down on the perverse incentives in the residential market - rather than putting money into the productive economy, just buy a bigger and bigger house until the kids leave home, you hit 65 and sell your $2m house which was much more than you needed anyway, buy a nice $1m home and take your tax-free gains to retire on.
1. how much public money / time has now been wasted by councils across the country planning on implementing the standards? Not a great look by National who supposedly cares about how each dollar is spent
2. National say that councils must make 30years worth of land available immediately for development. What does immediately mean? The day after the election result is confirmed? In five years once they have 20 rounds of consultation?
and it all comes back to the point you made Bernard that not one council in NZ has any idea what Central Governments population growth (migration) policies will be for the coming year let alone the next 30 years - as Central Government refuses to discuss that with the general population - because they know that the great majority will disagree with it - and council's don't want to meet the substantial cost imposition associated with that "growth" so assume it is zero.
Chris is ignoring the fact that the years and years it has taken the Councils to implement the NPS-UD is the councils acting "immediately". This sort of thing is not instant because of the incredible amount of legal risk in pissing off landowners. There's no way for Chris to get around it unless he is also going to replace the RMA "immediately".
Luxon owes Bishop a beer. That interview was an truly impressive political feat. I'd put him up there with Sepuloni for how well he managed that Jake Tame interview.
If National actually did the things in this policy then that'd be great. A value capture tax and an explicit growth target would be huge! The thing is it's not credible. The key bit of Bishop's interview was when he said that it comes down to who has the political courage to follow through. And that's not National or Labour.
We all know that the political subtext at Birkenhead was "I know you don't like 3 story houses and I want you to think that I don't like 3 story houses either". That does not look like political courage to me.
When you say the levy pays for infrastructure, what infrastructure is included and which is excluded? Councils no longer have to pay for power, gas, or telecoms, and in the future won't be responsible for the three waters either. Will the levy go to these providers or will they be adding their own bills on top of that?
I've always liked the idea of a land tax, and prefer your tiered version to (what we currently know of) TOP's - primarily because their flat 0.75% version effectively punishes a residential home owner for their neighbour's empty section... Add a little extra tax in there for houses that are occupied for less than a couple of weeks a year and we'd be starting to address our housing problem I expect!
However it's already obvious that people have some issues with it, so probably needs a couple of other key considerations and clarifications:
- Clarify it applies to the unimproved value of the land only. And, it should also only apply to the unmortgaged portion of the land; I just can't see throwing an extra day-one $2000 tax on a first-home buyer with an $800k mortgage being popular
- Re-valuations should be done at least annually. In spite of the doubts expressed about the accuracy of these valuations, I expect a dedicated department could do this easily with modern analysis and tools. And, ideally, if we started fixing our housing cost problem, the tax should also reduce.
- Payment should be able to be deferred (without penalty, but perhaps with inflation-adjustment) until the property is sold...or passed on as inheritance.
- We desperately need more mixed-use zoning (for climate, community and infrastructure). We need to think carefully about how/if we tax a 3-level townhouse with a barbershop or florist on the bottom floor.
- We should simultaneously bring back (ring-fenced) interest deductibility for landlords and encourage them (including the mum-and-dad ones!) to start operating as a viable business, or sell. Otherwise, a land tax will just turn into a rent increase
As an aside, for those questioning how unfair it is to use 'unrealised gains' to value someone's wealth, it's worth pointing out the (highly-profitable) banks don't care about gains being 'unrealised' when they offer homeowners low-cost mortgage top-ups and platinum credit cards... If it's good enough for bank shareholders, it should be good enough for us!
Keeping coming back to the certain way of building lots of well designed houses with well designed public space and community facilities is for the state to build them.
A Ministry of Green Works for the building.
A revamped State Advances Corporation for low interest long term mortgages.
A reinstated family benefit that can be capitalised to help first home buyers.
Significant central government support for the necessary physical, social and environmental infrastructure.
What happens under National's policy when the marginal development trips a capex investment need and a new widget is needed, does the new development have to pay for the whole new widget?
perhaps they need to be discussing the impact of the recent amendments to the building code - Ive just built a new home - if it had to comply with the new code it would have cost $70,000 (15%) more to build and that is for a 120m2 build (plus garage and deck) -
Ive just had a conversation with one of the larger builders in our area and he reckons the code will add $100,000 to the cost of a 240m2 home. The new code will bring minimal benefits in terms of improved energy efficiency and there is no chance there will be a positive return on costs over the life of the building. I've put a wood burner in my home so generally have surplus heat when it is cold. For the cost of the new code I could have installed 10's of kilowatts of solar on the roof - now that would make a real difference!
In the meantime the manufacturers of triple glazing cant believe their luck - I bet they have all gone out and bought a Dodge Ram or an F250 and new jet ski just to celebrate their windfall.
This increase in the cost of a new build will flow right through the housing market as if the cost of new build goes up by 15% the cost of buying an existing home will follow. It seems lost on everyone in Wellington when they express much consternation at the spiraling cost of housing that an existing home is still generally cheaper than a new build plus you don't have to wait for a year between purchase and occupancy and most people do not have the time or the financial resources to build. What is also ignored is that growth in household income has been depressed relative to the cost of building or buying a home and that is because successive Governments have had habit of chronically understating the real rate of inflation as a means of suppressing wage growth. If wages were inflating at the same rate as property we wouldn't be debating whether a capital gains tax was necessary.
Bernard, re your excellent suggestion of a new state agency to take responsibility for installing green infrastructure, housing development, etc you would have seen that the 2023 budget established Rau Paenga as a new cross-government infrastructure delivery agency with $100M in start up funding. Rau Paenga was previously the Christchurch rebuild agency Otakaro Ltd which is now renamed, retooled & funded to expand nationwide. Thank god a Labour government is finally using the power of the state to start addressing our infrastructure deficit.
Aren't they a project management shop? Still need the policy, funding, financing, planning, design, delivery and operations to actually start addressing the deficit.
I don't know much about any of this stuff, so don't really have an opinion one way or the other, but just wanted to mention that I really like that your plan clearly articulates the consideration for the long term effects of migration and climate change.
Where is that stuff from either of the main parties? I feel like long-termism is something that modern democracy does not encourage or enable
To fix the issues the whole monetary system needs to be changed and govt needs to transition to MMT.
My proposal is that govt funds the required growth requirements and the councils continue to collect rates aka property taxes as one form of income to fund council.
The issue of raising taxes and levies on the general population is a no go there is nothing creative in raising taxes in all forms and disguises we are already taxed to death with the effective tax rate at somewhere near 60%.
There needs to be a huge change in monitory policy as my feeling is we are way over peak tax.
The problems we are experiencing today is a lack of planning and foresight if the chinese can do it why can't we here in NZ.
More creative thinking is required not more added taxes on top of all the many other taxes that are stealing funds from hard working people and pushing costs up.
If anyone is interested in my proposal that we should have a tax free NZ and fund by using other creative methods.
Gerald, I'm pretty sure I disagree with you about the potential for a tax free economy - I think tax just does too much heavy-lifting for us around regulation, currency stability and our global integration - but there's some seeds of interesting ideas in there. You should write it up in a post - maybe just don't lean-in too hard on the Chinese-central-planning theme ;-)
Bernard, your idea of 0.5% levy on owner occupied houses is interesting. Who would decide the paper value? Would it also apply to retirees who might have no income to fund such a levy? Taxing an unrealised value appears to be a dangerous precedent. Will you be able to offset losses if the value drops on the previous year? We can all agree that tax on a realised capital gain is relatively easy to administer. I’m not sure taxing unrealised gains will be seen as a fair tax.
It also adds up if you include improvement’s rather than just land as a $1M property would mean additional $5k pa which is a lot for most people
Also the RV is an unreliable source of info,
My modest (130sqm) rental house has improvements valued at 485k, whereas my much larger personal house (renovated under building consents) has improvements value at 270k.
The suggested 0.5% levy would drive a rental increase of $117 per week to cover the additional costs, already can't write off genuine interest charges so can't subsidise more new charges.
Only land.
a person paying off a mortgage on their own home cannot write off interest charges. therefore a business or person paying off a mortgage on a dwelling they rent out must not be able to write off interest charges (although for new builds they still can). allowing interest to be tax deductible on rental and speculative residential properties gives their owners a colossal financial advantage over people who are purchasing a residential property they live in and this policy caused the raging inferno of increasing residential property prices which resulted in the current unaffordability of residential properties in NZ. the problem is GREED!!! I hate GREED.
Hang on Robert. A person living in their home gets the benefit of a place to live, a landlord has no usage right once they let it out, and still have to provide their own place to live. Different situations altogether.
The government taxes the rental income on the property, without allowing an offsetting expense for all costs, that drives up rent to deliver a fair return on the asset. Not greed, economics, but the government significantly lifts its share of tax on the whole transaction - now who was being greedy?
Our rental properties were a service to an elderly person and a young family, neither of whom were in a position to buy a warm comfortable home. We charged rent that never increased while the tenant stayed, in one case 9 years. The rules changed, so we decided to sell one, and that young family didn't have a place to stay any more.
Nobody was better off, but it must make you feel relieved
you are ignoring the fact:
a person paying off a mortgage on their own home cannot write off interest charges. therefore a business or person paying off a mortgage on a dwelling they rent out must not be able to write off interest charges. they still can for new builds which gives them a COLOSSAL financial advantage over people buying a new home for themselves (that is nasty).
your second paragraph is bs.
greed is a serious problem in NZ. also, you were better off compared with all people who were purchasing a dwelling for themself.
what is desperately needed in NZ is the rapid construction of at least 100,000 public/state houses of the sizes and in the locations needed, to be rented at affordable (to the tenants) rents.
Not ignoring the fact, that was clear in my comment.
I pointed out that a person living in their own house gets a direct benefit - they live in it, and save rental costs, naturally that has a cost. A person providing a home for others, does not get the benefit of living in it, so the situation is different.
Of course I'm better off, I've been saving for 30 years. I bought a ratty home in an outer suburb when we earned a pittance, many hours to make it better, we did the same thing again after moving for work, any gains a direct result of my physical labour and time commitment.
I agree, building more affordable houses is a sensible and practical solution that requires a competent government to do it. 5 years on we haven't got that....... but law changes, building failures and fiscal/monetary policy means that things are even worse for renters.
Only land
> Taxing an unrealised value appears to be a dangerous precedent
Council rates are based on on paper value, and so are taxes on investment funds. These seem easy enough to administer.
> Will you be able to offset losses if the value drops on the previous year?
It's a levy on value, not capital gain. If the value drops you wouldn't offset the loss, your levy would just be smaller next year.
Yes but rates are payment for services supplied, water, waste, and social amenities. How do a retired couple on a fixed super income pay a year on year levy. Not all homeowners are loaded.
Well then just rename Bernard's 0.5% levy to "payment for services supplied" so we get the nomenclature right.
You could be right about those points. I guess all I'm really trying to say is that it's not precedent setting.
People on pensions can pay for it the same way as provided for rates - the defer payment system.
first time I've heard of a deferred payment system for rates. I should be grateful if you would advise/state where this information is publicly available.
https://www.govt.nz/browse/housing-and-property/getting-help-with-housing/postpone-defer-paying-rates/
thankyou. I will investigate.
Deferred payment until sale.
Taxes are also payments for services supplied. Welfare, education, health, law and order, defence etc. Social amenities, without which our society would be unrecognisable. Perhaps less direct than what some of your rates pay for, but still service. I think this is where a great deal of society's ills arise - tax is seen as an evil to be minimised or avoided, not a contribution to society that benefits us all. We get to vote every 3 years on how we want that benefit to look and feel on the ground.
You don't live in an investment fund though, so what you are suggesting is effectively taxing the home as imputed dividend.
Yes
Tax on absolute value of land. Not the change
Thanks BOP. Yes. Using same land value as for ratings purposes. For any owner, but doesn’t have to be collected until sold, albeit with low interest rate. Maybe 10 year government bond yield.
Better if the tax is on owner-unoccupied real estate. It's the landlords and rentiers who are the parasites. But that needs to be backed by an increase in pensions, so retirees who own real estate do not need to charge everyone else rent to afford a decent retirement. Pensions can be paid as they come due. There is no "tax pay-for" and no need for superannuation with a fiat currency on a floating exchange rate. Who pays for the pension in real terms? Answer: Today's workers who produce the output retirees desire to consume.
How would the value of a property for the 0.5% be calculated? This is obviously fraught already for local body rates which is at worst placing you as a pegging against the base (ie your % of total rates collected) as opposed to an absolute number which this would require?
On a related note, I can't understand the carve outs for primary residences for CGT which seem to be taken as read in the wider discussion? The argument is often 'you buy back into the same market'. All that says to me is people think they are more entitled to buy their neighbour's house because they already own their current property, compared with the renters on the other side who have to save via wages.
It also doubles down on the perverse incentives in the residential market - rather than putting money into the productive economy, just buy a bigger and bigger house until the kids leave home, you hit 65 and sell your $2m house which was much more than you needed anyway, buy a nice $1m home and take your tax-free gains to retire on.
Land value used for ratings purposes. Already there with accepted process for appeals etc.
Two questions come to mind
1. how much public money / time has now been wasted by councils across the country planning on implementing the standards? Not a great look by National who supposedly cares about how each dollar is spent
2. National say that councils must make 30years worth of land available immediately for development. What does immediately mean? The day after the election result is confirmed? In five years once they have 20 rounds of consultation?
Great points and questions
and it all comes back to the point you made Bernard that not one council in NZ has any idea what Central Governments population growth (migration) policies will be for the coming year let alone the next 30 years - as Central Government refuses to discuss that with the general population - because they know that the great majority will disagree with it - and council's don't want to meet the substantial cost imposition associated with that "growth" so assume it is zero.
Chris is ignoring the fact that the years and years it has taken the Councils to implement the NPS-UD is the councils acting "immediately". This sort of thing is not instant because of the incredible amount of legal risk in pissing off landowners. There's no way for Chris to get around it unless he is also going to replace the RMA "immediately".
Luxon owes Bishop a beer. That interview was an truly impressive political feat. I'd put him up there with Sepuloni for how well he managed that Jake Tame interview.
If National actually did the things in this policy then that'd be great. A value capture tax and an explicit growth target would be huge! The thing is it's not credible. The key bit of Bishop's interview was when he said that it comes down to who has the political courage to follow through. And that's not National or Labour.
We all know that the political subtext at Birkenhead was "I know you don't like 3 story houses and I want you to think that I don't like 3 story houses either". That does not look like political courage to me.
Indeed. Chris is a good politician. And I mean that in a complementary way.
Which Chris?
Will Nicola Willis also be asked to dine on the rodent, or do the political optics work better with a single serve?
When you say the levy pays for infrastructure, what infrastructure is included and which is excluded? Councils no longer have to pay for power, gas, or telecoms, and in the future won't be responsible for the three waters either. Will the levy go to these providers or will they be adding their own bills on top of that?
The announcement doesn't seem to include tax/investment measures to end the treatment of housing as a speculative commodity. So same old, same old.
I've always liked the idea of a land tax, and prefer your tiered version to (what we currently know of) TOP's - primarily because their flat 0.75% version effectively punishes a residential home owner for their neighbour's empty section... Add a little extra tax in there for houses that are occupied for less than a couple of weeks a year and we'd be starting to address our housing problem I expect!
However it's already obvious that people have some issues with it, so probably needs a couple of other key considerations and clarifications:
- Clarify it applies to the unimproved value of the land only. And, it should also only apply to the unmortgaged portion of the land; I just can't see throwing an extra day-one $2000 tax on a first-home buyer with an $800k mortgage being popular
- Re-valuations should be done at least annually. In spite of the doubts expressed about the accuracy of these valuations, I expect a dedicated department could do this easily with modern analysis and tools. And, ideally, if we started fixing our housing cost problem, the tax should also reduce.
- Payment should be able to be deferred (without penalty, but perhaps with inflation-adjustment) until the property is sold...or passed on as inheritance.
- We desperately need more mixed-use zoning (for climate, community and infrastructure). We need to think carefully about how/if we tax a 3-level townhouse with a barbershop or florist on the bottom floor.
- We should simultaneously bring back (ring-fenced) interest deductibility for landlords and encourage them (including the mum-and-dad ones!) to start operating as a viable business, or sell. Otherwise, a land tax will just turn into a rent increase
As an aside, for those questioning how unfair it is to use 'unrealised gains' to value someone's wealth, it's worth pointing out the (highly-profitable) banks don't care about gains being 'unrealised' when they offer homeowners low-cost mortgage top-ups and platinum credit cards... If it's good enough for bank shareholders, it should be good enough for us!
Keeping coming back to the certain way of building lots of well designed houses with well designed public space and community facilities is for the state to build them.
A Ministry of Green Works for the building.
A revamped State Advances Corporation for low interest long term mortgages.
A reinstated family benefit that can be capitalised to help first home buyers.
Significant central government support for the necessary physical, social and environmental infrastructure.
What happens under National's policy when the marginal development trips a capex investment need and a new widget is needed, does the new development have to pay for the whole new widget?
perhaps they need to be discussing the impact of the recent amendments to the building code - Ive just built a new home - if it had to comply with the new code it would have cost $70,000 (15%) more to build and that is for a 120m2 build (plus garage and deck) -
Ive just had a conversation with one of the larger builders in our area and he reckons the code will add $100,000 to the cost of a 240m2 home. The new code will bring minimal benefits in terms of improved energy efficiency and there is no chance there will be a positive return on costs over the life of the building. I've put a wood burner in my home so generally have surplus heat when it is cold. For the cost of the new code I could have installed 10's of kilowatts of solar on the roof - now that would make a real difference!
In the meantime the manufacturers of triple glazing cant believe their luck - I bet they have all gone out and bought a Dodge Ram or an F250 and new jet ski just to celebrate their windfall.
This increase in the cost of a new build will flow right through the housing market as if the cost of new build goes up by 15% the cost of buying an existing home will follow. It seems lost on everyone in Wellington when they express much consternation at the spiraling cost of housing that an existing home is still generally cheaper than a new build plus you don't have to wait for a year between purchase and occupancy and most people do not have the time or the financial resources to build. What is also ignored is that growth in household income has been depressed relative to the cost of building or buying a home and that is because successive Governments have had habit of chronically understating the real rate of inflation as a means of suppressing wage growth. If wages were inflating at the same rate as property we wouldn't be debating whether a capital gains tax was necessary.
Bernard, re your excellent suggestion of a new state agency to take responsibility for installing green infrastructure, housing development, etc you would have seen that the 2023 budget established Rau Paenga as a new cross-government infrastructure delivery agency with $100M in start up funding. Rau Paenga was previously the Christchurch rebuild agency Otakaro Ltd which is now renamed, retooled & funded to expand nationwide. Thank god a Labour government is finally using the power of the state to start addressing our infrastructure deficit.
Aren't they a project management shop? Still need the policy, funding, financing, planning, design, delivery and operations to actually start addressing the deficit.
I don't know much about any of this stuff, so don't really have an opinion one way or the other, but just wanted to mention that I really like that your plan clearly articulates the consideration for the long term effects of migration and climate change.
Where is that stuff from either of the main parties? I feel like long-termism is something that modern democracy does not encourage or enable
To fix the issues the whole monetary system needs to be changed and govt needs to transition to MMT.
My proposal is that govt funds the required growth requirements and the councils continue to collect rates aka property taxes as one form of income to fund council.
The issue of raising taxes and levies on the general population is a no go there is nothing creative in raising taxes in all forms and disguises we are already taxed to death with the effective tax rate at somewhere near 60%.
There needs to be a huge change in monitory policy as my feeling is we are way over peak tax.
The problems we are experiencing today is a lack of planning and foresight if the chinese can do it why can't we here in NZ.
More creative thinking is required not more added taxes on top of all the many other taxes that are stealing funds from hard working people and pushing costs up.
If anyone is interested in my proposal that we should have a tax free NZ and fund by using other creative methods.
Of course the Chinese don’t have to worry about those troublesome things called elections.
Or human rights
Gerald, I'm pretty sure I disagree with you about the potential for a tax free economy - I think tax just does too much heavy-lifting for us around regulation, currency stability and our global integration - but there's some seeds of interesting ideas in there. You should write it up in a post - maybe just don't lean-in too hard on the Chinese-central-planning theme ;-)
Even MMT doesn't propose no taxes - taxation is required to keep inflation from getting too high.
2021
Confidence And Supply
How MP Nicola Willis orchestrated a radical shift in National’s housing policy.
By Hayden Donnell
https://northandsouth.co.nz/2021/06/16/nicola-willis-housing-national-party/
What the GOVT needs to do is pay off all councils debts and start a fresh with new rules put in place.
A royal commission needs to be set up to investigate why councils are so in debt and why there is so much mismanagement.
How ever the financial problems are huge and can only be solved at the GOVT level.
A complete change in how Govt monitory policy is structured need to happen asap.
Sounds familiar https://www.interest.co.nz/property/69450/nick-smith-says-has-told-government-target-housing-affordability-four-times-income