Mike Hosking: KiwiBuild collapse confirms this is a Government run by amateurs

COMMENT: So it would appear, with the denials and obfuscation, what we told you 18 months ago about KiwiBuild will come to pass.

You can't build 100,000 houses in 10 years. You can't, and shouldn't, promise you can, because it isn't real, it isn't possible - and any promise to the contrary is dishonest, naive and bound to end in tears.

National leader Simon Bridges looked, for a moment, like a proper opposition leader in Parliament yesterday when he was asking Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern about the targets. This is the sort of thing he should have been doing for months.

Ever since this Government started the year with the cold, hard truth that the promise of 1000 houses in year one was a fantasy, and they'd be lucky to crack 100, that was the moment this house of cards collapsed. That was the moment that Phil Twyford, the minister in charge, should have handed in his resignation based on incompetency alone.

Further, Twyford had known about it since December last year but wanted the summer to ponder. Pondering doesn't build houses anymore than hot air does, he's clearly good at both.

They talked of a re-calibration. The Prime Minister, in yet another one of her outstanding displays of naivety, post the capitulation, chose to continue to insist they were going to build 100,000 houses in 10 years.

She must now regret that, given it wasn't true then, and isn't true now.

They are stalling, apparently until next month, to finally release what we already know. What some of us knew since September 2017 and spoke about, and what many have come to realise since then, as the outworkings of a party that wasn't remotely prepared for government, didn't have a clue about housing, nor the economy in general.

How they extract themselves from this, when they finally get around to doing it officially, will be a show worth watching. Do they even have the gonads to attempt a new number?

I said earlier this year you will never see another figure associated with KiwiBuild, targets will be gone, and they wouldn't dare ever put numbers next to promises around housing ever again.

I still hold that view. How could you not? This was the Government's biggest of big ticket items. This was the solution to the so-called "housing crisis". This was getting those "locked out of the market" into 'affordable' homes.

None of it was ever real, or realistic. None of it was based on sound economics, or any understanding of the housing market. This was "group thinking" from a bunch of university based wonks, hand wringers and idealists of the highest order who by happenstance ended up in government.

And look at the result: If this was a business deal, there would be legal action, the operators would be accused of fraud.

As a result of this, and what they will eventually announce, should be all the reason for you to finally come to the conclusion, if you haven't already, that when it comes to the economy and its guardianship, you are dealing with amateurs.