Housing. How hard is it really? Here's a house, here's a door. Windows: one, two, three, four. And the hatchback, if you have one. Simple stuff. And yet you can't move for the moaners! Can't afford a house this. Sleeping in my car that. Honestly.
Mike Hosking dropped a common-sense bomb on Seven Sharp the other night. Noting the Prime Minister's remarks about the number of reasonably priced houses on the market in Auckland, spaketh the Hosk: "To say it's unaffordable? Not true!" And: "A lot of this whole debate is driven by more emotion than by fact."
A week has now passed since those remarks, so it's been very puzzling indeed that people are still going on about housing. In the newspaper, on the radio, even on the television, the stories based on housing emotions just won't quit. But facts will prevail. As long as we don't let them get into the hands of the do-gooders and the scientists and the pointy-headed "experts", we'll be right. The facts will set us free.
Let's begin with the claptrap about a "crisis". The critics bemoan "a severe home affordability and ownership crisis" which "has reached dangerous levels", and how we "need government leadership that is prepared to focus on the fundamental issues driving the crisis". Yes, it's true, those are John Key's words, from 2007 - I'll give you that. But that was in the deepest winter of Helengrad, when children dressed in sackcloth and the flag still had a Union Jack on it. Today, things are looking up. Not totally fixed, it's fair to say, but the official status of the housing situation has officially shifted from crisis to challenge, according to officials.
But don't take my word for it. Look at the facts. As Nick Smith has pointed out, Auckland housing is more affordable today than it was when National came to Government. Anyone who is laughing or weeping or otherwise rolling around on the floor at such a suggestion clearly has a bad case of emotions. Because the Massey University home affordability index tells not a lie. Mr Smith, the sharpest of three equally sharp points in the isosceles triumvirate of housing ministers, made this observation some months ago. Did he back down when it was pointed out that this was wholly dependent on historically low interest rates, which could hardly be guaranteed for the typical 20- to 30-year duration of a mortgage? He did not.
