Here’s my curation of the day’s top news, analysis, commentary, charts and cartoons from around Aotearoa and elsewhere about our political economy on housing, climate and poverty. This is only published in full for paying subscribers.
Firstly and briefly, here’s my summary of this morning’s top news:
PM Christopher Luxon blindsided the National caucus and his coalition partners yesterday by first suggesting a referendum to abolish MMP in a NewstalkZB1 interview in the morning, and then committing to it in comments to Stuff2 in the evening, saying: “When we do the four-year term referendum conversation, it makes sense for us to throw an MMP piece into it, and we’ll work that out in the second term.”
Explaining his reasoning in an answer to a texter into NewstalkZB, Luxon said: “I don't need some yahoo or numpty from some other party around that (Cabinet) table.”
That led NZ First Leader Winston Peters to suggest3 Luxon’s caucus might dump him and possible leadership rival Chris Bishop to say Luxon was only ‘musing’ about the idea. Luxon then doubled down last night on the commitment in the comments above to Stuff reporters in Auckland.
The results of a Taxpayers Union-Curia poll due today may trigger new National leadership change speculation4, although there is no clear and popular alternative within the caucus or known by the public5. That’s unlike in Labour’s case six weeks before the 2017 election, when it was able to switch from Andrew Little to Jacinda Ardern while in the relative safety of opposition when Ardern was already more popular than Little.
Even National’s natural supporters are despondent this morning about the party’s prospects in the November 7 election and highly critical of Luxon. Former National Party staffer and now Editor of the The Post and Sunday Star Times, Matthew Hooton, wrote in a column in The Post-$6 this morning that National needed to deal with its leadership crisis in the coming days, adding Luxon was “obviously out-of-touch, out-of-his-depth and profoundly unpopular.” See Newspaper Article of the Day below.
Luxon’s comments to Rotorua business leaders last Friday continue to reverberate, with former National Leader and now-Auckland Chamber of Commerce CEO Simon Bridges writing a column in this morning’s NZ Herald-$7 arguing Luxon didn’t understand small business owners in New Zealand.
So it turns out Immigration Minister Erica Stanford wanted to remove the current limits on bringing in temporary workers from overseas to pick fruit and veges through the Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme, but was blocked in cabinet, Kaya Selby reports this morning for RNZ8 from cabinet papers9. See Chart of the Day below
Illustrating the power of some great reporting and questioning from Jack Tame at Q+A10, MSD said it had dropped its KPIs to reduce the number of people in emergency housing.
New housing supply grew 9.1% over the last five years, which was faster than population growth of 5.5%. But that hasn’t solved housing shortages that still dominate our political economy, as the Salvation Army’s Social Policy and Parliamentary Unit pointed out in its always-excellent annual housing report11 published yesterday.
The report’s lead author, Alan Johnson, noted a rise in unoccupied homes to 220,500 or 10.9% of all dwellings in the 2023 Census, with 18% of all new homes built in the last five years being unoccupied, and many second and third homes bought in regional areas that were once rentals for local workers.
Johnson wrote: “The wrong people are getting the wrong housing in the wrong places. No party has yet given a convincing answer about what they intend to do about it.”
The report also identified signs of gentrification in some regions, with wealthier migrants purchasing homes previously available to renters and reducing rental supply for lower-income households. He added: “A housing policy calibrated to Auckland will not fix Gisborne.”
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