Housing MInister Chris Bishop sets 'long-term' price target of three to five times household incomes
I VERY much doubt the economic competence of the new government. First Seymour wants to move massive amounts of money from poor to rich, now Bishop lives in cloud kuckoo land. Median income is $66,200 per year in 2023, so 50% earn less, 50% more (sometimes MUCH more). 3-5 times of that is $200,000-330,000. Even if they decide to give the land away for free you can’t build a house for that. And Bishop MUST know that. If they assume two full earners (aka the better off ones) it’s $400,000-660,000 for a house (including land) - which developer can provide that? So the government would need to build the houses - massively subsidised by the tax payer … which they don’t want to do.
So HOW can Bishop spout such nonsense???
From mortgages.co.nz...
In October 2023, BNZ published a report comparing New Zealand’s median section price, plus consented new-build cost, with the median price for an existing home each year. Using these median values, it has nearly always been more expensive to build, except for 2021-2022 when existing house prices rose sharply before falling again. As median building costs continued to rise into 2023 and 2024, building became significantly more expensive than buying an existing home.
Some Choice News!
DOC is rolling out a new tool to help figure out what to tackle first when it comes to protecting our threatened species and the things putting them at risk.
Why does this matter? As Nikki Macdonald from The Post points out, we’re a country with around 4,400 threatened species. With limited time and funding, conservation has always meant making tough calls about what gets attention first.
For the first time, DOC has put real numbers around what it would take to do everything needed to properly safeguard our unique natural environment. The new BioInvest tool shows the scale of the challenge: 310,177 actions across 28,007 sites.
Now that we can see the full picture, it brings the big question into focus: how much do we, as Kiwis, truly value protecting nature — and what are we prepared to invest to make it happen?
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