National Party MP Simeon Brown has come out swinging at Labour’s housing promises saying they stopped more homes being built at Ihumātao than they built during their time in government.
The issue of housing, especially for the next generation, was a hot topic of debate during the Young Voters’ Debate tonight.
Labour Party’s Keri Allan was defending her party’s housing policy when National’s Brown took aim at their poor record for building.
“This is the party that said they were going to build 100,000 affordable homes within 10 years,” Brown said.
“Well, I think they’ve built just over 500 – in fact they’ve stopped more houses being built at Ihumātao than they’ve actually built through KiwiBuild.
“They’ve absolutely failed.”
Brown’s slamming of the party’s building scheme was met with cheers and boos from the crowd.
Allan once again defended her party, saying they had far more success in supplying housing to Kiwis than National did.
“We’ve built more houses in the last three years than they did in their entire nine years.”
Allan accused the National Party of merely ripping down state housing and failing to follow this up by building more homes.
“They left us with a massive crisis which they refused to acknowledge as a critical issue.”
Allan said the current government has introduced the progressive home ownership scheme to help families enter the market.
She also blamed the lack of builders for the current supply issue of homes.
“If you go around to pretty much any region right now you can’t find a chippy [builder] for the next 18 months at least,” said Allan.
She said Labour’s economic response going forward was about investing in people so that they have enough workers to build homes.
NZ First's Robert Griffith said his party wanted to bring together groups such as developers and iwi in a housing commission to combat the housing supply problem.
"That was our push, the parties in the coalition didn't let it happen."
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