Turei on house prices

Sadly I was overseas last week and didn’t get to cover at the time the massive blunder by Metiria Turei on The Vote. It was so bad, that even before the episode went to air, she was on Firstline admitting she doesn’t know their own policy.

Extracts from what she said:

Garner: Would you like to see house prices fall in New Zealand, Metiria?

Turei: Well, yes actually. We would like to make sure that they are affordable. Oh – shocked look on your faces , how dare, how terrible if young families could actually afford to buy a home.

There is a big difference between saying prices should stop rising so rapidly, and saying we want to see house prices fall.

Garner: So, if house prices fall as you would like, you’d like the house prices to fall, that means that some families could have negative equity which could be an economic disaster for New Zealand!

Turei: Yes, that’s right that’s right so you have to be extremely careful….would you like to listen to an answer Duncan?

Garner: I think I heard enough!

Turei: So you have to make sure…

Peters: Hang on, hang on, hang on…

Turei: You have to make sure that if you’re going to change any of those, those economic levers you have to do it extremely carefully and over a long period of time and the first priority has to be building affordable homes – now those are homes…

And here Turei says she wants some home owners to have negative equity.

 “that means that those holding onto the wealth now will have to be prepared to let some of it go…”

And she went further and advocated that it would be good to have some home owners forced to sell their homes because the prices drop.

Won’t a Labour/Green Government be a lot of fun!