The New Zealand Herald<\/em> today<\/a>, journalist Simon Wilson reported:<\/p>\n“Hipkins told the crowd of about 500 . . . that he grew up in a state house built by the Labour government in the 1950s. ‘And I\u2019m very proud that we are building more state houses today than at any time since the 1950s,’ he said.<\/em><\/p>\n\u201c’Labour has exceeded the 1000 commitment. We\u2019ve built 12,000 social house units since 2017, and 7000 of them have been in T\u0101maki Makaurau. But there is more work to be done.’<\/em><\/p>\n“He reminded the audience that the last National government had sold state houses, not built them.<\/em><\/p>\n“Davidson said that housing was ‘a human right and a core public good’. The Greens\u2019 commitment was greater than that of the other parties: it wanted to build 35,000 more public houses in the next five years, and resource the construction sector and the government\u2019s state housing provider K\u0101inga Ora to get it done.<\/em><\/p>\n\u201c’We will also put a cap on rent increases and introduce a minimum income guarantee, to lift people out of poverty.’<\/em><\/p>\n“Willis told the audience there were 2468 people on the state house waiting list in Auckland when Labour took office in 2017, and now there are 8175.<\/em><\/p>\n\u201c’Here\u2019s the thing. If you don\u2019t like the result you\u2019re getting, you don\u2019t keep doing the same thing. We don\u2019t think social housing should just be provided by K\u0101inga Ora. We want the Salvation Army, and Habitat for Humanity and other community housing providers to be much more involved.’<\/em><\/p>\n“Members of that sector were at the meeting and one confirmed the community housing sector is already building a substantial proportion of new social housing.”<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Asia Pacific Report Opposition National Party deputy leader Nicola Willis was among three political leaders who made a surprising commitment at a debate last night to build 1000 state houses in Auckland each year. Labour Party leader and caretaker prime minister Chris Hipkins and Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson also agreed to do so, with<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":400,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[231,11163,605,432,50,5,4597,2664,905,15353,68021,6,7,5627,58812,235,23077,255,68022,56024,68023,12,14,238,417,15,35134,1131,52475,1743,68024,1,52220],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1203172"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/400"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1203172"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1203172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1206348,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1203172\/revisions\/1206348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1203172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1203172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1203172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}