THREE CHEERS for Jane Bowron…

from The Dominion Post....

Jane Bowron: Let's revolt and cut our ties with the City of Sales

1:45PM - Sunday, 01 May 2016

It's a total dereliction of duty for this Government to fail to address rampant house prices.

A COUPLE of weeks ago I wrote a column maintaining that two things had happened which signalled the beginning of the end of John Key and his Government.

They were Finance Minister Bill English's cavalier dismissal of a section of the unemployed, and the prime minster's part in allowing New Zealand to become a tax haven for the globally rich.

Two weeks later and Key's performance post the Panama Papers leak has been poor. He has done little to allay fears that New Zealand has sullied its reputation internationally over its foreign trust regime.

Key has eddied about the controversy and dismissed criticisms from opposition parties brushing them off as “desperate claims”. In the past all Key has had to do to remain the perennial and congenial top dog has been to invoke ‘Status Key’ (ie declare that along with most New Zealanders, he is relaxed and comfortable with everything from mass surveillance of the populace to runaway Auckland house prices).

But the relaxed and comfortable 'tude from the top dude doesn't appear to be working for him anymore. His laid back post-modern mantra, cobbled together out of laissez-faire politics and Kiwi songwriter Peter Cape's famous 1959 folk song She'll be right, has for two and a half election cycles been a great smokescreen for what ails us.

At best it can be seen as a sleepy refusal to take action quickly, and at worst interpreted as a leader asleep at the wheel who can't or won't set the crooked straight.

Auckland and its swollen environs' house prices and shortages continue to be the dominant story, so much so that soon the rest of the country's attitude to the City of Sales' maladies will be to take a war cry out of the Donald Trump foreign policy playbook.

Why not ‘build a wall’ and secede Auckland from the rest of the nation so it can no longer bore us to death with its house sale blow outs, while at the same time act as a stop to the spread of its infection to the rest of the country's housing affordability.

Auckland could become a separate state and John Key made its premier. Those who have the misfortune to live outside Aucklandia should hold sausage sizzles to raise money to afford the Lego to start building the wall, and bolt cutters to sever the cable north of the Bombay Hills.

All let's-start-a-revolution jokes aside, I would argue that most New Zealanders have for some time now been experiencing a troubling and baffled sense of loss over the sell-off of our water, and the takeover of our land by overseas investors.

With more farmers going broke perhaps we might see the extension of the Buy a Beach campaign and apply that successful crowd-funding philanthropy to the buying back of farmlands by New Zealanders to fight off foreign ownership.

The farmer could be kept on the land as manager and New Zealanders who bought shares in the property could reap the rewards and save other farms.

Push-back to the gutting of the country's assets has begun to be more than just a distant murmur. Even Right-wing broadcasters like Paul Henry are expressing alarm that water, our most precious resource, is being sold for a mere pittance and that we will be left high and dry.

The Government is as stuck as traffic over intervening to slow house prices and baulks at doing the decent thing to swallow the dead rat and implement a capital gains tax targeted particularly at investors.

Former Labour Party leader David Cunliffe tried to bring in a capital gains tax two election cycles ago and that issue, combined with his low watt charisma, lost him the election and the leadership.

Housing is the number one issue facing the country and it would be a total dereliction of duty for a Government comfortably in power for over eight years not to bite the bullet and bring in a capital gains tax targeted at investors. It must not slide away from an unpalatable policy that would be a voter turn-off affecting thousands of multiple home-owning Kiwis.

If it doesn't, young New Zealanders will never have a chance of home ownership, and the all too fragile economy will remain scarily vulnerable to the inevitable bust of the Auckland housing market.

It must act now for the greater good, or go down in history as ‘that government’ that sold the land and our water down the river — forever leaving it with a For Sale sign slung around its strangled neck, and a note from a foreign owner saying, “We bought a country”.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/79489401