Labour’s record on housing

We’re making it easier for first home buyers.

We’re making sure more first home buyers can access Government assistance to get into their own home by lifting the income caps on First Home Loans and First Home Grants. We’re also closing a tax loophole that benefits property speculators, and extending the bright-line test to 10 years. Together, these measures will ease pressure on the market and help more first home buyers get into a property.

We’re removing barriers holding up the building of new homes.

We’re launching a $3.8 billion Housing Acceleration Fund, which will speed up the pace and scale of house building. This will jumpstart housing developments by funding the vital infrastructure like pipes and transport links needed for new housing. By removing these barriers for local government, we’re helping to enable more houses to be built, right across the country.

We’ve built a record number of public houses.

We’re building more new public and transitional housing than any Government in decades. Already, we’ve added more than 4,500 new homes, funding a total of 18,000 additional public and transitional homes by 2024.

We’ve stopped overseas speculators.

We banned offshore speculators from buying Kiwi homes, to help more first home buyers and families into the housing market.

We’ve banned unfair letting fees.

One way we’ve made life better for renters is by getting rid of unfair letting fees, which drive up costs for families and have no economic rationale.

We’ve rolled out free apprenticeships to grow our construction workforce.

We introduced free trades qualifications in targeted areas and free apprenticeships in July last year, as part of our response to COVID-19. More than 100,000 Kiwis have already signed up for free trades training, including more than 30,000 people going into construction.

We’re reforming the RMA.

We’re delivering on our promise to repeal and replace the RMA to fix our planning laws. This reform will help us tackle our housing crisis by simplifying and accelerating planning processes, reducing the number of Resource Management plans from over 100 documents to approximately 14, and introducing standardised planning rules.

We’ve updated tenancy laws to make renting fairer.

We brought New Zealand’s rental laws into the 21st century to make renting fairer for Kiwi families. We modernised the outdated Residential Tenancies Act by banning no-cause terminations, limiting rent increases to once a year, and enabling tenants to make changes like earthquake-proofing.

We’ve introduced Healthy Homes Standards – because your house shouldn’t make you sick.

We introduced new rules for rental properties to ensure everyone has a warm, dry place to live. Landlords now have to ensure their properties comply with heating, insulation, ventilation, moisture and draught standards, so they’re healthy homes for tenants.

We’ve launched a progressive home ownership scheme.

Our progressive home ownership scheme helps people who are struggling to pull together a deposit or pay a mortgage into their own home. It’s already helping families in Queenstown and Auckland get on the path to home ownership.

We’re getting on with our Homelessness Action Plan.

We’re making sure every New Zealander has a safe place to call home through our Homelessness Action Plan. This includes boosting transitional housing places to help get people into homes, and ramping up wraparound support to prevent people becoming homeless in the first place.

There is no single answer to the housing issues New Zealand faces, but we’re making good progress, and the policies we’re putting in place will make a real difference.

To find out more about our latest housing announcement, you can read more here.