Government spends $1.4bn paying for people to live in motels, spokesperson says
The New Zealand National Party has slammed the government for its “embarrassing failure” in its attempts to address the housing crisis, highlighting that since coming into office, Labour has spent $1.4 billion paying for people to live in motels.
Chris Bishop (pictured above), National’s housing spokesperson, said emergency housing is “a social and economic disaster” that has “proved ruinous for taxpayers and catastrophic for thousands of families around the country.”
“Labour has simply been writing big cheques to motel owners to try to wish the problem away,” he said. “Their ‘hear no evil, see no evil’ approach to the problem has now created a permanent government machine dedicated to overseeing nearly $1 million of taxpayers’ money per day paid to motel owners.”
Bishop said people in emergency housing spend an average 23.1 weeks in said accommodation – that’s up from 3.5 weeks in December 2017. With people in emergency housing staying longer, that meant the government was spending more, with Budget 2023 documents flagging hundreds of millions to be spent in the coming years.
“Labour’s attempts to get on top of this problem have been an embarrassing failure,” he said. “Budget 2022 allocated $355 million for a ‘reset’ of the system but a year later just $600,000 has been spent.”
Bishop said Labour has overseen a housing catastrophe, with thousands of families living in motels, 480 living in cars, the social housing waitlist quadrupling to more than 24,000 families, and rents surging to $170 per week.
“National will supercharge social housing, adopt a social investment approach to getting support to people who need it, end Labour’s war on landlords, and work with the private sector and community providers to house people in need,” he said. “We will also comprehensively overhaul our planning and infrastructure funding system so that New Zealand goes for housing growth.”
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