Housing Minister Chris Bishop says Kāinga Ora “shouldn’t be building mansions” after outlining new expectations for the agency, including reducing costs.
Also joining Breakfast this morning was Labour’s housing spokesperson Kieran McAnulty, who argued the cuts will cause far fewer Kāinga Ora homes to be built, and claimed $1.5 billion cut out of the housing budget will impact the amount of houses overall being built in the country.
Bishop said Kāinga Ora is building 3500 houses “in the next year alone”, and reiterated it is “very important” to continue building social housing in New Zealand.
“We’ve got a housing crisis and we need more social houses. So [Kāinga Ora] has a big build programme.
“What we’ve asked them to do though is to be much more efficient and effective as to what they do. We shouldn’t be building mansions all over the place and extremely expensive houses, and we don’t need all the overheads that go with what’s happened in KO in the last few years.
“What we need is efficient building and I think we’re going to deliver that in the next few months, so I’m really confident about the pathway forward.”
Labour’s spokesperson for housing Kieran McAnulty and Housing Minister Chris Bishop joined Breakfast this morning to debate the latest instruction to cut costs at Kāinga Ora.
When asked if projects had been put on hold and if Kāinga Ora was still building, Bishop responded:
“At any given point there’ll be developments being paused or rephased or rescoped, because Kāinga Ora owns around 70,000 houses and they’ve got a big pipeline of work around the country. So there will potentially be, in fact it’s been publicly reported, that some projects have been put on hold. That’s not unusual, that’s been the case for the last six years as well, so there’s no change there.”
He said the Government has funded new social housing places from June 2025.
Meanwhile, McAnulty said $1.5 billion had been cut out of the housing budget.
“There was no money in the Budget for new Kāinga Ora homes. In fact, the instruction that was given and the commentary the minister provided after the Bill English report, which contained factual inaccuracies which were outlined by the board at the time, have made it really clear that there’s not going to be any new Kāinga Ora homes funded.
“There was enough funding in the Budget for 1500 new social housing places provided by the community housing sector. That was paid for by scrapping the first home grant, but 1500 over two years is 750 a year. That’s less than half the amount that was funded by the previous government,” McAnulty said.
“So when you’ve got a waiting list of that size, a clear direction from the Minister that Kāinga Ora needs to cut costs, that will mean cut houses, $1.5 billion scrapped out of the housing budget, that’s only going to take it in one direction … it’s exactly what we saw the last time National were in government, fewer houses being built, more people needing homes.”
In reply to McAnulty’s comment, Bishop said the Government would “potentially” fund more Kāinga Ora houses to be built, but they “want a turn around plan” before this happens.
He added it was “irresponsible” to put more money into the organisation after an independent review found it was “financially unsustainable”.