Mike's Minute: Election issues are already popping up

We are standing by for the election date today. 

It’s not what it was, kind of like budgets. The suspense, the scuttlebutt, the guessing game – it’s all gone. 

You might remember Albanese, not having learned our lesson, got himself into dreadful trouble last year and failed to forecast a date. 

So they guessed, and guessed, and second guessed, and then the flooding and storms came, so it delayed what was supposed to be an announcement. But that’s what you get when you’re a power freak and you think holding the cards counts for something. 

John Key put all that to bed some years back. Return from holiday, announce the date in the latter part of the year, and basically get on with life. 

Short of a government falling apart, elections should be scheduled at the end of a three-year term. 

Also today, apparently some policy —and perhaps this business of housing— is to be dealt with. Specifically, the thinking is the Auckland issue needs to be sorted. 

Elections, rightly or wrongly, are won and lost in Auckland, and the Government’s two million house housing plan is one of those ideas that no one quite gets and freaks people out. 

When we had councillor Maurice Williamson on last year, he suggested we ask Minister Chris Bishop just where the two million figure came from, because he couldn’t work it out. 

What we do know is the council were forced into agreeing to it. If they didn’t, the “three houses, three storeys on a regular plot” plan was a goer, and no one liked that either. 

And that sadly is the trouble with housing and big cities. No shortage of moaners and issues but a big shortage of solutions and agreement around them. 

What I do know from personal experience is that having uncertainty in the market —which is what we have— kills enthusiasm and demand. 

“What’s going up next door?” you ask the agent. The agent doesn’t know. No one knows. Could be nothing. Could be an 11-storey headache in suburbia.  

Who is buying a house next to that nightmare? And that is what the Bishop plan has created, and that hopefully is what gets fixed. 

And fast. 

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