Keith Melville

My opinion piece on Kainga Ora’s poor performance published in the Beacon last week drew a predictable response in social media and the Beacon letters section on Wednesday from Dave Stewart.

My piece, based on the Government finding that the state house provider was an excessive and wasteful spender in the two terms of the previous government, drew a baseless claim by Mr Stewart that the current government and private landlords are “in an incestuous alliance and are making the housing crisis worse”.

If the housing crisis is getting worse as Mr Stewart insists, why then are rents decreasing nationwide, house prices falling or flatlining, and housing stocks increasing?

In making such a wild statement that does not stand up to reality, he is shooting himself in the foot. He also accuses me of defending what he claims are the coalition Government’s multi-billion dollar hand-out to landlords. That is factually wrong. There have been absolutely no hand-outs to private landlords despite persistent propaganda from the left falsely claiming landlords have been given a special tax break (a mysterious one) that no one else receives. A request through the Official Information Act will hopefully settle that issue.

Mr Stewart then claims that I have offered “little in the way of constructive answers to a problem that the taxpayers’ subsidised housing market has created through what is essentially a free money lolly scramble to landlords and speculators”.

He has me stumped on that one. How on earth did my wife and I as the owners of a rental property miss out on this free money lolly scramble and where do we go to find it?