What it actually was, of course, was something rather more tawdry: a system engineered to extract the maximum possible sum of money from anyone unfortunate enough to need to rent a roof over their head.
Let us be precise about the mechanism. When a prospective tenant applied for a rental property in New Zealand, they were routinely required to declare their income. This was presented, with straight faces, as an affordability check. In practice, it functioned as a price-setting instrument. Landlords and property managers could observe what a household earned and calibrate the rent accordingly, not to the condition of the property, not to its size, or whether the plumbing actually worked, but to the upper limit of what the prospective tenants could conceivably be made to pay.
The signal here was not quality. It was vulnerability. Middle and higher-income earners found themselves charged accordingly, regardless of whether they were occupying a warm, well-maintained home or a damp, mouldering box dressed up with fresh paint and a flattering TradeMe photograph. Low-income Kiwis often didn't even get their foot in the door.
The results were entirely predictable. By 2022, some 46 percent of renting households were spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent, compared to just 19 percent in 1988. Since 2003, house prices had increased by 230 percent, whilst median household income grew by only 137 percent. Housing was no longer all about shelter. It had become a very profitable business enterprise.
The insignificant easing of rents we have witnessed recently isn't the result of good governance to remedy this issue. The mean weekly rent in New Zealand for the year to September 2025 was $568, showing a 0.6% decline compared to the prior year. This is welcome in itself, but its cause isn't deregulation or the benevolence of landlords. It is a symptom of a recession and emigration. Net overseas migration slowed to just 13,066 in the year to July 2025, compared to a peak of over 135,000 in late 2023, and the net outflow of New Zealand citizens hit a record high of 47,600 in a single year. People are leaving in their tens of thousands because they cannot afford to live in New Zealand.
That is a grim form of market correction, and it deserves to be named as such. Contrast it with Australia, where sustained migration has pushed rents up by an estimated 43.8 percent over five years, with the typical renter paying around $10,500 more annually than at the start of the pandemic. New Zealand's slight moderation has been purchased at a considerable social cost, the departure of skilled younger workers at a rate that constitutes yet another unsustainable crisis.
Against this backdrop, the Green Party's Renters' Rights campaign proposes a two percent annual cap on rent increases, the reversal of no-cause evictions, a Rental Warrant of Fitness, and the construction of tens of thousands of quality public homes. It represents not a radical departure but a long-overdue acknowledgement of reality.
On Wednesday, RNZ reported:
Greens promise to cap rent rises at 2 percent a year
The 'A home for everybody' policy was launched by the party co-leaders and local MP Tamatha Paul at a rental home in Wellington on Wednesday afternoon.
Co-leader Marama Davidson said with rental costs increasing from 19 percent of incomes in 1988 to 30 percent in 2022, it was time for housing to be treated as a human right.
"In a country like Aotearoa, with our wealth of resources and skills, there is no excuse for people to go without a decent home, let along any home at all."
Co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick said the Greens would build tens of thousands more public homes and support councils and community providers to do the same, stimulating local economies and creating jobs while curbing homelessness and waiting lists.
"This isn't rocket science," she said. "Mass building of public housing almost 100 years ago led to decades of stable, affordable homes for New Zealanders.
ACT Housing spokesperson Cameron Luxton responded by calling the campaign a plan to make more people homeless. This is, to put it plainly, a talking point that serves a specific constituency, and that constituency is clearly not tenants.
On Wednesday, Scoop reported:
Greens Revive Campaign To Make More People Homeless
ACT Housing spokesperson Cameron Luxton says the Green Party’s latest housing policy is a return to the same failed ideas that drove up rents and reduced supply.
“We’ve just seen rents fall nationally for the first time in years after anti-landlord policies were reversed. The Greens now want to take us straight back.
WHO ACTS FOR ACT
The ACT Party was founded on the Rogernomics tradition of Roger Douglas, a disciple of the view that markets, left sufficiently alone, will solve all human problems. Three decades of evidence in New Zealand's housing sector clearly suggests otherwise. Yet the party's institutional memory, and crucially its donor base, remains firmly committed to the proposition that property investors are the real victims of housing policy.
This isn't merely ideological. It is financial, and the money trail isn't difficult to follow. Analysis by RNZ of Electoral Commission records found that people with interests in the property industry donated more than half of their political contributions to National, with ACT receiving 32 percent of the total, and Labour a mere two percent. As Victoria University senior research fellow Max Rashbrooke observed, donors of this scale enjoy a constant level of access to ministers that ordinary voters can only dream of.
The conflicts of interest are not merely financial. They are, in the most literal sense, structural. The 2024 Register of Pecuniary Interests shows that Parliament collectively owns 261 properties, an average of 2.2 per MP. National MPs account for the bulk of this, with 18 of them owning approximately 30 or more rental homes. One does not need to be a committed cynic to ask whether legislators with this much skin in the game are best placed to design fair tenancy law.
THE DAVID SEYMOUR PROBLEM
No examination of this subject is complete without dwelling on the particular and instructive case of David Seymour. For years, Seymour cultivated his public image as the honest outsider who simply could not afford to buy a home, a man of the people standing bravely against the landed political elites of Parliament. It was a compelling narrative. It was also, in material respects, completely untrue.
In 2021, Seymour was forced to correct his Register of Pecuniary Interests to disclose that he was a beneficiary of three trusts, the NN Faithfull Family Trust, the BH and VA Seymour Family Trust, and the Beachcomber Trust, two of which held property including a Northland beach house and a neighbouring section, and his father's house in Whangarei. These interests had not been declared in previous years, in violation of Parliamentary disclosure rules. His return was also filed late, drawing a formal rebuke from the Registrar of Pecuniary Interests, Sir Maarten Wevers.
Seymour called it an honest mistake and claimed he had legal advice saying he did not technically own the properties. That is a distinction the rest of us might find difficult to take seriously. A beneficiary of a trust that holds property stands to inherit or profit from that property. The rules requiring disclosure of such interests are not ambiguous. They are written plainly in Standing Orders, and Seymour is a lawmaker who has sat in Parliament for over a decade... a decade too long some might argue.
What makes this particularly pointed is that in 2017, when he was still falsely presenting himself as property-free, Seymour told RNZ: "The fact that the average National MP owns 2.2 properties of their own might suggest why they have spent a lot of time introducing solutions that you would almost suspect were not supposed to work, because they certainly have not." He was right. He was also, at that moment, a beneficiary of trusts that held the very kind of assets he was criticising his colleagues for owning.
One is entitled to ask what he was really doing when he invoked that argument. He was not speaking truth to power. He was in fact dishonestly presenting himself to the public as just another ordinary Kiwi.
Having now restored interest deductibility for rental property investors as a key plank of the coalition agreement with National, and having championed the removal of no-cause evictions, the right-wing coalition government have ensured that the landlord class which funds their political parties have received a considerable return for their political investment, an investment that is ultimately paid for with globally high rents.
A HOMELESSNESS CRISIS OF THEIR OWN MAKING
The claim that the Green Party's proposals would cause homelessness requires particular scrutiny, because the homelessness crisis is already here. It grew substantially under the very deregulatory settings that ACT champions, and it has worsened measurably under the current neoliberal government.
The number of people sleeping rough in Auckland more than doubled between September 2024 and September 2025. Wellington's Downtown Community Ministry recorded a 25 percent increase in rough sleepers in 2025 compared to the prior year. In Christchurch, the City Mission recorded 270 new clients in just six months to March 2025, up from 156 in the corresponding period prior.
The government tightenning the gateway to emergency housing is partly to blame, a policy that came into force in August 2024. The rate of emergency housing applications being declined rose from 4 percent in March 2024 to 36 percent by June 2025. One social agency reported that in a single month, every one of the 27 people they referred to Work and Income for emergency housing was turned away. The government has also reduced its funding for homelessness support by $79 million compared to the prior financial year.
Emergency housing motel numbers have fallen, from 3,141 in December 2023 to 591 a year later. Associate Housing Minister Tama Potaka declared this a triumph. The Salvation Army described it more accurately as a likely contributor to the rising number of people living on the street.
To invoke the threat of future homelessness as a reason to do nothing about present homelessness is not policy analysis. It is a defunct defence of the arrangement that produced the crisis in the first place.
WHAT ACTUALLY WORKS
The international evidence is available to any government willing to look at it. Vienna has kept housing affordable for over a century through a combination of city land ownership and large-scale municipal development that sets a genuine price anchor for the broader rental market.
Singapore's Housing and Development Board provides affordable housing to nearly 80 percent of the population, combining public construction, grants, and income-sensitive pricing to ensure that shelter is a right rather than a commodity to be speculated on. Finland, through its Housing First policy introduced in 2008, became the only European Union country where the number of homeless people has consistently declined year on year. These nations did not stumble into housing security by removing tenant protections and trusting property investors to be decent humans. They built it deliberately, through sustained public investment and enforceable standards.
WHAT REFORM MUST LOOK LIKE
Any meaningful reform in New Zealand must begin with a centralised rental database, a single authoritative register from which all real estate agents and property managers are required to operate. Every rental property should be assessed and graded by size, condition, insulation, heating, proximity to services, and structural integrity. Rents should be set in relation to that assessed quality, not in relation to the maximum amount prospective tenants can pay.
Properties should be offered to renters in order of quality, at affordable rents calibrated to their actual standard. The practical effect of this would be significant, as better quality houses would be rented first. Owners should also be substantially financially penalised if they leave their properties empty and dilapidated, or demolish houses that are still suitable for human habitation. A substantial proportion of New Zealand's older rental housing stock fails that test. The Healthy Homes Standards are a beginning. A Rental Warrant of Fitness, independently certified, publicly searchable, and tied to legal occupancy, is the logical next step.
The Tenancy Tribunal also requires substantive reform. The procedural and evidential disadvantages facing tenants in dispute with landlords are well documented. The current framework leans heavily toward those with legal experience and resources. Protections for renters need to be strengthened in law, not merely recommended as guidelines, and legal representation support for tenants at the Tribunal must be funded accordingly.
There are genuine risks in any rent control regime implemented carelessly. A blunt national cap, applied without regard for regional conditions, property quality, or supply dynamics, could suppress new construction if designed poorly. That's why the Green Party also owes New Zealand a costed, detailed build programme alongside its tenancy protections. Ambition without logistics isn't a housing policy. It is a press release.
But the answer to that risk is better policy design, not the continued absence of any policy at all.
And New Zealand must build state houses that people actually want to live in. Not cramped, isolated units on the periphery of cities, but well-designed, well-located homes that integrate their residents into communities with genuine access to schools, transport, parks, and employment. Vienna did not solve its housing crisis by building chicken coops. Neither did Singapore.
The lessons are available. The question, as ever in this country, is whether the political will exists to act on it, or whether we will continue to mistake the interests of an asset-rich parliamentary class for the national interest, and simply give up by accepting the resulting misery as a natural consequence of the free market.
