An Announcement from Mr B Anglo-Saxon
The Terrace School of Financial Witchcraft and Wizardry
My fellow New Zealanders – please do not mention the house price bubble.
Two years ago, John Key said New Zealand was on the cusp of something really special. I know a lot of you didn’t believe him, but that something special is here. Forget exporting milk powder or logs or aluminium – forget the minimum-wage jobs the tourism industry creates in places like Queenstown where nobody can live on minimum wage – this government has turned Auckland real estate into the greatest and cleverest export industry this country has seen since we subverted the gold standard by digging up more gold. But we have to keep this a secret.
The idea that the country could get rich by selling its assets to foreigners has been around since the time of Roger Douglas, but you nay-sayers thought we could never make it work – how wrong you were! It has now got to the point where the average Auckland homeowners can earn themsleves and the country one million dollars in foreign exchange, tax-free, simply by selling their house to foreigners. Stick with us, and we can get that price fifty percent higher before the bubble bursts and the foreigners sell the houses back to their former inhabitants for a loss. But only if you help keep the secret by not talking about the bubble.
The Labour Party have tried to suggest this trick is racist, by pointing out that some of the buyers we are tricking into buying these overpriced houses are Chinese. What they overlook is that some of the other buyers are Australians, and it’s not racist to take advantage of Australians.
You need to bear with us. We can sell overpriced New Zealand real estate to British people looking for a safe place to put their money after Brexit. We can sell to Americans who are scared that Hilary Clinton will become president and everything will continue along the same path as it has up until now, only without that nice black guy pretending to be in charge to make people feel everything is going to turn out okay in the end.
Most homeowners in South Auckland have not yet had the opportunity to sell their houses for a million dollars to foreigners who will later offload the properties back to them for a fraction of the price, because the bubble is not yet big enough for their houses to sell for that much. If by talking about the bubble you deter the foreigners from buying, you are robbing these South Auckland homeowners of their million dollars, and you are robbing the people living in converted garages next door who we believe that wealth will eventually trickle down to.
Can of Worms, Opened 