The Green’s latest housing policy is a lot of wishful thinking, National’s Housing spokesperson Jacqui Dean says.

“Blue-sky thinking has never been the Green’s problem, but delivery has.

“The Government partners talked a big game on housing before the last election and they haven’t delivered. KiwiBuild was a disaster and it took three years just to get started on progressive home ownership.

“The Greens want to bring in more regulation and red tape. All that will do is place more onerous requirements and costs on landlords, scaring them out of the market, reducing the country’s rental stock and putting the price up on those that remain.

“This ends up hurting renters and makes even more New Zealanders dependent on state housing.

“It is policies like the Government’s rental standards that have seen the social housing wait list has skyrocket, tripling in size, all while the Greens have been in Government.

“The Greens can promise 5000 homes in a year, but they’ve been in a Government for three and they’ve only managed to build about 400 KiwiBuild homes.

“Promises mean nothing if you can’t deliver on them, and the Greens have shown their inability to do that.”