Meet the candidates 21/08/25

Thursday 21st of August at Aldersgate Centre.

“Good evening everybody.

To answer the question “why vote for me?” I won't actually be talking about myself very much. If you want to get to know me, why don't we have a cup of tea afterwards or a beer sometime, have a coffee. That'll be an easier way to do that.

I'm talking about an elephant in the room of this country and this city. I'm not talking about speed bumps. I'm not talking about bike lanes either. I’m not even talking about asset sales or rate caps.

I want to talk about housing.

Residential property in our country is worth four times our GDP. That's double the rate in either Australia or the United States.

It's valued at 20 times our stock market. That is compared to Australia and the United States where it's about 1:1.

Where once we built 10 new homes per thousand population a year, now we can barely manage four.

Land banking in the city and in New Zealand discourages investment. Developers are then incentivised to build and flip townhouses rather than building anything more ambitious like actual apartments.

For 40 years, successive governments, local and national, have failed. They've entirely failed to address this issue.

This week, council sent a notice to people living in the car park of the Holy Trinity Church that they had to vacate. Now I do understand that is under some progress and it is being addressed and they probably won't need to leave but nonetheless it is indicative of the situation in which we found ourselves.

These are our neighbours.

Homelessness costs at least $60,000 a year per person. That's from data about 10 years old too. Pre-covid data. You can guess it's probably in the six figures now.

Prison beds are built while we don't build enough social housing. They cost about $1,000 a night. Apparently, that's our plan for housing people.

And here in the central ward, AirBnBs get to operate with relative impunity.

I've talked to folks from VNA [Victoria Neighbourhood Association], from ICON [Inner City West Neighbourhood Association], and elsewhere in the central ward, and they're asking about where their neighbours have gone? Because next door to them are Airbnbs and short-term rentals with a revolving door of people they never get to know, or absent owners that are only here for a couple weeks a year and spend their lives in Wanaka or Canada or somewhere else.

Unless we take steps to address that elephant in the room of housing, your neighbours are leaving for Australia at best, and living in tents or in prison at worse.

Had we made different decisions, some of those people in the car park at Holy Trinity Church may well be your neighbours today. They might have gainful employment. They might be living next door to you. They might be valued members of your communities, but instead they're under enormous amounts of pressure and there's nowhere for them to go.

So why vote for me?

Because we are 40 years overdue for a change in this country.

Because I who I am is far less important than what I stand for. And what I stand for is a serious politics that values the many, not the few.

Fundamentally, we need to change the conversation around the council table. We've got to start somewhere in this country and I see no reason why it can't be in Christchurch.

We might not be able to face the change the face of the entire nation overnight, but we can lead it if we want to.

Thank you.”