The problem isn't the benefits. but our low-wage economy, and the inability of our wages to keep up with the costs of living.
And the key to increasing that is through increasing productivity and growth.
That's often stated by the right to justify all sorts of measures, but in the last couple of decades, wages, especially at the lower end, have completely decoupled from growth in productivity. I tried to google search for a NZ specific graph, and found one in this paper here, but couldn't work out how to embed it, but it showed pretty much the same as most you find for the US like below.
Productivity Growth is probably not the right terminology to use as it is not necessarily the sole measure of a broad suite of indicies. The attached Paper from the Productivity Commission is long and complex and I don't profess to understand it all, but they talk of "Labour Input Share" which is largely similar to Productivity growth apart from a couple of Blips due to High levels of inflation. The Abstract section on page 3 provides a summary.
Personally the biggest problem we are facing at the moment is defintely housing.
We have been hit by an almost perfect storm, where we have had a long period of slow population growth and ironically because of NZ's sound economic performance, we have seen an influx of immigrants and people returning to NZ or simply not leaving. We simply have a level of demand that is outstripping supply.
This happened in Chch after the EQ, when their obviously was a shortfall in available housing and prices went through the roof for rentals and purchases. The rebuild has now corrected this imbalance and there is now an oversupply in and around Christchurch and prices have stabilised and are even falling.
The same will happen nationally. At the moment the Construction Industry is building in the region of 28000 houses per annum, and the industry (as it is structured now) is pretty much at capacity. There is a need for an additional 53000 people in the construction sector to meet demand going forward. Eventually it will catch up. It has happened in the past and it will happen again and when supply exceeds demand things will stabilise. There is evidence of that happening nationwide.
I like Labours idea of an additional 100,000 new homes over 10 years but they have not shown how they are going to achieve this other than "partnership with private enterprise" Quite simply I can not see how this will be achieved