Affordable City

Like Canada, New Zealand doesn't really have political parties at the local level. There are city-by-city loose affiliations that can be viewed as Labour-linked or National-linked, but they're not all that obvious.

While it's nice to avoid party politicking, it does make it harder for voters trying to figure out which candidates they should support for particular policy bundles. To the extent that local politics is mostly about constituency work rather than policy, this can make sense. But local government policy issues are getting to be rather pressing; failures in local politics seem to be driving housing price inflation and are starting to have macroeconomic consequence. 

And so it's great to see the launch of a new local-politics political party: Affordable City. Their policy objectives:

The national Affordable City umbrella has five policies which all local Affordable parties will have in common.

• Lower rates
• Balanced budgets
• Making housing affordable
• Spending only on the basics
• Restoring private property rights

The individual local Affordable parties may also have other policies which are specific to the issues in their region.

If any readers are sufficiently masochistic to wish to stand for local government, they might wish to get in touch with the folks at Affordable City. Getting local government right is rather important. I worry that it will be a tough slog: homeowners vote far more regularly than do renters, and policies that make cities affordable aren't in the short-term interest of current homeowners.