The Mike Hosking Breakfast

The Government's reforms in the housing market are being seen as a drastic move and are expected to penalise mum and dad investors.
The changes include taxes on capital gains for investors who sell within ten years,  and removing tax deductions on interest.
Property developer David Whitburn told Mike Hosking many people only own one or two extra properties.
"We just want to provide for their families and have a bit more than the pension when they retire.
"It's brutal for many people, including those who've made decisions recently."
Whitburn contends they've been blindsided because there's been no warning or consultation at all.
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So, two parts to the housing announcement.
Part one, the lying. If there was anyone left who still genuinely had fallen for the most open, honest and transparent government bollocks, yesterday sorted that once and for all.
Not only did they say they wouldn't touch the bright-line test, which they did. And the Prime Minister, yet again asleep at the wheel, stood there and lied by saying they were silent on the issue when clearly, they weren't.
You can dance on the head of a pin if you want around whether a brightline adjustment is a Capital Gains Tax, which it is. But what is as clear as day is that Grant Robertson said no brightline adjustment, and they adjusted the brightline.
Most governments lie but lying this blatantly and then pretending you didn't lie, makes the lie even worse. And the lie is on about the biggest issue you can lie on, housing. One way or another it affects every single one of us.
And then part two, will it work. Well, yes and no.
The tax deductibility on expenses simply means one of two, or two of two things. One, the increased costs of being a landlord will be passed onto the tenant, rents are already rising. Or landlords will bail, rentals will become harder to get, and rents will rise.
Either way rents will rise, on top of an already rising market. This is a simple economic truth, the same way you can't touch one part of an economy without affecting another.
The development money for pipes, lights, and roads is sound. The adjustment for HomeStart is fiddling. The adjustment for low deposits isn't enough, given the deposit is the key to first home buyers, not the mortgage, given money is so cheap.
Westpac may or may not be right about the wider economy. If the investor bails, that affects the wider economy. The wider economy can't afford to be affected because it's currently going backwards. We are in a recession, actually a double dip recession.
Housing, like it or not, drives economic activity, and if Westpac are right, Robertson and his obsession around this so-called crisis, will have blown it. Of course, like GDP, the good thing about all this is, the price rises will either slow, or they won't. Therefore, showing this move either worked or it didn't.
House prices are slowing already, proving we yet again we got freaked out by something that has happened before and will happen again.
If the government understood that yesterday, the dramas and dishonesty wouldn't have been required.

THE BEST BITS IN A SILLIER PACKAGE (from Wednesday's Mike Hosking Breakfast) This Is Being Recorded/Some People Are Just Random - and Get Elected Anyway/Jab Bribes

Judith Collins says Speaker Trevor Mallard should have already been removed from office.
Newstalk ZB Political Editor Barry Soper has seen the statement of claim that went to the High Court in the defamation action against Trevor Mallard, for wrongly calling a parliamentary worker a rapist.
Even though Mallard said he knew the man wasn't a rapist within 24 hours of making the claim, the court document says he wouldn't be apologising or pay damages, didn't accept he defamed the man and would vigorously defend the claim.
While Mallard apologised 18 months later, Judith Collins told Mike Hosking his position remains untenable.
"I have written to the Prime Minister, I sent her the statement of claim. It's a disgrace, he needs to go."
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The Finance Minister wants the economy to move away from property speculation towards more productivity.
A range of measures has been introduced to put the brakes on runaway house prices and help first home owners get into the market.
Westpac feels it could see house prices fall by 10 percent, and affect the wider economy.
Grant Robertson told Mike Hosking credit rating agencies say the economy has strong underlying fundamentals.
"Investment needs to be more productive and it's time we moved away from housing speculation as an underpinning of economic growth."
Robertson also rejected claims he had lied to voters during last year's election campaign when he said the brightline test would not be extended.
At that time every economist and the Treasury had advised the Government that house prices were going to fall.
But he conceded he was "wrong" to say what he had to Newstalk ZB's Heather du Plessis-Allan in September.
"I've acknowledged that I was too definitive."
House prices had changed "significantly" in the past few months and the Government had to respond, he said.
Robertson said he did not own a rental property.
Hosking said he did and he would be putting the rent up. Robertson said that was his choice and that rental prices were affected by many factors.
Westpac had predicted that the housing changes would affect the wider economy but Robertson said a greater risk was that the housing bubble would burst.

My daughter in Melbourne, until recently a massive Jacinda fan, appears well and truly over her.
My wife spent yesterday on her show and indeed throughout the day telling me the bubble wasn’t coming.
I had got way too carried away in thinking this lot could actually make a decision about anything.
Her call – and she was right – was an announcement about an announcement.
Honestly, how they can do this with a straight face I have no idea.
So April 6 it is. That’s the date for the announcement - the announcement of the date, not the date that the bubble is opening.
If you want to stick with Kate’s predictions, she’s calling the bubble will be open by school holidays. I say that would make it too tight. If on the 6th the PM says on the 17th we are off, that’s a lot of tickets to buy and hotels to book in a very short space of time for most of us to get across the Tasman.
But maybe that’s her plan: make it so hard the local economy gets one more local burst.
Anyway, given Kate is 1-nil up on me in the guessathon, who am I to argue?
But as for Ardern and yesterday’s embarrassment – she says the bubble is hard, but is it? Or is this lot just useless and/or desperate not to see the end of control?
There is simply too much evidence now to show them up to be fundamentally dishonest. From Scott Morrison and his bewilderment, the pending Australia-Singapore deal, the numerous airports telling us they’ve been set since October, all the tourist operators pulling their hair out and going broke - none of it adds up any more.
This is a control exercise pure and simple.
We have no Covid, Australia has no Covid, and the pacific has no Covid. The exercise of fear has to end.
But as we have said all along, still playing to the government’s partial advantage is that the fear instilled in so many is still prevalent.
Not all of us live our lives in fear, but many still do. Some still sit here being grateful no one can go anywhere.
It’s sad, it’s dangerous, it’s backward, it’s economically ruinous and it’s politically inexcusable. Even I honestly thought they couldn’t drag this nonsense out any longer.  
Yesterday I said it would be 182 days overdue, let’s make that 197.

Residents of Paris and several other regions of France spent their first weekend under a limited monthlong lockdown. While the French government insisted the rules would be less strict than in the past, the measures have been criticized as messy.
A travel authorization certificate posted online was so ridiculed by French media for its unnecessary complexity that the Interior Ministry scrapped it within hours. For now, simple proof of residence is required to stroll within a 10-kilometer (6.2-mile) radius.
The form the French government still obliges citizens to fill out to travel greater distances - up to 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) also was not accessible online because of a technical glitch. A website Sunday simply said, “Available soon.”
Under the new restrictions, nonessential shops were closed but people are not required to spend most of the day confined at home. The government announced the measures on Thursday as the coronavirus picked up speed again in some parts of France.
The country reported 35,327 new confirmed cases on Saturday, when the number of COVID-19 patients in French intensive care units rose to 4,353, the most so far this year, the Health Ministry reported.
“When you look at the numbers, they’re unsustainable, and it is going to become ever-harder as the virus continues to circulate," Anaelle Aeschliman, a nurse at the Ambroise Pare clinic in the western Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, told The Associated Press. "I admit I was a bit disappointed that we aren’t being locked down nationwide.”
The French government has tried hard to avoid imposing a third nationwide lockdown. President Emmanuel Macron said Friday that “lockdown” was not the appropriate term to describe the new regional restrictions.

New Zealand continues to excel when it comes to snow sports.,
Yesterday, Skier Alice Robinson rocketed down one of the steepest courses on the international circuit to claim gold in the final World Cup giant slalom of the season in Switzerland.
The 19-year-old's clocked the fastest second run to climb from fourth to the top of the podium, beating Olympic champion Mikaela Shiffrin by 0.28 of a second.
Snow Sports CEO Nic Cavanagh told Mike Hosking that the programme continues to grow and mature, and the results are shown in results such as Robinson's.
"What we've got now is world class athletes in Zoi [Sadowski-Synnott], Nico [Porteous] and Alice. They've got the unrelenting desire to be the best in the world, mixed with the realisation that they are."
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The Blacklist is one of the most popular television programmes going around.
And Ryan Eggold was a prominent feature early on, starring as Tom Keen for five seasons.
Of course, he got his break in 90210.
And now he's the star of a new NBC medical drama, New Amsterdam, with all seasons, including the new third season, currently on Neon.
Ryan Eggold joined Mike Hosking on the show this morning.
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Frustration that the Government is moving to improve the treatment of prisoners, but nothing's being done about assaults on prison officers.
Corrections Minister Kelvin Davis has ordered a major overhaul of the way Auckland Women's Prison handles inmates, and a review of all women's prisons.
The Corrections Association's Alan Whitley says they feel they aren't being listened to.
He says in the past year there have been more than 800 assaults on officers, and he expects that to increase to more than a thousand this year.
Lynette Cave, Corrections' Northern Regional Commissioner, joined Mike Hosking to talk about the proposed changes to women's prisons.
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