CONFIDENCE AND SUPPLY
National’s housing spokesperson Nicola Willis spent the morning of 14 April fighting people on Twitter. Her party had proposed a new bill aimed at increasing housing supply and Willis was going after her critics one by one. “Sue, with all respect [you’re] completely wrong,” she told former Labour MP Sue Moroney, who said the proposal raised spectres of the deregulation that fuelled the 1990s leaky homes crisis. “Seriously, read the bill,” she advised left-leaning Auckland councillor Richard Hills, who worried it would punish councils like his own, which is already issuing a record number of consents.
Social media can be a brutal arena for right-leaning politicians. But in this case, something unusual happened: Willis started finding supporters on the left. “National [is] pretty much getting things right on housing. If some left commentators truly cared about the causes they said they did, they’d push the government and
