Regulatory Captcha #2

Every year, New Zealand MPs have to declare all their ‘pecuniary’ (financial) interests. These interests include everything from companies to investment accounts to a horse that Winston Peters has sadly left in Mongolia - and, of course, property.

The list of declared interests is fascinating, but it’s an 80 page pdf - you can find it here. I skimmed it, but it was a pain to draw any conclusions - so I converted it to a spreadsheet, cleaned it up, and did some analysis.

Today we’re not just stopping at memes, because I have a 1226 row spreadsheet of everything our MPs declared last year. Here’s a snapshot of it - are your eyes glazing over or lighting up?

Today I’m only going to focus on property, because I think we can draw interesting conclusions from the data without knowing how much the property is worth. This isn’t the case for other items on the interests register - who knows how much Chris Bishop has in his Simplicity accounts (although good on you Chris for being diversified between all of the risk levels), or how much David Seymour’s beach towel from the Eden Park trust is worth?

So here we go with the charts. First - which party has the most property?

No surprises there, but National have more MPs in Parliament than the other parties, which skews the data.

Now we can look at the ‘per MP’ rate of property interests.

Interesting. National and ACT MPs have on average 3 properties each. Also, almost everyone in Parliament owns a lot of property! If we eliminate non-housing property from the data, we can compare it to home ownership rates for the rest of the country - lets do that:

The parliament average is much, much higher than the national average, which is 0.66 homes owned per household according to Stats NZ. So, does literally everyone in parliament own property?

Almost. The parliament average is very high, almost 95% across all property types.

It’s not surprising that this is the case - property ownership is New Zealand’s primary pathway to wealth creation, and I would expect that in general, MPs are wealthier than the average person in this country.

However, it’s still an important fact that 95% of MPs own property. In its simplest form, it means that almost everyone in parliament has a vested interest in seeing their property values go up, and almost everyone in parliament has a vested interest against taxing property more. The data shows that this vested interest is more significant on the right of the political spectrum, but property ownership by Labour MPs is still ubiquitous.

Another way of looking at it is that renters are a minority that are only represented in Parliament by some of the Greens.

Now, let’s look at what kind of property our MPs own.

The data is a little bit fuzzy here, because there doesn’t appear to be a standardised method of classifying property in MP declarations. This means that an MP (hi, Gerry Brownlee) could (he does) have 8 properties listed as Residential when in fact it is highly likely they’re being rented out. I have allowed MPs to have two freebies, and then assumed the rest of their unclassified residential property is rented.

Even so, it is overwhelmingly National MPs that have interests in rental properties. To me, this casts the rental policy reforms (re-instatement of rental interest tax deductibility, reduction in the Brightline test from 10 years to 2, ‘no-cause’ evictions) by National in a new light. A more cynical person would use this discrepancy to explain why Labour and National both avoid a capital gains tax, but Labour is prepared to tax rental landlords more.

In fact, since the interest deductibility rules for landlords were re-instated in 2024, ACT, NZ First, and National MPs have acquired 25 new investment properties according to this recent Spinoff article.

Lastly, here’s the full list of property-owning MPs, so you can look your local MP up yourself.

That’s all for today - I hope you found the charts interesting, and I will continue digging through my new toy spreadsheet to find funny gifts.