Here’s one policy costed for Labour

The Herald reports:

Labour’s energy spokesman David Shearer said last week’s Budget confirmed the Government had “virtually abandoned” its home insulation scheme and as a result, a fifth of the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority’s (EECA) staff would be cut.

While $30 million a year would still be allocated to home insulation, “this means a meagre 15,000 homes will be insulated”, Mr Shearer said.

“Currently 600,000 houses remain uninsulated across New Zealand. Around 300,000 of these homes are lived in by people on low incomes.”

Labour has vowed to insulate every rental property in NZ. Now as all us home owners will rent our homes to ourselves in order to qualify, then that is up to 600,000 homes they are promising to insulate, by their own figures.

And also by their own figures, the cost is $2,000 a home. So 600,000 times $2,000 means that Labour is pledging to spend $1.2 billion on home insulation.

There goes the surplus, and that’s just on one of their many policies!

UPDATE: I think my readers are playing a joke on me, but they claim Labour’s actual policy is to make it illegal to rent an uninsulated house. Now I don’t think Labour are that crazy that they would advocate a law that would lead to up to 600,000 rental houses being removed from the market, so I think its a joke. I mean how can you campaign on home affordability and have a policy that will increase the cost of renting a house, and remove hundreds of thousands from the market?