Housing market working well for MPs

The Parliament Register of Interests came out last week. In this, MPs have to disclose all sorts of information about their finances. There wasn't a whole lot of interesting things in it. Kiwiblog mentions the apparent contradiction of Jim Anderton being a shareholder in the Commonwealth Bank of Australia after criticising the foreign domination of banking in NZ and therefore setting up the state-owned Kiwibank.  Much more significantly, No Right Turn suggests there is a problematic issue of so many MPs owning investment properties: 'it does raise doubts about their ability to seriously discuss the housing problem, when so many of them are directly financially benefitting from the present state of affairs'. As pointed out in an earlier posting on Money & Power, Helen Clark, for example, owns an Auckland villa worth $720,000, a Wellington townhouse worth about $350,000, an apartment in Christchurch, and property at Rodney. So although Labour's faith in letting 'the market decide housing issues' doesn't work very well for working class New Zealanders, it's sure working well for the political class.