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I’m all for the push to have wool carpet used in government buildings but I think it’s a mistake putting it in state homes.  

Kāinga Ora has announced that, from next month, there will be woollen carpets in all new state homes. It’s also going to use wool if the carpet in existing homes needs replacing.  

Economic Growth Minister Nicola Willis says Kāinga Ora has managed to get a deal that will mean the wool carpet won’t cost any more than nylon carpet.  

Which is interesting because, in December last year, KO said it had done some cost analysis work which showed that it could save roughly 34% using nylon carpet. So the wool carpet people have obviously sharpened their pencils.  

Nevertheless, is it practical?  And my answer to that is no it’s not. And will it end up costing us in the long-term? Yes it will, and I’ll tell you why.  

But first, here’s why I generally like the government’s move to use wool carpet, but why I don't think it's a good idea in Kāinga Ora properties.  

It makes perfect sense for the Government to be doing what it can to support our farmers who grow wool, who’ve been pushing it uphill recently. Wool has almost become a burden for farmers because of the returns they’ve been getting.  

So good on the Government for going down the wool route, because it has to buy carpet, so why not buy the carpet that does the farmers a favour, while it's at it? Especially, when you consider the amount of money the Government must spend on carpet.  

I don’t have a dollar figure for you, but I was reading a briefing that was written for the incoming government after the last election, which said that the Government has approximately 1 million square metres of office accommodation around the country, costing approximately $330 million a year.  

That’s a lot of potential floorspace for carpet and that’s a lot of potential floorspace to get our farmers' wool all over.  

But here’s why I don't think it’s a good idea having wool carpet in state homes.  

Government buildings —such as government department offices and schools— generally have cleaners going through pretty much every day. And so if the DOC office or the local primary school has wool carpet, they get cleaned pretty regularly, don’t they?  

A Kāinga Ora property is different. The only time cleaners get sent into a state house is when someone leaves or is booted out.   

And this isn’t me tarring every state housing tenant with the same brush, because most tenants are probably very good. But we’d be naive to think that every tenant vacuums the carpets every day. We’d be naive to think that every state house tenant is a cleaning freak and will do everything they can to keep stains out of the carpet.  

I remember when we put wool carpet in —it was when the kids were still quite young— and we did everything we could to stop it getting marks and stains on it, but it still got stains and marks on it.  

And I’ve seen nylon carpets in action, and you can’t deny that they are brilliant for keeping clean. I’ve seen red wine spilled on nylon carpet and you can pretty much just wipe it away.  

That’s the kind of carpet that Kāinga Ora should be using.