Poll: Voters love Labour's foreign buyer ban ...

Could it be the asset sales debate all over again? Labour won that one by a landslide according to polls, and a referendum on power company partial privatisation saw the public overwhelmingly back its view. But come Election 2015, it just wasn't a decisive factor.

Similarly, a new 3News-Reid Research poll asked, "Should government ban foreign buyers from buying houses?" and got this very Twyford-friendly response:

• Yes - 61%
• No - 35%

Even National voters replied:

• Yes - 54%
• No - 43%

Yet support for the ban pushed so enthusiastically by Labour recently (and also backed by the Greens and NZ First) has not translated to broader support for the party.

The poll found didn't find any movement outside the margin of error. Its standings:

• National: 47% (+0.6)
• Labour: 31.1% (+0.7)
• Greens: 11.4% (+ 0.3%)

NZ First also nudged up, to 8.4%. Some of the minor upward movements could be other parties taking on support from the imploding Conservatives (0.7%), but really it's just a blip.

The only move  close to statistically significant was in last week's (otherwise static) One News-Colmar Brunton poll, which saw the Greens jump three points to 13% — hinting that Labour's dogwhistling over Chinese-sounding buyers could be alienating some liberals (and one John Campbell as he appeared on NBR's Weekend Rumble).

The 3News poll also found things static on the preferred PM front:

• John Key - 38.3% (down 1.1)
• Winston Peters - 11.3% (up 0.1)
• Andrew Little - 10.2% (down 1.4)

For Labour, it's a disappointing result, and more so because the poll was taken before John Key moved to defuse the foreign buyer controversy today with a new points-for-moving-to-the-regions policy.

Andrew Little must be wondering what it will take to get cut-through.

Australia already has a foreign buyer ban. The move has failed to cool the Sydney market. New fines are on the way, but the question is whether any foreign buyer ban can be enforced on a day-to-day level in a world of friends, family and shelf companies — and a reality gap between Kiwis' love of borrowing money offshore and antipathy for allowing foreign money in. Fixing supply might not be so much a complement to a foreign buyer ban as the only practical solution.