Last Thursday, April 1st, Dr Bryce Edwards, political analyst in residence at Victoria University of Wellington, ruffled the very considerable plumage of species Iratum dominae – better known to us as Megan Woods, Minister of Housing, earning him a personal rebuke:
Arousing Woods’s ire was Dr Edwards’s column for Red Radio “State builds missing from govt housing package”, published at 2.55 pm that day. Edwards was scolded, and tweeted news of his reprimand, within one hour and ten minutes of the piece appearing. Who said Woods was slow off the couch unless enticed by a plate of pastries?
Edwards canvassed the views of several commenters on the hot-potato housing issue but repeated several misconceptions and urban myths that need dispelling. Edwards’s article quotes Heather du Plessis-Allan:
“Michael Joseph Savage had a grand idea in the 30s. He pumped out 33,000 state houses for people who didn’t have homes. We’re probably due the 2021 equivalent of that.”
That statement is nowhere close to fact; at the time of his death in 1940, a total of 9,232 ‘State’ houses had been built or were being constructed, under the scheme Savage’s government commenced in 1937. That’s still a remarkable effort, but way less than one third of the number quoted by du Plessis-Allan.
Also quoted by Edwards was arch-misinformant, neo-Marxist, John Minto of the ‘State House Action Network’:
“The last time we had a housing crisis this big – in the late 1940s – a Labour government built 10,000 state houses per year.”
That statement is nonsense and, knowing the source, probably deliberately so. The four years 1946-1949 (National came to power in December 1949) saw 11,006 houses constructed in total (this included apartments each counted as individual housing units). Again, way under one-third of the claimed number, and closer to a quarter, at around 2,800 units per year, certainly nowhere near “10,000”.
Buoyed since being quoted by Edwards, Minto laid more propaganda on the hapless readers of ‘The Daily Blog’, claiming “The private sector has NEVER built houses for people on low incomes” [emphasis his] – which is completely untrue. In Wellington alone, the entire suburbs of Newtown, Kilbirnie and Lyall Bay, and later Newlands and Karori West, were developed as cheap houses on cheap land so that low-to-moderate income earners could rest their heads under their own roofs. The box-standard look-alike formula was repeated in numerous other locations.
Minto is then blinded by his own peculiar ideology, or ignorance (in his case the same thing), after advocating that government simply needed to borrow more money and leverage economies of scale to bring materials and housing prices down, saying this approach should be a ‘slam-dunk’ with historically low interest rates:
“But no – the tiny group in the Labour leadership which has control of the levers of power is mired in neo-liberalism where the market rules everything. They are terrified of their own shadow.
This coming budget is Labour’s last-chance saloon to create a state agency (a 2021 Ministry of Works) to build state houses on the industrial scale the community is demanding.”
Which is pure tosh. Poor John is obviously unaware that private enterprise built all those ‘State’ houses of yore, every single one; the huge majority were constructed by Fletcher Building under the tender system engaged, where private contractors competed for the builds in what we would call now a Public-Private-Partnership, or PPP, a hallmark of neo-liberal economics. The Ministry of Works never so much as drove a single nail into a ‘State house’. (Don’t tell John, he’ll choke on the news.)
So where, oh where, did the ‘10,000 State Houses per year’ myth spring from, and is there any truth in it at all? The answer to that question is: no, it’s pure fantasy. But there were aspirations for more than 20,000 homes per year, ‘at reasonable cost’, and they came from the National Party; the first National government 1949-1957 under Sid Holland, who in 1953 determined to have New Zealanders housed in an additional 206,000 new homes within 10 years; the vast majority (90%) private builds.
They managed to achieve 203,600 by 1963 including the brief contribution of the second Labour government 1957-60 who carried on the very worthy initiatives. New private-home builds exceeded 24,000 per year several times since 1956, when wartime restrictions were finally fully lifted, through 1963, while new ‘State house’ builds during the period peaked at 2,892 under National in 1955 and fell to a low of close to half that number, just 1,647 units in 1958 under, you guessed it: Labour.
Don’t tell Mr Minto that, it’ll really ruffle his feathers.
PS: Ms Woods, don’t ring, the phone’s off the hook.
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