THE GREAT DIVIDE
The year was 1988. New Zealand and all of its domain was newly and proudly nuclear-free. The prime minister, David Lange, had recently fallen out with his finance minister, Roger Douglas, after calling for a cup of tea. We were entranced by a new home-grown TV show called Gloss, about rich and glamorous people in Auckland. The sharemarket had crashed the previous October from a spectacular height, and once-glittering corporations were being revealed as mere houses of cards.
We worried a great deal about the cost of mortgages, even though interest rates were down to below 18 per cent. But — and this might seem incomprehensible from the vantage point of 2021 — social gatherings were not dominated by talk about houses. There were generally enough of them to go around, at a reasonable price.
That is not misty-eyed romanticism. For verification, consider the words of the National Housing Commission in a 1988 report: “New Zealand does not have the huge, insoluble problems of homelessness and substandard housing which confront many other nations.”
The commission was one cog in a sophisticated housing system that had built up over the 50 years since Michael Joseph Savage carried a dining table through the front door of New Zealand’s first state house in 1937. That system had been tweaked and refined through the post-war decades, but it was underpinned by a broad consensus that it was good for social wellbeing if families owned their homes, and that they should be supported by the government to do so where necessary. For those who couldn’t afford to own, there would be state houses at subsidised rent.
It was the job of the commission to produce a detailed report every five years to keep the nation informed. As it turned out, the 1988 volume was its last: In a sign of the reforming times, it was in the process of being disbanded. Its final report noted rising stresses. There were families in South Auckland crowding into garages and relatives’ houses while they waited months for a state house. Some 17,500 households were in serious need, made worse by increasing unemployment due to radical economic restructuring. Private rents were rising, and Māori and Pasifika people faced widespread discrimination from landlords.
But there was much that was working well. Almost three-quarters of the population owned their homes, and 10,000 modest-income households a year were being financed to do so through government mortgages. Around 7000 new families a year found security and shelter in a state house. It was a rare and shocking sight to see a homeless person sleeping on the street.
The commission reminded the nation not to take this for granted. “In Great Britain there are large numbers of people living permanently in bed and breakfast establishments at public expense because of a shortage of more permanent affordable accommodation. In the United States night shelters can only admit a small proportion of those who wish to use them and the remainder must sleep rough. In both countries and in much of Europe, ‘handbag people’ abound in the streets of the cities. In all of these countries homelessness is part of a cycle of poverty very difficult to climb out of.”
Fortunately for New Zealand, “the legacy of our forebears in providing a relatively adequate housing stock gives us a better basis than in many countries in meeting these (consequently more limited) problems,” the commission noted. “[T]here are indications that adequate housing for all and the abhorrence of extremes of poverty remain central ideals of most New Zealanders.”
Within a few short years that legacy had been smashed.
Within a generation New Zealand’s home-owning democracy has been transformed into a class society divided by property wealth. Those who have it effortlessly accrue more of it, and can transfer the benefits of it to their offspring. Those shut out from it are condemned by income, age, race and circumstance to pay a large proportion of their wages to property investors for somewhere to live.
We New Zealanders, who once abhorred poverty, now step around people sleeping in shop doorways on Queen Street, Courteney Place and Colombo Street, and are no longer shocked.
A time bomb of poverty among the elderly is coming down the line, as increasing numbers of people reach retirement without their own homes. Māori, excluded from their ancestral lands by war and theft, are being locked out from housing wealth: their rate of home ownership has plunged from over half in the 1980s to less than a third.
It is
