Artist’s impression of a disembodied hand alongside Megan Woods and a KiwiBuild reset button.

PoliticsSeptember 4, 2019

Cheat sheet: Megan Woods hits reset on the beleaguered KiwiBuild programme

Editor-at-large

Artist’s impression of a disembodied hand alongside Megan Woods and a KiwiBuild reset button.

Almost two years on, the coalition government’s flagship KiwiBuild programme has been given a ‘reset’, with the big 100,000 target – and all the targets along the way – thrown in the bin.

What just happened?

Megan Woods has pressed a reset button, detonating a controlled explosion beneath the government’s big KiwiBuild housing programme. The housing minister was frank: “KiwiBuild isn’t working so we are changing it.”

What does this reset entail?

The overarching target of the programme – 100,000 new houses to be built over 10 years – has been chucked in the skip. “It was overly ambitious,” Woods acknowledged. Targets were “driving perverse outcomes” and “led to contracts being signed in places where there was little first home buyer demand.” It will be replaced by one of the most beloved metaphors of modern politics: a “dashboard”, which will measure monthly the progress of KiwiBuild.

Wait, is that the same 100,000 target that Winston Peters described in May as ‘easily achievable’?

The very same.

What else?

Nothing seismic, to be honest. Announcing the reset, Woods said “there is no silver bullet”.

There is a move to provide “new innovative ways of buying a home”. That includes enhancing $400 million targeted at “progressive ownership” options, such as rent-to-buy and shared-ownership schemes.

The government will reduce from 10% to 5% the “first home grant” deposit required for a government-backed mortgage, and adjust the amount paid to developers to disincentivise falling back on the government underwrite, rather than selling through the KiwiBuild scheme.

Buyers of studio and one-bedroom homes will no longer have to commit to living in the home for three years; one year will suffice.

The KiwiBuild homes that have failed to sell will be released on the open market.

Ministry of Housing and Urban Development

Kainga Ora, the urban development agency, will be tasked with an increased focus on targeting the parts of the country best suited to KiwiBuild developments, and addressing the mix of requirements for public, KiwiBuild and commercial housing. And they’ll be looking for “opportunities for build to rent with long-term institutional investors”.

What is ‘build to rent’?

An approach to housing that has become increasingly popular overseas, build-to-rent involves the construction of dwellings expressly for the purpose of rental accommodation, but guaranteeing longer-term, secure tenancies, with commercial and institutional investors attracted by the opportunity to build apartments on Crown land. Some commentators had looked to the government to go further than “looking for opportunities”, and to power up state and social house building programmes.

Where did KiwiBuild all begin?

On a grey Sunday afternoon at the Ellerslie Event Centre, Labour leader David Shearer addressed his party conference. “It’s time for the government to step up and we will,” he said. “Today, I am announcing we will put 100,000 Kiwi families into their first home.” That brought a 30-second standing ovation, and David Shearer grinned, looking suddenly lighter, as if a David-Cunliffe-shaped burden had floated suddenly away.

With the dream of house ownership becoming utterly out of reach for thousands of New Zealanders, KiwiBuild – reportedly the brainchild of Annette King – would see the government use its scale and buying power to deliver 100,000 “affordable starter homes”, a reachable rung on the ladder. It would also boost supply, helping to cool an overheated property market.

All it took was five years, three leadership changes, and two elections and Labour’s flagship house building policy was made real.

How did that go?

Not well. The target was 100,000 houses in a decade, with 1,000 homes in the first year, 5,000 in the second, 10,000 in the third, then 12,000 a year thereafter. It didn’t turn out like that.

As we approach the two year mark, how many have been built?

Not so many.

How many?

258.

Any other issues?

A few. There were snafus over the structure of the unit overseeing the project, complaints from developers, an over-reliance on “buying off the plans”, escalating costs for some of the houses, a failure even to find willing buyers for some of them, the general, thudding realities of New Zealand’s construction economy and regulatory web, and the controversy-surrounded resignation of the head of the KiwiBuild unit. National housing spokesperson Judith Collins enjoyed field day after field day. Ten weeks ago, amid talk of recalibrations and resets, Phil Twyford got himself reshuffled out of town, losing the housing portfolio, which was split into three, with Megan Woods at the KiwiBuild helm.

Would that be the same Megan Woods who wrote the PhD thesis ‘Integrating the nation: Gendering Māori urbanisation and integration, 1942-1969’?

Yes. Have a biscuit.

How did today’s announcements go down?

The community housing providers in the KiwiBuy coalition liked it. The group, which includes Salvation Army, Habitat for Humanity, Housing Foundation and Community Housing Aotearoa, issued a release headed “Door to home ownership has been opened”, saying, “Today’s announcement by Government of its intention to work with the community housing sector and others in the development of a $400m progressive home ownership package is warmly welcomed.”

And the opposition?

Judith Collins reckoned it amounted to “scrapping KiwiBuild in all but name”. She said, “The long-awaited KiwiBuild reset has proven to be a damp squib, with all the elements that made the policy unique now consigned to the rubbish bin.” And: “It’s pretty easy to achieve targets when there aren’t any, which appears to be the government’s strategy on housing… New Zealanders who dream of home ownership will feel justifiably let down by the KiwiBuild reset. The three key elements are gone – there’s no 100,000 homes target, price caps have been loosened and the asset test for ‘second chancers’ is no more.”

Keep going!

A true patriot gazes disappointedly at Elle Hunt. Photo: Getty

PoliticsSeptember 4, 2019

Please, nobody tell the Home Office: I have failed at being British

Elle Hunt

Contributing writer

A true patriot gazes disappointedly at Elle Hunt. Photo: Getty

Tests on citizenship are very revealing about our ideas of ‘national identity’, writes NZ-British human mashup Elle Hunt.

I’d come across a sample “Life in the UK” quiz online – 24 questions on the culture and heritage of the British isles, of the kind posed as part of the application process for citizenship – and idly put myself to the test. The pass rate is at least 75% correct; I got 15 out of 24 – or 62.5%.

I didn’t know the answers to questions about the Norman invasion, or York Minster, or the years that individual colonies finally wrested their independence, or much of the other trivia that apparently proves one’s lasting investment in Britain. Fortunately, I didn’t have to: I was born in England, to English parents, so my citizenship is not up for debate – no matter my imperfect recollection of the glory days of Empire.

Nearly 171,000 tests were taken across the UK last year – reflective, on the whole, of earnest, costly, in some cases no doubt desperate attempts to make a permanent home here. About 31,600 failed: 18% of the total. The test is due to be reformed “to give greater prominence to British values”.

In the meantime, as Brexit looms on 31 October, people who have lived in Britain all their lives are being denied permanent residency. In that light it is especially ludicrous that, as one commentator wrote, people’s futures may rest on their ability to answer questions such as “Are Halloween lanterns carved out of melons, pineapples, coconuts, or pumpkins?” and “Where did the first farmers come from?”

That this is taken seriously as a metric may seem perverse, but it is very revealing of how much we couch in discussions of “national identity”. The Life in the UK test is asking you to demonstrate book smarts on culture and history, which is increasingly understood to have been captured through one dominant lens – one that is overwhelmingly white and almost invariably male.

It may not be difficult to scrape a pass, and it is probably one of the easier hurdles of the citizenship application process, given the expense involved – but the symbolism of it is nonetheless meaningful. The test looks to a problematic past to set a benchmark of what it means to be British and implies an expectation: if you are to stay, you will play by these rules.

Trust NZ First – never ones to reach for a dog whistle when there’s a foghorn to hand – to make this explicit in one remit to introduce such a citizenship test last year with a “Respecting New Zealand Values Bill”. Roger Melville, from Wairarapa, said he was in favour of the idea because New Zealand had been filling with people “who aren’t really New Zealanders”, who did not display New Zealand values and who were often, in his experience – “and I’m not trying to be racist” – also from South Asia.

I suspect that Melville would have happily approved my family as aspiring New Zealanders, given that we were middle-class, English and – now I’m not trying to be racist – white. My parents, younger sister and I were granted citizenship in 2006, the week after my 13th birthday, at a ceremony in Whangarei. We sang the national anthem, one verse audibly less confidently than the rest, and were given kauri trees to take home and plant – a symbol of the roots we would soon put down in our new home.

Ten years later, that kauri tree was reaching deep into the dirt outside the house I grew up in, which my parents had sold – and I had moved to Sydney.

Come January, I will have been out of New Zealand five years. My accent, whatever semblance of it I had, is fading. Even my passport has expired. The longer I stay away, the smaller a share of my life my years there become. So when I failed in my attempt at Britishness, I wondered – do I still count as a New Zealander, if I ever did? And if not, who does?

It is not as simple as a question of place of birth or citizenship when belonging, mediated externally, is a construct; we choose who we embrace as much as we choose who to reject. Pakeha’s claim to the country is secondary to that of Māori. Population growth is being driven by migration. An estimated 1.5m citizens live outside New Zealand. Many of our highest-profile citizens, considered archetypal New Zealanders, in fact moved there from overseas as children, or left as young adults to never return.

Russell Crowe has lived most of his life in Australia and gives the strong impression that if it would get him citizenship there, he’d hand in his Kiwi passport immediately. Anna Paquin moved to New Zealand from Canada when she was four, and left for the US when she was 13. Sam Neill was born in Northern Ireland; Eleanor Catton, in Canada. Katherine Mansfield – for years hailed as New Zealand’s only noteworthy literary figure – left New Zealand for Europe at age 19.

Mansfield’s “somewhat problematical” standing as a New Zealand writer “in view of her long years of absence” was elegantly addressed by Gillian Boddy in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography in 1996. “Mansfield herself was emphatic about her debut to the country of her birth: ‘New Zealand is in my very bones’. … She could not have written as she did without an understanding of both those worlds.”

My own connection to New Zealand may be waning at an immediate, quotidien level (and for that reason, this is my last regular column for The Spinoff), but it is also fundamental to who I am, the way I view the world, and how I approach my life in a country that often feels entirely foreign, despite my lifelong claim to it.

Citizenship tests may be an especially crude measure of what makes a New Zealander, or a Briton, or an Australian; but so, arguably, is citizenship when it may mean less to someone who was born with it than someone who fought for it. Britain might think the test of life in the UK lies in questions about pumpkins and cathedrals, but as Mansfield modelled, the best answer to “who is embraced as a New Zealander?” may be those who embrace New Zealand.