Housing minister Chris Bishop is making the case for affordable housing to National Party members and beyond, framing the housing crisis as an existential threat to the centre-right. Is the threat real? Gabi Lardies assesses the evidence.

If I wanted to make loyal National supporters’ heartbeats quicken, I’d show them exactly what Chris Bishop did on Sunday at the National Party AGM. On the pull-down projection screen at the Due Drop Events Centre in Auckland, he first showed a neat, mundane graph of New Zealand homeownership rates plummeting from about 73% in 1986 to 65% in 2017. So far the hearts kept their steady rhythms. Then, a black slide, with a little National Party logo in the corner, boldly announced: “Declining rates of homeownership is the greatest threat to the centre-right worldwide”. Surely this dramatic statement raised a few pulses and eyebrows – but is it true, and does it apply here?

Somewhat unexpectedly, Bishop has made more progressive statements on housing since the coalition took office than any minister in decades. In June he went as far to say that house prices should continue to drop, even if it made homeowners nervous – words that haven’t been uttered by a Labour MP in decades (and neither Labour leader Chris Hipkins nor housing spokesperson Kieran McAnulty have followed suit, at least in public). Bishop’s made the case for making housing more affordable on three fronts: to boost the economy, to help get the government books back in order, and then the moral case – that people shouldn’t have to live in emergency housing, and that it’s an issue of intergenerational equity. Now he’s dialling it up. Our housing crisis is a threat – one that will affect the National Party. 

Bishop’s presentation proceeded to use data from this year’s election in Britain as a warning to the National Party here. Using a sample of 35,000 voters, YouGov, an international research data and analysis tech group, looked at how people voted across age, gender, education, income, employment, housing tenure and their previous votes. Renters, young people (18-25) and people who lived with family or friends had extremely low levels of voting for the centre-right Conservative Party. The National Party’s British equivalent gained the most votes among retired people and homeowners. 

We too have data that collects voting preferences alongside housing tenure, age, education, income and many other things. The New Zealand Election Survey (NZES) has been doing so since 1990. The most recent available data set is from the 2020 election, which surveyed 3,730 people and gave each a $20 voucher as compensation. So how does housing tenure intersect with the way people vote here in Aotearoa? 

Below, the chart shows support for National weighted in voters who own their own homes: 30.4% of homeowners without mortgages voted for National in 2020, while only 10.2% of renting families did. By contrast, the Labour vote is much more evenly spread – 42.1% of outright owners, and 43.8% of renting families. While there are higher levels of support for Labour across all house tenures (it was 2020 after all), among mortgage-free homeowners it’s only 12% higher than for National, but for family renters, more than four times as much as National’s share.

Data from 2020, however, should be taken with a grain of salt, as the nation was riding Covid and Jacindamania waves. So how did National voters and Labour voters compare in 2017, when the party vote was split more evenly, at 44.45% for National and 36.89% for Labour? 

Though the election results were markedly different, the pattern of voting according to housing tenure was similar, with 45.3% of outright homeowners and 40.8% of mortgaged homeowners voting National, compared to 25.6% and 29.2% respectively voting Labour. The biggest change between 2017 and 2020 lies in the people who own their homes with a mortgage – National lost about 17% of its support among this group, and Labour gained about 11%. Next up is the mortgage-free homeowners – National lost 15% of its support, and Labour gained about 16%. The change in families who rent their home privately was large too – National lost about 10% and Labour gained about the same.

If we compare by voter type instead of housing tenure, we get the same story of how they intersect. For almost a decade National voters have had markedly higher rates of homeownership than the average voter and than Labour voters – at least 10% more. Weighting the data like this shows another skew – voters are overwhelmingly homeowners. In 2020, 66% of the surveyed voters owned homes, while the national rate was likely under the 64.5% calculated at the 2018 census. The next chunk of the voter base were renting families, but they numbered at about a sixth of homeowners. And while they aren’t homeowners, it's likely they’re aspiring to be.

If Chris Bishop’s thinking is that homeowners are more inclined to vote for National, so making more homeowners will get you more National voters, then at least the first part is true. But you might look at the data the other way around too. If homeownership rates are dropping, there are increasing numbers of renters, and housing policy could be designed to capture their favour too. You might, if particularly wry, take a two-pronged approach, rather than leaving about 20% of voters (renters) with only the hope of one day being homeowners.

In New Zealand, there’s a power in promising affordable housing. Owning one's own home and land is the ultimate symbol of the great New Zealand promise of egalitarianism and meritocracy, dating back to the adverts in Britain of the land of milk and honey. A centre-right party, which heralds meritocracy and bootstrap pulling, won’t be too popular if under its watch, that symbol is too far out of reach for too many people, no matter how hard they strive.