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Image: Getty/Archi Banal
Image: Getty/Archi Banal

PoliticsSeptember 25, 2023

Did National really just simply sell off state houses?

Image: Getty/Archi Banal
Image: Getty/Archi Banal

New Zealand has a massive deficit in state housing, but is that all National’s fault? Max Rashbrooke runs the numbers.

It has become a truth universally acknowledged, at least on the left, that the last time National was in power, its only interest in state houses lay in selling them off. But did it really?

For a long time, the actual facts were obscured by a fog of data uncertainty. You’d think public housing numbers would be a simple matter: either the state owns a specific home or it doesn’t. But dwellings can be tenanted or empty, rented at subsidised or market rates, transferred to charities to run or kept firmly within the state. They can be sold, bought, demolished or leased.

Voyager-award-winning reporter Kirsty Johnston once spent weeks trying to untangle the data, a process she describes as “somewhere between a merry-go-round and a nightmare”. Now, in response to Spinoff enquiries, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has produced official data that allows the question to be resolved.

First, though, some history. State homes came into being in the 1930s under the inaugural Labour government, as it attempted to not just accommodate the most vulnerable but also, in the words of historian Ben Schrader, “provide an alternative to private housing”. State housing was to be built at such a scale that it could influence market rents and have “a social status equivalent to home ownership”. And, briefly, the vision worked. “When I interviewed [the first generation of] state house tenants, they said it was great to have a state house and they had sort of ‘made it’,” Schrader recounts. “It was a step up in the social hierarchy.”

Working at scale and pace, Labour built nearly 30,000 state houses in the 12 years to 1950. Technically, of course, it lost power in 1949, but its building pipeline (and that of any other government) can reasonably be regarded as extending a year after its time in office: an incoming administration can hardly cancel signed contracts or halt work underway.

Adjusted for population, Labour built the equivalent of 10,000 homes a year today. But construction slowed under subsequent National governments, and although Sid Holland and Keith Holyoake built a little under 1,000 a year across most of the 1950s and 60s, the dream of competing with private homes died. State housing, Schrader says, became more and more a “residual” service for the poor. And although the fourth Labour government erected around 13,000 houses in six years, a hammer blow landed soon after.

Jim Bolger’s National government was, by 1991, managing around 70,000 state homes, roughly 5.4% of the total housing stock. This was not, by global standards, an enormous percentage, either then or now. In countries like the Netherlands, nearly one-third of all housing is provided outside the market, often constructed by the state and handed over to charities to run. In Vienna, 50% of all residences – many of them in architecturally stunning apartment blocks – are owned by the city council or co-operatives.

Nonetheless, Bolger and his successor Jenny Shipley took New Zealand’s small state housing stock, and made it even smaller. Influenced by anti-government ideology, they sold off one in every seven homes, leaving the incoming Helen Clark and colleagues with just 59,000. Clark then restored numbers to around 67,000 in 2009 – the year in which John Key’s housing policies took effect, and the historical Te Ara data on state housing stops.

What happened then is revealed in the previously unpublished HUD data covering 2009 to 2016. (The post-2017 ‘Housing Dashboard’ then picks up the story.) It confirms that National did indeed sell thousands of state homes. Of the 67,627 it inherited in 2009, just 61,426 – some 6,000 fewer – were left in Kāinga Ora ownership by 2017.

Many of the sales, though, were to the community housing providers – charities like Tauranga’s Accessible Properties – that National believed were superior to state agency Kāinga Ora. The charities were, crucially, given access to Income-Related Rent Subsidies (IRRS), which set rents at 25% of income. This effectively put some charities’ tenants on the same financial footing as Kāinga Ora’s, and brought them into the “state” or “public” housing sector.

Whether or not charities are indeed superior housing providers remains a vexed question, though their representative, Community Housing Aotearoa chief executive Paul Gilberd, takes a diplomatic stance: “We need them [Kāinga Ora] to be going really, really well, as well as our sector.” Either way, as the data shows, IRRS-covered charity places rose to over 4,700 by 2017, leaving National with a net loss of around 1,500 state houses. (A similar story is told in the data Johnston assembled.)

The state housing waiting list now stands at more than 24,000 (Photo: Shutterstock; photo illustration by Archi Banal)

Case closed, then: National did sell state houses. But wait: if, as above, a government should be attributed a one-year post-election pipeline, National gets to claim the year to June 2018 – a 12 month period in which over 1,000 state houses were added, as the party finally twigged to the need to build. That would leave National with a net loss, from 2009 to 2018, of just 340 homes.

Not so bad, then. But the amount of state housing matters less than the proportion it represents of all dwellings. A state-housing stock that stays static while the population grows is accommodating less of the public, and providing a reduced service.

The figure below shows how many extra government dwellings would have been needed to maintain the 1991 level of provision, when state houses made up 5.35% of all homes. The destruction of the Bolger years comes into sharper focus: National left, on this measure, 20,000 fewer places than it inherited. Clark did no more than halt the losses, which – in the final analysis – mounted again under Key and English, worsening the shortfall by another 14,000 homes.

Number of state houses needed to restore the 1991 state-housing share of dwellings. Blue = National-led government. Red = Labour-led government. Each administration is attributed one year’s worth of building after it left office.

It is no surprise, then, that senior National figures like Nicola Willis have admitted the party sold too many state houses. Her colleague Chris Bishop even told RNZ that National would “build enough state and social housing” to clear the state-house waiting list – a startling claim given that the list currently sits at 24,717, but one to which he will no doubt be held if his party wins power. That waiting list has ballooned under Labour, but the government can at least point to having added 13,000 places to the state housing stock, of which roughly half are newly built. (The broader construction boom has, however, seen the share of state housing fall further.)

The wider picture here is what Gilberd calls “30 years of profound neglect” from 1991 onwards. And even before that, state housing’s status had been dented. In Schrader’s words: “It had been a step up, but it became a step down.” To change that dynamic now would require not just higher building quality from Kāinga Ora but also the immediate addition of – at least – 43,000 homes, to restore the (not overly generous) 1991 level of provision. That, though, seems a distant prospect.

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PoliticsSeptember 25, 2023

Who dares challenge Chlöe? The race for Auckland Central

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Chlöe Swarbrick’s victory was one of the biggest surprises of the 2020 election, but in the past three years she’s made the seat her own. Can the high-profile Green hold on to Auckland Central, or will it flip to a National or Labour newbie?

Read the other battleground electorate profiles in our Hot Seats series here.

Herne Bay, possibly the most expensive suburb in the country; the chaotic CBD, where shoebox apartments are stacked over empty shopfronts and bougie eateries; and two barefoot, gumboot, strappy-sandal lifestyle islands, Waiheke and Aotea Great Barrier – welcome to the Auckland Central electorate. Here, there are a lot of educated young adults, and not many children or elderly people. Over half of the population was born overseas, the most of any electorate. A third of them live on their own, more than any other electorate, and almost seven of every 10 of don’t own their home. A quarter of the homes have no heating, compared to only 4% of homes across the nation. The hot topics in the area are crime, housing, transport and liveability.

The Auckland Central electorate was created for the 1887 election, and has been in continuous existence since 1905. In 2008 Grafton and Point Chevalier were shaved off and Newton was added on and in 2014 Westmere and most of Grey Lynn were moved to the Mt Albert electorate to account for expected population growth.

The Auckland Central electorate (Image: Parliamentary Library)

Last election, the Green Party’s Chlöe Swarbrick won by just 1,068 votes (3% of the valid votes cast) to slip into the Auckland Central seat – only the second time a Green candidate had won an electorate (the other was Jeanette Fitzsimons in Coromandel in 1999). The seat had been held by National’s Nikki Kaye since 2008, but sometimes by as little as 600 votes (2014) and never by more than 1581 votes (2017). Before that, it was a fairly safe Labour seat, the single exception being Sandra Lee, who won the seat for the Alliance in 1993. A few months out from the 2020 election, Kaye announced she was leaving politics, which made a Swarbrick victory seem more plausible, though very few predicted it.

Swarbrick has been a high-profile presence in the seat for the past three years and, in contrast to her unexpected 2020 win, it’s hard not to see her as the front-runner in Auckland Central in 2023. Her closest contender from 2020, Labour’s Helen White, has retreated to the Mt Albert electorate, and Emma Mellow, the National Party candidate, who was just under 3,000 votes behind, is nowhere to be found (she’s rumoured to be in Australia). Instead the two major parties have put first-timers forward, and one can’t help but wonder if the high-profile seat is being used as a training ground, and considered unwinnable, held tightly in Swarbrick’s high-profile grasp. Her campaign headquarters on Karangahape Road is buzzing with volunteers and neon green tube lights.

The two top contenders taking on Swarbrick are National’s Mahesh Muralidhar and Labour’s Oscar Sims. Muralidhar’s list placing of 43 makes it highly unlikely he’ll get into parliament without winning his electorate, and at 63 on Labour’s list, Sims has no chance, so both are pinning their hopes on taking Auckland Central off Swarbrick. Last week, the pair joined Swarbrick on Gone By Lunchtime’s election megapod to debate the issues facing their electorate. They also went head to head in a K Rd Business Association-hosted debate at Whammy Bar the week prior, and at an earlier debate at St-Matthew-in-the-city.

So what are the main issues facing Auckland Central, according to the candidates, and how do they propose to deal with them? 

Mahesh Muralidhar stands for and behind the National Party

Tough on crime: National’s Mahesh Muralidhar

You may recognise National’s first-time candidate Mahesh Muralidhar from reality TV show Going Straight (described at the time as “Fear Factor on the sickness benefit” by the Listener), which he won in the early 2000s. Mahesh Muralidhar was badly burned in a stunt re-enactment, but this hasn’t stopped him from becoming, in his own words, “a seasoned executive with a track record of getting things done”. He is CEO of a New Zealand venture capital firm.

The 43-year-old lives in Ponsonby and revealed on the megapod that he drives a Tesla (not a Ferrari, as one member of the public had accused him of).

During the megapod and Whammy debates, he copped criticism for his party backing out of the bipartisan medium-density residential standards, which were intended to provide more housing without sprawl. When debate host Toby Manhire asked if “a little part of him died” when National withdrew its support, Muralidhar gave an emphatic no. The decision was in response to constituents’ concerns, he said. “We listened and said ‘I get it’.” Swarbrick, visibly agitated at this, pushed back: “I can’t interpret it any other way other than cowardice,” she said, saying that perhaps the National Party saw it as a way to win some marginal seats – no doubt hinting at her own electorate.

Muralidhar backed National’s housing growth policy, denying, as proposed by Whammy debate moderator Russell Brown, that its aim was “to keep apartments out of Epsom”, as well as Labour candidate Oscar Sims’ assertion that “his party’s policies will make it more difficult to build more houses”. Muralidhar even said the policy would lower rents, which, as pointed out by Simon Wilson in the Herald, goes further than the official National Party line. 

Crime, and being tough on it, are repeated refrains for Muralidhar. “I’ve talked to a dairy owner who’s had a machete held to his neck,” he said during the Whammy debate. “I’ve talked to a young woman with a job on Queen St whose parents say she should quit. My number one commitment would be to make sure Auckland Central is safe again.”

When asked by Manhire what one thing he would do to make Queen Street “less shit”, Muralidhar said it would be to put a police station downtown. Sims was quick to point out that there was a police station downtown until it was closed under a National government in 2013.

Muralidhar clashed with Swarbrick over transport policy too. She asked him if he agreed with the “international expert advice” on induced congestion – that building more roads leads to more traffic. He said that concepts need to be tested in context, and that transport projects need to be prioritised and staged. “We haven’t staged our priorities properly, there are cycleways going nowhere, cones all over the place… our roads are terrible,” he said.

‘I’ll work hard to win the seat’: Oscar Sims, Labour candidate for Auckland Central

Because Chlöe is too busy: Labour’s Oscar Sims

Throughout his campaign for Auckland Central, Sims’ tune has changed in harmony with the national polls. At first, his pitch was that as part of Labour, he would have a direct line into government, and so Auckland Central would have a strong voice in parliament. Now that a Labour-led government is looking less and less likely, he’s saying that Swarbrick will be busy being the Green Party’s spokesperson for “a lot of different things”, so “I can step in and take over that local advocacy role”. 

It seems that for Sims, being Labour candidate has gone from a strength (being an inside voice) to a hindrance (being on the defensive for a party that’s falling out of favour). During the megapod, when Manhire left the studio to let them deliberate among themselves, Sims said, “This is just going to become you two grilling me.” To an extent he was right, with Labour’s failure to deliver a target for National’s Muralidhar, who said, “there were so many projects you went out and said you were going to deliver that turned into huge wastes of money”. He goaded Sims into saying, “I think we have accepted that we wanted to do more on these issues and we haven’t done that.” 

Sims, who like Swarbrick is an inner-city renter without a car, seems to have been to every corner of the electorate, visited police ministers, business associations, markets, festivals, community groups and residents’ groups to talk to his possible future constituents about their concerns. He’s nailed up hoardings, participated in debates, attended every Labour-related campaign launch and hosted a fundraising dinner. 

Sims’ top three priorities on policy.nz are improving the safety of the city centre, protecting the rights of renters and improving reliability and affordability of public transport, including the Waiheke ferry. Voters may feel that the 25-year-old isn’t really offering anything Swarbrick isn’t onto already, and Sims seems to knows it. In fact, during debates, the two are often in agreement. During the St-Matthew-in-the-city debate, at one point he pointed to Swarbrick and said, “She’s getting in anyway on the Green Party list,” which is, well, true.

Chlöe Swarbrick is not only the Green Party’s candidate for the Auckland Central electorate, but also third on the party list

The reigning queen: The Greens’ Chlöe Swarbrick

According to Swarbrick, her biggest wins for her electorate over the past term have been securing the wage subsidy for small businesses, setting up the Ellen Melville Centre-based omicron resilience team, which turned into a community resource during the floods, saving the St James theatre, and increasing environmental protections for the Hauraki Gulf. Since her win by a hair in 2020, Swarbrick has grown her public profile and political stature, and continues to emphasise her belonging in the “community” of the electorate. 

Of all the candidates, she has the biggest role in her party, being third on the list, and she considers it a strength. “That fact that I have high-profile spokesperson roles for the party, and I elevate those issues to the house in parliament, but also can link them back to constituency issues, I think, is a massive benefit,” she said during the megapod. She pointed out that her predecessor Nikki Kaye was a cabinet minister at the same time as “amply” representing Auckland Central.

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— Staff writer

Swarbrick’s number one priority for the electorate, as listed on policy.nz, is passing the Rental Warrant of Fitness Bill, which she launched in July and says will benefit the large number of renters in Auckland Central.

She reels off facts, figures, reports effortlessly, and seems to have done the impossible, that is, work constructively with Auckland mayor Wayne Brown. Together they’re making plans to turn the waterfront port area into public space. “On the areas we can get consensus, we do move forward,” she said.

Swarbrick summons a positive vision when she talks about the central city, in contrast to other candidates’ focus on crime. “We also need to talk about vibrancy – foot traffic, people wanting to be there.” She has been looking at different ways to fill the empty shopfronts of the city, she says, and taking ideas from post-earthquake Christchurch such as Gap Filler to discuss with regeneration organisation Eke Panuku.

Because of her visibility in the electorate and her high profile in parliament and beyond, it’s hard to imagine any of the other candidates winning favour over Swarbrick – but if unlikely candidates didn’t run, we wouldn’t have Swarbrick.

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Politics