Building industry a ‘sacred cow’

Press, 5 August 1977, Page 2

Building industry a ‘sacred cow’

PA Wellington To assert that young couples had a "right” to their owr. home was as ridiculous as to say they had a right to a world trip, a Wellington property developer, Mr Bob Jones. s<»’d yesterday.

The building industry was a "sacred cow*' which had "grown to an unnatural size, far beyond our needs,” he said, in a speech prepared for delivery to the Masterton Rotary Club. There was already one home to every 2.5 people, and 60,000 homes were lying empty at any one time, Mr Jones said.

Seventy per cent of New Zealanders owned their own homes, compared with less than 50 per cent in west European countries.

State houses and a “gen-

,eral oversupply" had given New Zealand the “lowest rentals in the world.”

Average rentals for residential property had risen only 80 per cent in the last five years, compared with a 130 per cent increase in the house prices index in the same period.

Mr Jones said that in 1935 there had been a real housing shortage. Tn the four decades since, the problem had been "substantially eliminated.”

"Today, we are left with a building industry far too large for our needs, and the sudden advent of a static population situation has brought that position home dramatically,” he said.

“The wealthiest nation in the word, the United States, is enjoying the greatest housing construction boom in its entire history.

“You will begin to appreciate my point when I tell you that translated back to a comparable population to New Zealand’s, that works out at 30,000 houses the same as the building industry wants to see here. “In my view, it would be economically wrong and politically irresponsible to do any more than the Minister of Housing, (Mr Holland) is doing about the situation — and that, frankly, is nothing," said Mr Jones.

“Enoch Powell once told mr that in his experience, to be right was too often politically wrong, and to be wrong too often politically right,” he said. “That is a price which with their integrity, neither he nor Mr Holland will pay, and in that regard they are political martyrs.”