‘The Next Million’: Planning for Growth in the 1950s and 1960s
Chapter 1 of ‘The Revolution that Nearly Was: How Aotearoa New Zealand’s progress was frustrated, and utopia mislaid’
IN 1953, the head of town and country planning at New Zealand’s Ministry of Works, John W. Cox, penned an article called ‘The Next Million’, in which we read that the New Zealand of the coming decades would have to be at the top of its game in the face of expected baby boom-era population growth:
We can make the next thirty years a period of high adventure, positive, constructive, exciting. It is a great opportunity. Shall we take it or shall we drift on dully, without objective, from crisis to crisis, constantly surprised at the results of our own mistakes and lack of foresight. If we do, the increased export of one commodity is certain — our native [i.e., local] brains and initiative.
In fact, Cox’s “next million” arrived in just over twenty years, not thirty. A New Zealand population of two million in 1952 became three million in 1973.
Such a rate of population growth might have been thought to cause all kinds of social strains and problems. And yet it did not.
The main reason it did not was because investment to cope with the next million was treated as a matter of urgency.
Such was the theme of the following government newsreel, screened in the same year as Cox’s ‘Next Million’.
Just as typical of that era is another government newsreel from the following year, 1954, in which the narrator intones that “Only an intensive building programme now can provide for the future! Children, the citizens of tomorrow, must also have their chance!”
We built several large dams and power stations.
And one of the earliest examples of high-voltage direct current transmission, by which hydropower from the South Island was transmitted, with few losses, to the more populous North Island.
And infrastructures of every kind to match the needs of expanding cities, Auckland above all.
1966 saw the opening of the the first New Zealand airport that could accept jet airliners, thereby ending an era of comparative isolation in which the country was accessible only by ship or, at best, by short-range propellor planes from Australia.
To prevent forms of real estate speculation that would have exploited a growing population, the postwar era also saw massive investment in state housing schemes, amounting to entire new towns of up to 60,000 people apiece, and in the new passenger railways with which they were often associated. A 1945 episode of the newsreel Weekly Review describes the integrated development of a new social town and the railway to serve it.
A more detailed treatment of how things were done is given in the second half of the 1946 official film Housing in New Zealand.
This was, at the time, primarily a Labour Party policy, developed under the New Zealand’s First Labour Government, in office from 1935 to 1949: a policy which today seems European in inspiration, both in its emphasis on long-term social renting as a ‘respectable’ form of tenure and in its focus on public transport, bicycles, and pedestrianisation.
Labour took the attitude that housing was a human right, a policy that the nation’s diplomats upheld with some success at the founding of the United Nations and in the course of the subsequent drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the official publication State Housing in New Zealand (1949), we read that:
The fundamental premise, then, about housing had undergone a change. Housing was to become a Public Utility, the right to live in a decent dwelling being regarded as on the same level as the right to education, sanitation, to good and abundant water, to an adequate road system and to a certain amount of medical care. Probably it would be true to say that this premise has now gained fairly wide acceptance. (p. 7)
In keeping with the arguments of earlier reformers (of which more below), urban land value was treated as an epiphenomenon of a wider social system, in the same way that pressure at any given point in a network of pipes or voltage at any given point in a network of wires is also determined by the system as a whole.
It was in that spirit, plus a desire to plan the new suburban towns in such a way that they would be sociable and well-rounded places for living and not sterile dormitories, that State Housing in New Zealand included the following passage:
HOUSING IS MORE than designing and building houses. In these days, physically speaking, the house is a kind of knot in a network of pipes, wires, roads, and footpaths, with larger and more complicated knots for shopping centres and other community facilities — all of which are necessary if people are to carry out easily the wide variety of activities that are our conception of civilized life. (p. 8)
For its part, the more conservative National Party, which took over from Labour in 1949, created a system under which the state would purchase all houses built by private developers if they remained unsold after six months.
As such National, too, favoured an abundance of housing, but with more of an emphasis toward affordable freehold rather than long-term renting.
Both parties supported the idea that most mortgages should be supplied by the State Advances Corporation, which created and distributed mortgage credit on the basis of need, in such a way that speculators need not apply.
State Advances interest rates were able to kept permanently low since, in the absence of take-up by speculators, low interest rates could not overheat the market. Indeed, they had the opposite effect, suppressing house prices and boosting supply. In State Housing in New Zealand, we read that:
To finance its comprehensive proposals, the Government adopted the somewhat unusual course of using Reserve Bank credit, thus recognizing that the most important factor in housing costs is the price of money — interest is the heaviest portion in the composition of ordinary rent. The newly-created Department [of Housing Construction] was able, therefore, to obtain the use of funds at the lowest possible rate of interest, the rate being 1 per cent for the first ₤5,000,000 advanced, and 1½ per cent on further advances. The sums advanced by the Reserve Bank were not subscribed or underwritten by other financial institutions. This action showed the Government’s intention to demonstrate that it is possible for the State to use the country’s credit in creating new assets for the country. (p. 7)
In 1958, a second, more short-lived Labour Government made it possible to capitalise the Family Benefit, a universal child allowance introduced under the First Labour Government. This minimised or even eliminated young families’ need to save for a deposit, should they wish to own their own home, and was retained by National after it regained power in 1960, only to be abolished by a Fourth Labour Government in 1985.
Such were the leg-ups that the earliest cohort of baby boomers enjoyed; though the tail end of the boomers faced increasing difficulties as the state withdrew from real estate, and as the mainstream political and media treatment of housing underwent an abrupt 180 degree pivot from housing as a human right to property climbing, property flipping, and shows about property climbing and property flipping.
New Zealand was a very youthful society until recent decades: its median age below 25 for most of the 1960s and always comparatively youthful by today’s standards, if not always quite so youthful as in the 1960s, for the whole of its modern and pre-modern history before that.
This was another reason why the welfare of young families was explicitly treated by both main parties at mid-century as an investment: for it was also a means of gathering votes.
This consensus helped to popularise the saying — much harder to defend today — that New Zealand was a good place to bring up children.
Indeed, it was in those years that New Zealand erected many of the school buildings we supposedly cannot now afford to recondition or replace: an irony that continually recurs in discussions of the contemporary infrastructure deficit.
How were two or three million New Zealanders able to build stuff that more than five million New Zealanders cannot now manage to recondition or replace?
Natalism and the Settler Contract
A couple of terms worth introducing, at this point, are ‘natalism’ and the ‘settler contract’.
Natalism means a policy of encouraging births and childrearing in order to procure what statisticians call ‘natural increase’ in population, in addition to whatever increase could be obtained from immigration.
Natalism is, in that sense, the opposite of Malthusianism.
For much of the twentieth century, natalism was the policy both of Australia and New Zealand. It arose, partly, out of the conviction that minerals in Australia and hydroelectricity in New Zealand were abundant, even if farmland often gave way to deserts over there and mountains over here.
Growing populations also helped to secure the Imperial claims of Britain and, in the case of Australia, to help secure domestic claims against rising Asian powers who, in the schoolroom map, hung just above the island continent as though the force of gravity would one day pull them downunder.
In New Zealand, a growing population helped to reinforce a peculiarly strong settler nationalism, which saw us remain outside the Australian confederation after its creation in 1901 despite an Australian offer for us to join as a state, which is still on the table.
(This go-it-alone pretention was satirised by the vintage cartoon I reproduced in the introduction.)
The settler contract was an aspect of New Zealand’s go-it-alone settler nationalism. It served a similar purpose to natalism, except that it was focused on securing immigration and limiting the subsequent emigration of the disappointed.
Introduced by the historian John E. Martin in his 2010 book Honouring the Contract, the settler contract, upon which earlier historians had bestowed their own expressions such as the ‘concordat’ (Harvey Franklin) and the ‘populist compact’ (James Belich), involved the creation of a favourable image of New Zealand as a destination for the youthful British and European migrants who were the most favoured at that time.
Such migrants encountered half a world of tempting places to step off the boat on the way to New Zealand.
At the same time, emigration was a chronic threat in twentieth century New Zealand. A youthful population had potentially high rates of increase, but was also footloose.
There had been a large population outflow in the late 1880s and early 1890s, known at the time as the Exodus. There would be another outflow in the 1970s; and something similar was always continually threatening to recur in between.
To secure a higher proportion of the world’s total of British and European migrants, and to limit emigration, the New Zealand state undertook investments and pursued social policies that were intended to guarantee a secure and prosperous life for all children and young adults.
As such, the postwar decades can best be described as decades in which a state already accustomed to catering for youth doubled down on that policy: a policy of making sure that families were safe from what the Wellington-based historian David Hamer, in a contribution to a 1963 collection of essays about New Zealand called Studies of a Small Democracy, called “superfluousness and precariousness:”
The most distinctive contemporary feature of New Zealand as a ‘small democracy’ is probably our insistence, proclaimed to the world in no uncertain terms in the Canberra Pact and at the founding of the United Nations, that the state must maintain full employment. That this problem of employment should have come to figure so prominently in our politics reflects the exceptionally wide variance between our basic economic situation and the human needs of our society. In a country whose economic well-being is dependent on primary production for export and whose economy is therefore founded on commercial farming, people do seem very superfluous. . . . This situation of superfluousness and precariousness with regard to employment has been felt all the more keenly because we are a small and isolated country. And, because we are a democracy, these feelings have become the material of political pressure and political action, so that, after the bitter experience of two depressions, ‘full employment’ and ‘social security’ became basic principles of our government’s policy. (p. 78)
Four years previously, a 1959 government film called The New Zealanders, which seems to have been directed at an audience of prospective migrants, insisted as follows:
Education’s almost wholly state-administered and free. All New Zealanders attend the same sort of schools and most talk with the same sort of accent. . . . There are universities in all the main centres. Varsity education is also free to all who pass the entrance examination. . . . Having a baby brings no financial worries . . . The best medical attention is free in the hospitals. Medicine is also distributed free of charge. With health care right through life we’ve come to believe that the people’s welfare is the government’s responsibility. . . . New Zealand’s a wonderfully healthy country, a great place for bringing up children. . . . . All workpeople must belong to unions . . .
In those days, it even used to be said that New Zealand was a ‘classless society’, a claim somewhat belied by the thumbnail for The New Zealanders, but nevertheless a condition to which the New Zealanders did aspire.
Boosting our Carrying-Capacity, Boosting the Nation
As I touched on in the introduction, the promotion of immigration to New Zealand had initially emphasised the country’s natural qualities and the dubious promise of agricultural land that was there for the taking, while drawing a discreet veil over Māori resistance and topographical realities alike.
However, it soon became clear that there wasn’t really that much good land to be had by either people, for reasons obvious in most places where the settlers stepped off the boat.
These were the same reasons that rendered those harbours, such as Wellington’s Port Nicholson, so famously scenic.
And practically all the other places as well, such as the Wakatipu Basin, the so-called ‘promised land of Rees’: a localised hollow in the almost endless mountains of the South Island within which Queenstown and a handful of neighbouring communities are located.
Basically, a country, or a district, can have an abundance of flat agricultural land, at the expense of a countryside that looks dull. Or it can be scenic. But it cannot be both.
It followed from this that another means of increasing our human carrying-capacity had to be found, if the political leaders of turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Zealand were to boost the nation.
And it was at this historical moment, in the turbulent post-Exodus 1890s and on into the twentieth century, that the deus ex machina of hydro-industrialisation, as I have called it, was pressed into service.
This still left open the question of whether the gains of hydro-industrialisation would be spread sufficiently widely to encourage the locally born to stay and more British and European settlers to come. Or whether they would accumulate in few hands through the action of a rising land market, and thereby kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.
Politics and Poverty
The grievance of later colonial-era settlers who had arrived to find all the best places for farming taken, and who doubted that they could live on the scenic uplands that remained, inspired a lecture called Politics and Poverty, delivered on 13 April 1883 to a a packed Dunedin Lyceum Hall, which held two thousand, by an up-and-coming politician named Robert Stout. In Politics and Poverty, reported in full in the next day’s issue of the Otago Daily Times and also to be found in the Pamphlet Collection of Robert Stout, its author declared that:
Land is a monopoly, and it will always remain a monopoly. I, however, believe that the land should belong to the State and not to individuals.
The title and the content of Stout’s lecture were, of course, also, an obvious and confessed homage to the American land reformer Henry George, whose Progress and Poverty had been published to great acclaim in 1879, though Stout claimed to have thought of much of its content independently.
In reality, such ideas were ‘in the air’ throughout of the nineteenth century: a fear that the only people who were consistently making money out of the industrial revolution and its attendant population explosions, both on the frontier and in the metropole, were those who had bought land when it was cheap.
The workers were often ground down, and the most heroic industrial entrepreneurs, such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, often went broke as a result of biting off more than they could chew.
But those who owned land reaped capital gains “as it were, in their sleep,” as the liberal philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill famously put it in his Principles of Political Economy.
Because we were a democracy — to paraphrase Hamer — Stout would became the Premier of New Zealand in 1884, the year that followed his Politics and Poverty address.
In the face of an increasingly pressing land shortage, from the early 1890s onward, there was a gradual but genuine pivot away from what several of our historians have called the representation of New Zealand as ‘Arcadia’ — meaning a rural paradise abundant in the sort of land that is suitable for small farms and lifestyle blocks — to ‘Utopia’, a land in which the rural frontier of settlement might well be closed, but in which the government would see to it, more artificially, that there were always plenty of jobs, affordable sections, and social services in the cities, with the quid pro quo for capital that this would enable the nation to keep growing.
By a sort of political jiu-jitsu, the settler contract thus helped to entrench the radical aspirations of disenchanted 1890s labour and render them respectable.
Business associations, chambers of commerce and civic boosters gave up the cream of maximum rent, profit and interest in return for the milk of continued population growth, without which all their ambitions would come to naught.
Our Forgotten Land Banks
Much has been made, lately, of the social housing achievements of European cities like Vienna, with their huge municipal land banks. The success of those sorts of cities in overcoming homelessness and housing scarcity puts many English-speaking cities to shame.
Forty years on from the coming of Rogernomics, we have forgotten that, until the 1980s, we had a similar policy in New Zealand to that of the Viennese.
In the early 1980s, public authorities maintained huge suburban land banks in New Zealand. One such example was the New Zealand Housing Corporation land bank that covered 687 hectares — nearly seven square kilometres — in the part of Auckland’s North Shore that is known as Albany.
These land banks were developed, in the public domain, by such agencies as the Housing Corporation, the Ministry of Works and Development, and even some of the larger municipalities, such as the Manukau City Council which, at the other end of Auckland, was in charge of developing its own city centre.
Clicking on the following image of the municipally developed Manukau Centre of 1976, standing in lonely, splendid isolation among fields that are now built up, will lead to a more detailed, zoomable version of the same aerial photograph.
According to New Zealand’s 1975 Official Yearbook,
Such has been the demand for State development in Auckland and Wellington that it has been necessary to acquire large areas of land in these metropolitan areas, which, when developed over a number of years, has resulted in the creation of new towns. These have been comprehensively planned, and developed sites have been made available for central commercial, industrial and administrative areas as well as civic and neighbourhood amenities. At present the three existing instances of development at this scale are Porirua City, near Wellington, and Otara and Mangere townships within Manukau City, south of Auckland.
In accordance with continuing Government policy, the planning of these towns and State development generally has recognised the need to conserve land and gain as much return from the installation of municipal services as possible. For these reasons, particular attention has been paid to subdivisional pattern and, where appropriate, medium-density housing to an acceptable level has been introduced. In addition, a measure of building of medium and high-density residential accommodation has been undertaken in inner city areas in Auckland and Wellington.
Further substantial areas of land have been acquired in the Albany Basin in Auckland for future development. A planning exercise, aimed at achieving the integration of State with private housing in the Albany area and the creation of a high standard of urban environment is currently being undertaken by local authority and departmental officers. Commencement of land development is timed for late 1974 or 1975. A large-scale development is also planned for Rolleston, south of Christchurch. (p. 517)
The state’s possession of these land banks dated in one way or another all the way back to colonial times
It was at the very beginning of the non-possessor era, in 1881, that Sir Julius Vogel, formerly the Treasurer and Premier of the Colony of New Zealand, published an open letter in which he went so far as to colourfully declare that any of his successors who sold off the public land bank should “be hung”:
Meanwhile the railway estate will develop, and in the course of time become enormously valuable. . . . Look at the value of [private enterprise] railway systems where fighting and competition go on in every direction over almost every mile, and then ask what must be the value of a [state] system in which the costly warfare will of necessity be absent. Twenty years hence the railways of New Zealand will be enormously valuable. . . . The Government which divested the colony of its contingent profits derivable from keeping the railways for the benefit of the State would, in my opinion, deserve to be hung. Scarcely less should be the punishment of a State which sacrificed the public lands which those railways make every year more valuable . . .
This letter can be found online as ‘Sir Julius Vogel and the New Zealand Railways’, text of a letter of 21 April 1881, posted from London to Mr Oswald Curtis of Nelson and reproduced in The Press, Christchurch, 15 June 1881.
Though they had lately been added to, was held to be justified on the grounds that comprehensive mobility planning, of the sort that would make it easy to get around by alternatives to the automobile, required a similarly comprehensive planning system.
And because public land banks were also held to be the only way to guarantee the future affordability of housing, and prevent undue speculation and windfalls, in the often cramped geographical setting of New Zealand’s cities.
In another 1977 publication, Auckland: The Costs of Growth, a joint working group from the Ministry of Works and Development and the Auckland Regional Authority therefore contended that:
The group sees a need for a greater degree of public ownership and development of land if development strategies are to be more carefully directed and the social provisions for community life met more easily. [i],
And that:
Land should be viewed as a non-renewable community-owned resource and not be treated as a profit-generating commodity. [ii]
[i] Auckland: The Costs of Growth, Auckland: Auckland Region Joint Study Group, Auckland Regional Authority and Ministry of Works and Development, 1977, pp. 20–21.
[ii] Auckland: The Costs of Growth, p. 153.
This has all been completely and utterly forgotten by the children of the Rogernomic revolution: a great forgetting that was already evident in 1996 when the Otago university academic Tom Brooking began an article about such colonial land reformers as Stout and Vogel with the observation that:
MOST NEW ZEALAND students of history in the late twentieth century seem to find it hard to understand why their ancestors of a hundred years ago argued so passionately about the matter of land tenure. Today the whole land debate seems archaic and obscure and looks like little more than ‘shadow boxing’.
In ‘New Zealand’s Planning History — Quo Vadis?’, Miller also contended that in addition to a general indifference to the city, restructuring and redundancy were also fostering corporate amnesia with regard to urban issues in the public service:
Planning as a clear intervention by the State is difficult to justify and sustain in an economy and society wracked by over a decade of ‘economic chemotherapy’ and endless restructuring. In such a milieu it is often hard to see value in the now, deemed inappropriate, interventions of the past.
During the Rogernomic era and on into the 1990s the land banks would be privatised, quite often as it seems for small fractions of what the land would eventually be worth in a market where the state was no longer continually suppressing the price of housing.
As I say, the existence of the former public land banks has been forgotten to a remarkable degree, even in the academy.
One wonders whether that was perhaps Rogernomics was always, really, all about. Namely, getting the state out of urban real estate and restoring the reign of those whom Oliver called the “possessors” at a time when cities like Auckland were becoming larger than ever.
This happened, admittedly, at a time when growth was slow. But that may only have made it easier to persuade the state to divest its land banks, now supposedly surplus to requirements: “a few smart entrepreneurs” knocking on the doors of the Housing Corporation or the shareholding ministers and offering to take these inconvenient encumbrances off their hands.
As Paul Goldsmith (now a cabinet minister) has written, in a 2012 business biography called Serious Fun: The Life and Times of Alan Gibbs,
Real money is often made at the point of discontinuities: when seismic shifts occur in the economy, such as from a regulated environment to a deregulated one, or from state enterprise to privatisation. Such conditions provide the opportunity for a few smart entrepreneurs who are in the right place at the right time to prosper extraordinarily. (pp. 203–204)
As, for instance, in one case I documented in the June 2011 issue of Metro, in which the real state developers Neil Group acquired 127 hectares of the Albany estate for $21 million in 1994, a sum which even thirty years ago was not a heck of a lot for that big a chunk of Albany.
Interestingly enough, an 8 March 2024 front-page article in the Wellington newspaper The Post, ‘One family to build them all’, noting that just one family, the Callenders, now owns nearly all the land zoned for the City of Wellington’s future expansion. This takes the form of a land bank of 542 hectares, nearly as big as the old Housing Corporation land bank in Albany.
Note: As regards the Albany estate as it was in the 1970s, it is to be found in Ministry of Works and Development Plan for Albany, ‘Modified Steering Committee’ option. Source: Albany Basin Development [Archives Reference AADX W3149 44 149/86/11], Archives New Zealand / The Department of Internal Affairs Te Tari Taiwhenua. The scheme publicised in the Auckland Star on 14 August 1974 appears above a covering article ‘Lost in the storm — hope for the future’ by John Roughhan [sic]. At the time, the Labour Government intended that the 687 hectare public land bank be made even larger: see Plan HDA (329) M 162/R2 ‘Plan of proposed land to be acquired for sub-regional centre and industrial purposes’ in the same MWD file series.
I have lately returned to Medium publication, after mostly limiting myself to comments and building up a store of new content, to be published over the weeks to come (readers may also wish to refer to ‘Powered by Aotearoa’, which came out last September.)
