(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, July 29.)
The house I live in was built in 1916. My wife and I plan a
party next year to celebrate its centenary.
Of all the houses we’ve owned (this is number seven), it’s
the one in which I've felt most at home.
It was built in what architectural historians call the
transitional villa style, an intermediate stage between the traditional villa
of the late 19th century and the Californian bungalow that became
fashionable after World War I.
It’s by no means grand, but the rooms are generously
proportioned. It incorporates some lovely woodwork and leadlight glass.
Traditional materials were used (native timber weatherboard,
matai flooring, corrugated iron roof), but the house has some unusual features,
including charming round leadlight windows that my architectural draughtsman
brother told me are known as aurioles.
And boy, was it strongly built. When a builder cut a hole
between two rooms to put in French doors several years ago, he marvelled at how
sturdy the interior walls were.
Two powerful earthquakes in 1942 – 7.2 and 6.8 respectively
on the Richter scale – caused mayhem in Masterton, where we live, but the only
damage suffered by our house was the loss of a brick chimney (one of thousands
that toppled in the town).
Now here’s my point. You can be sure that whoever built our
house had no formal training or qualifications. No one in the building trade did then. I’m
not even sure that councils employed building inspectors.
But houses of that era were built to last. My own
grandfather was a builder in Palmerston North whose proudest
creation, a magnificent 1904 villa called Kaingahou, has a category II rating
from Heritage New Zealand and is regarded as a showpiece.
Contrast this with the situation I heard described on Radio
New Zealand’s Nine to Noon programme
last week. Complaints about substandard building work have risen by 30 per cent
this year. In Auckland, one-third of building inspections result in a “fail”.
Some of the failings were detailed on the programme. They
included fundamental stuff like concrete blocks not lining up, gaps and cracks
in foundations and walls out of true. Nine
to Noon host Kathryn Ryan described some of the photos she was shown as
“shockers”.
Auckland Council’s manager of building control partly
attributed the problem to the city’s building boom, which he says has created
jobs for a lot of inexperienced people.
Same old, same old. The building industry has always been
prone to boom-and-bust cycles.
I couldn’t help thinking that if standards are so poor now,
how bad might they get when the promised increase in housing construction
starts in Auckland?
But what I most wanted to know was how all this could
happen just three and a half years after the government, amid much fanfare, launched
the Licensed Building Practitioner (LBP) scheme.
It was introduced in response to the disastrous leaky homes
crisis and was supposed to ensure, if I recall correctly, that shoddy building
work would be a thing of the past.
The scheme imposed a cumbersome new bureaucracy on the
building trade and required tradesmen to jump through all manner of hoops in
order to demonstrate competence. A builder friend of mine was almost apoplectic
at what he called suffocating control by meddling bureaucrats, which he argued
would raise building costs, stifle innovation and create barriers to
employment.
The supreme irony, to me, was that the scheme appeared to
enhance the power of the very same bureaucracy that had presided over the leaky
homes epidemic in the first place.
And what has been the result? More shoddy building work.
Ryan got an admission out of the Auckland Council building control manager (who was commendably frank) that we were at risk of another leaky buildings
catastrophe.
I waited for her to ask him the obvious question: how could this
happen so soon after the introduction of an elaborate scheme expressly created
to prevent it? She never did.
I was left to conclude that when you combine political
pressure to “do something” about a problem (such as leaky homes) with a naïve
faith in the power of regulations to change people’s behaviour, the results are
rarely the ones desired.
We have recently seen another example of this. Parental
smacking was banned in 2007, supposedly to reduce New Zealand’s shocking
incidence of violence against children.
It has done nothing of the sort, just as critics of the
anti-smacking law predicted. In fact reported child abuse rates increased by 83 per cent
between 2008 and 2013.
All that has happened is that a lot of good parents have been
subjected unnecessarily to the stigma and unpleasantness of police investigations for
harmless acts of parental discipline.
Similarly, I confidently predict that this year’s reduction
in the drink-driving limit will have minimal impact on the road toll.
Responsible people have cut back their alcohol intake, even if their
consumption was moderate to start with, but reckless drunks will continue to
behave as they always have.
It seems there are some lessons we just never learn.