Kieran McAnulty is severely underrated: How Chris Bishop Got Away with Blowing Up Kāinga Ora & State Housing

Feb 08, 2025

Last week, Kieran McAnulty called out Chris Bishop and Nicola Willis for their claims that Kāinga Ora’s costs were too high.

They had claimed Kāinga Ora’s cost were 12% higher than market i.e. private devlopers

But Kāinga Ora’s Chair had already explained why last year:

"We're not building to sell, so we'll be maintaining these houses over an extended multi-decade period. So we want to make sure that we're putting in the right fittings etcetera that will, at the right cost, be better.
"The other thing that is quite a big factor for us is the land that we hold isn't always optimally configured and property developers can pick and choose what land is going to be the lowest cost to build on - which is partly topology, but partly sort of form factor, etcetera, which leads to greater efficiencies - and we don't always have those degrees of freedom."

McAnulty also pointed this out last week:

"70% of the people in Kāinga Ora homes have a disability, so building these homes for these people is not the average residential dwelling that the private sector would build ... they have wider doorways, they have special aspects to them that cost money.”

Note this quote was only found in the RNZ coverage that I scanned.

You didn’t hear it in NZ Herald’s Jamie Ensor report, or God fordid, Newstalk ZB which led with that Labour was just“perplexed” with Bishop’s plans.

Ditto interest.co.nz’s Dan Brunskill coverage - missing of course.

Nor an anoymous 1News reporter’s report.

Why?

"I think Chris Bishop's full of it ... it's all PR and it's all about saving money, rather than housing people.”

- McAnulty

McAnulty was also spot on with his criticism of the Bill English report - which I also covered as one of my first pieces on this Substack:

It was "not based on fact", McAnulty pointed out.
"The review was a crock. It just so happened to land in the exact same conclusion that [the] previous National government were heading - it was preconceived, in my view.
"The board of Kāinga Ora pointed out factual inaccuracies throughout the report, and this government has ignored it. Their response was to replace the board."

This is all very important context which the majority of our major media outlets have ignored.

Again - why?

Do they feel that it’s unimportant?
Are they under-resourced?
Do they not feel McAnulty’s points are valid and true?

After all the respected Newsroom had covered many of those points in detail last year, so they are all factually verified.

Heck, you could even read a Substack from some weird bird creature called Mountain Tui and discover some of the same.

To be fair, The Post published a contextual article by Max Rashbrooke yesterday which pointed some of this out - but as usual, it’s the first articles that make the deepest impressions - and this Government knows it.

Rashbrooke:

National’s attempt to undermine [Kāinga Ora’s] success takes two forms.
The first is to complain about Kāinga Ora’s debts. But as Howden-Chapman noted last year, “Has anyone ever bought a house or built a house without doing any borrowing?”….
But even National’s anointed Kāinga Ora chair, Simon Moutter, noted that private developers can “pick and choose” their sites, while his agency must work with awkwardly situated land.
It also builds many disability-friendly homes and has sought the highest environmental ratings….
We must also remember that Kāinga Ora had to start almost afresh.
Under the previous National government, more state houses were sold than built; a deficit of about 14,000 homes – relative to population growth – accrued, deepening the catastrophic sales under Jim Bolger in the 1990s. John Key’s government also did “almost no” renewals of ageing stock, according to Kāinga Ora.

In May of last year, McAnulty, on Kāinga Ora, also said this about Kāinga Ora in Parliament. I’m copying large parts of it because I think that is completely spot on -

On numerous occasions, the Prime Minister mentioned that debt had gone up from $3 billion to $12 billion.
At no point did the Prime Minister mention the asset value that had been accumulated in that time, that had gone from roughly $20 billion to roughly $45 billion in six years.
Why? Because they are trying to paint a picture. They are trying desperately to undermine an organisation that had to start from scratch.
Actually, that's inaccurate: they had to start beyond and behind the starting line, because when we came in in 2017, and when Kāinga Ora was established in 2018, Housing New Zealand was a shell of an organisation.
It existed for one reason and one reason only, and that was to sell State houses.
It was a shame, it was a disgrace, and we had to build that up from nothing, change the outlook. That is what, supposedly, was in review yesterday. It was what, supposedly, is under financial strain.
What amazed me was it seemed like the Prime Minister and the housing Minister only realised that it costs money to build houses, and a lot of houses—14,000 is the number that public houses increased by in the last six years.
That is an astronomical number in the context of what Housing New Zealand was and what Kāinga Ora has become.
By all means, we should always look for efficiencies, but the attitude—it was astounding. They've given up—they have given up. They have not even committed to continuing at the same level.
I find the actions of those two Ministers yesterday to be disingenuous—disingenuous because throughout the campaign, both of them made a promise to New Zealanders.
They promised that their Government would build more houses than the Labour Government.
So to achieve that, that's 14,001-plus, and what have we seen in the last seven months? Absolutely nothing.
We've seen blaming and we've seen dodging around the issues, and we've seen claims that I believe to be disingenuous.

I’m starting to think McAnulty is severely under-reported - especially for the quality of analysis he provides.

And once again, despite my fervent desire for a successful and effective media, the industry has a lot to answer for when it comes to the key points.

For months, and possibly years before hand, NZ Herald & Stuff etc. has been leading with headlines like this - stoking rage about Kāinga Ora and quoting from competition developers:

Coughlin also headlined an article last year called “Put on your dancing shoes Christopher Luxon, the rock star economy is back for an encore”

There’s also a reason why Kāinga Ora is one of the few Government organisations that have valiantly retained its Māori name under the National, ACT, New Zealand First friendly coalition government.

They didn’t even try.

As I wrote early last year - the knives were already out for Kāinga Ora from the very start.

And in my opinion, nothing was going to stop them from making it real.

They just did - thanks to a complicit and/or weak media landscape.