TV review

(they were funded as a pair way back in 2012). That is, it starts off with a depiction of New Zealand as an idyll, where Bruce’s parents and he could buy a house with a governmentbacked mortgage for twice their annual salary.

Then: disaster! Reagan and Thatcher and Douglas and neoliberalism.

This history lesson is not without merit — it’s useful for people to know how much easier it was to buy into housing for prior generations. But the framing of this era as an idyll is inescapably a Pakeha one: he talks about the descent from a homeownership rate of 74 per cent then to 64 per cent today, without ever acknowledging that at the same peak, the rate was under 60 per cent for Maori and 50 per cent for Pacific people. Like so many good-old-days narratives, he fails to acknowledge that the old days were particularly good for a specific type of person.

The fixation on neoliberalism is hardly unique to Bruce, but it does seem a form of stylistic throatclearing. It helps cement the point that this is ultimately an intensely Winstonian world view: pining for days of statist control and viewing Asian money with deep suspicion.

Having relived the 80s we head off overseas. There’s Ireland, where we see the after-effects of a construction boom — plummeting prices, an odd thing to fret about in this context.

There’s Turin, where we visit a leafy apartment building where units go for $1 million-plus — but they had to wait three years for resource consent (I’m not sure what the point is either).

Mostly, there’s Canada. That’s where we meet the guy talking about a trillion Chinese dollars at the start — an associate professor at the mid- ranking Simon Fraser University. After this mission, Bruce feels confident enough to issue a verdict.

“There is that sense in New Zealand that we don’t want to upset the Chinese — and that talking about Chinese money raises racial issues.”

Quite. That is why Labour was so castigated for it a couple of years back. Yet it’s the most persistent thread throughout the documentary, and overwhelms what is worthwhile about it — most notably its segment on rental protection and communal flat ownership in Germany.

Yet such international solutions to our housing issues are forgone in favour of race-baiting and a Bruce family history.

That self-involvement is understandable. Who Owns New Zealand Now? was written, directed, produced and line-edited by one man: Bryan Bruce — whose production company Red Sky has been NZ on Air-funded 18 times in 18 years, totalling just shy of $4.5m.

Among those have been titles of merit — but this is not one of them. Instead it’s an indulgent, cheaply made and presented travelogue with undertones of old-fashioned nostalgia and scaremongering. It should not have been made.