Book of the week

Rottenomics: The Story of New Zealand’s Leaky Building Disaster by Peter Dyer (Bateman Books, $31.99)

Few New Zealanders have been untouched by the unfolding catastrophe of the leaky buildings disaster. Getting sick through mould-infested homes, losing their life savings trying to fix them, or simply through having to pay the astronomical national bill for this avoidable crisis, none of us are unscathed – and it’s not over yet.

Dyer describes it as our biggest human-made disaster, and in

financial terms, he’s probably right. He puts the cost, based on an unpublished government report he dug out, at more than $49 billion, with more to come. All of us are paying higher rates because our local councils have ended up footing the bill for the careless incompetence of our national politicians and those who advised them, who took a functioning building safety system and wrecked it.

If all this sounds too strong, you should read this book. The first and only comprehensive investigation into the disaster, it is meticulous, well-sourced and referenced.

What went wrong? Dyer, a selftaught investigative journalist, has done an outstanding job in getting literally to the roots of the issue – namely our reliance on Pinus radiata. Promoted post-war as a fix to a timber shortage, it was also prone to rot. Fortunately, farsighted research by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) and sensible regulation literally found a solution, in the form of boric treatment.

Unfortunately, by the 1980s, although this carefully regulated treatment regime ensured buildings were rot and insect-proof, there were calls – no doubt genuine

– to reduce red tape and meet a demand for more buildings, more quickly. The solution two Treasury officials suggested was a ‘‘performance-based’’ system – essentially one which replaced inspectors and regulation with the idea that the market would somehow police itself. So key industry regulators were either scrapped or made toothless, and their budgets slashed.

This combined with what Dyer calls a perfect storm of a cascade of new building materials – such as mono-cladding, and sealants – architects and designers who did not how to use them properly, and the deliberate destruction of a local

and national regulation and inspection system in the name of freeing up a system which admittedly needed reform. Not to mention hollowing out the training system for apprentices, so that when they were most needed, skilled tradespeople were thinner on the ground.

It is an allegory for our post-war trajectory – a brilliant home-grown solution to a timber shortage, provided it was treated and used properly – thrown away in haste.

If there is a lesson, it is the pitifully bad state of policy advice, and political leadership of this industry. Some of the most chilling lines in the book are the selfcongratulatory quotes from MPs in 1991 as they passed the Building Act which unleashed the storm.

Perhaps the most telling statistic in the book is buried near the end. In 1988, we were spending 11 per cent of our income on housing. By 2015, that had risen to 28 percent. Dyer fails to mention rising land values no doubt account for some of this worsening, but his point is still valid. The ‘‘reforms’’ failed even at the one thing they set out to do – reduce costs.

It is a further irony, and not a credit to our own journalists (myself included) that it took Dyer, a recent migrant, to write this important book. – James Hollings