Labour began 14 years of frantic and well-planned house-building throughout New Zealand, building decent, solid, well-constructed homes on quarter-acre sections for families to rent from the state.
Labour managed to empty the inner city suburbs of Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin of families living in Victorian-era, run-down, leaky and unsafe slum housing.
Labour also pepper-potted state housing areas in every town and just about every village throughout the country, ensuring that young families, no matter where they lived, had access to decent rental accommodation.
This housing programme also included houses built for iwi, railway staff, pool houses for government servants, police housing, defence housing and Ministry of Works villages, Turangi and Twizel being just two examples of this concept.
No working family, sick or old people needed to live in private rental accommodation in run-down neighbourhoods if they did not want to.
New Zealand should forever be thankful to that Labour government for ensuring its citizens were warmly and safely housed.
National, when it came into office in 1949, continued Labour's sterling role in providing decent housing for New Zealanders.
By then the huge state house suburbs including Taita, Naenae and Waiwhetu were well and truly under way with thousands of houses being built, shopping centres and community facilities planned and under construction on old farm and market garden land.
National introduced legislation to enable a young couple to elect to buy their state house from the government, this taking effect from 1950 with many thousands becoming homeowners overnight.
People could either elect to rent or buy their homes with help from the State Advances Corporation.
They could also obtain finance to build their own homes on sections peppered among the planned housing estates.
National is to be thanked for providing a generation of young people, lives torn apart by the Depression and then World War II, with the chance to better themselves and provide their children with the security of growing up in a home actually owned by Mum and Dad.
Families tended to stay in their homes for years or, if the kids kept coming in those pre-pill and TV days, upgrading via the State Advances Corporation, into homes with bigger or more bedrooms, usually in the same neighbourhood so friends were kept and children did not have to move school.
The other option was adding one or two bedrooms on, these old state houses lending themselves easily to such modifications.
National also begun the huge state housing estates in Porirua, Titahi Bay and South Auckland as New Zealand's population exploded after the war.
Birth rates were climbing and immigration from the United Kingdom and Europe of much-needed skilled people was taking place.
There seemed to be little between National and Labour in their compassion around housing until someone decided that the market should set the rent rates in the 1990s.
Since then, rents have sky-rocketed, house prices are unbelievable and unattainable for many young people, particularly from the working end of town.
The very demographic targeted by National in 1950 to own their own homes has been ignored for so long the housing problem in this country has almost become insurmountable for both tenants and first-time buyers.
Visiting my old home town of Naenae recently I was shocked to see large tracts of green grass where once state houses stood.
These houses were either demolished or removed but have not been replaced. These were three and four-bedroom homes, much needed now.
Which crazy government policy allowed this to happen? One would assume the land is still government-owned.
Cannot Housing New Zealand or the local council urgently build some modern, high-density homes on this land?
Places such as Naenae are becoming ghost towns when once they were held up internationally as the pride of New Zealand's housing development.
