Anderton back to the future

Jim Anderton and owner Chau Kam Chang at the Mangere Bridge house he built in 1962. Picture / Kenny Rodger

Cabinet Minister and Progressive MP Jim Anderton is wandering through his past, and he's thoroughly enjoying it. He's back at the modest Mangere Bridge house he had built in 1962 with the help of a lump-sum family benefit payment, a capitalisation scheme he wants reintroduced.

Mr Anderton, 67, is relishing the nostalgia trip, laughing that the broken ceiling lampshade appears to be the one he accidentally smashed some 40 years ago while practising his golf swing.

In the master bedroom, he spies the brushed metal lamp installed in 1962, now a retro classic. Look at those mellow rimu floorboards, he marvels, and the dark red bricks surrounding the fireplace: "I chose those. In its day this house was quite a stylish place."

He admits to having driven past the three-bedroom Wellesley St property on odd occasions over the years, just for a nosy.

The occupant of the well-kept Huntly-brick home since Mr Anderton's 1967 departure, Cantonese migrant Chau Kam Chang, 73, hovers, delighted with the visit and insistent that people tuck into her just-baked rich chocolate cake.

Young families struggle to save a deposit, says Mr Anderton, "and there's nothing worse than having to move every time their landlord wants to sell up".

But if they are allowed to capitalise their benefits over six years for the first child, he says, they will get enough for a deposit on a $200,000 home. They would enjoy security and "a sense of belonging in their community".

Mr Anderton's scheme could become a chip in any coalition negotiations, and has come directly out of his own experience.

He and then-wife Joan Caulfield capitalised on the family benefit for their first child Jillian, born in 1961, to the tune of £1000 (in today's terms, $33,400).

In 1962 they put a deposit of £700 ($23,500) on the quarter acre, a sunny slope angled towards Ambury Park.

It cost them a further £3000 ($100,300) to build the house, helped by a 3 per cent mortgage.

In those days, banks were not "all fuzzy and cuddly"; Mr Anderton says he and his wife would have struggled to save the deposit themselves.

Their equity helped him launch an engineering business and later buy the family the bigger house it needed as the children kept coming.

Anderton's pledge

* A family on $35,000 in 2007 would get $104 a week for their first child under Labour's Working For Families package.

* Capitalisation of four years of family financial support would earn $21,632.

* With a 10 per cent deposit, a family could buy a house for $216,320 with a mortgage of $194,688.

* This option would assume a 30-year mortgage at 7.25 per cent and weekly repayments of $277.