Dialogue: 50 years of taking the cheap way out

By GARTH GEORGE

I had to smile when I read our lead story on Tuesday about overcrowded schools and temporary classrooms.

Particularly the comments of John Morris, headmaster of Auckland Grammar: "What they [the Education Ministry] want to do is throw a whole lot of prefabs here, but we don't want any more. We've already got 22, and half are over 50 years old."

He's right, because I was at school 50 years ago and I remember the arrival of the first prefabs at primary schools way down the bottom of the South Island. Some of them obviously ended up at Auckland Grammar, too.

It wasn't too long before there were complaints about them, not from school headmasters and headmistresses but from education boards, school committees and home and school associations (remember them?).

School heads would never have dreamed of complaining publicly. They were genuine civil servants then and, even if it had crossed their minds to criticise their employer in the press, the penalties would have been rapid and severe.

The early prefabs were something of a novelty because prefabrication of buildings was something new. Perhaps they were the first to be built by that method, which is more common than not these days in everything from houses to skyscrapers.

But those who had to teach and learn in them would nod their heads today to read the comments of Allan Peachey, principal of Rangitoto College: "Having prefabs is just a tip to pour money down. They're designed to be temporary but ... they have become permanent."

They were never satisfactory. One of their major drawbacks, at least in the deep south, was that they were draughty and almost impossible to heat. Sitting in such classrooms clad in an overcoat, scarf and fingerless mittens was conducive neither to teaching nor learning.

It is perhaps telling that today's complaints, which echo those made 50 years ago, arise for the same reason - the inability of politicians and bureaucrats to see past the end of any financial year.

Schools are not the only institutions to have been deprived of adequate capital for buildings over the decades. The same has applied to all Government buildings from departmental offices to hospitals, to police stations.

I recall the completion back in the late 1960s of a new Government building in Invercargill which was intended to accommodate all departments.

Yet within a matter of months of its opening amid great political pomp and ceremony, some departments were looking for extra office space elsewhere.

The Auckland central police station was too small from the day it opened and today, were it subject to the laws and regulations that afflict most of us, would be condemned as uninhabitable.

The saddest thing today about the prefabs and overcrowded schools is that the situation has continued, nay worsened, under a Labour Government.

One of the reasons I voted Labour at the last election was that I considered a Labour Government - quit of the Douglasses, Prebbles, Caygills et al - would begin to address the vast basic problems created in our society by years of Rogernomics and Ruthanasia.

I expected Labour, particularly with the Alliance in tow, to get to work quickly to renovate the crumbling defence and police forces, a far-too-liberal Judiciary, and health, education and pension systems so ordinary Kiwi battlers once again felt the sense of security that comes from trust in a benign state.

I have been sadly disappointed. More than two years of this Government's term have passed and in the basic areas things have become worse rather than better.

The basics have been glossed over while money has been thrown at luxuries such as paid parental leave, "the arts" and Maori television (plus a lot of other things Maori as well).

And while I can understand the vote-catching reasons for these indulgences, they do not explain why this Government continues to rate so highly in the polls. It has not done what it said it would do. In terms of those services basic to our well-being we are certainly not better off.

It doesn't help that there is really no alternative. Despite the bravado of Michelle Boag and the beavering away of Bill English, the National Party is in disarray and there seems little chance of it pulling itself together in the next 10 months or so.

It seems that the best we can hope for is the return of Labour, but with a sufficient majority to govern alone, or at least without needing the support of those people who call themselves Greens but who are really reds in drag.

* garth_george@nzherald.co.nz