Seddon's State Houses - The Workers' Dwellings Act 1905 and the Heretaunga Settlement

Monograph No. 1, 1984, conditions slighty vary. One very good, the other slightly faded.
Inspired by the new workers' houses he saw being built by the local councils in London and Glasgow in the late 1890s, the Prime Minister of the time, Richard Seddon, returned home determined to give the New Zealand worker a real `stake' in his country - a freehold, five-roomed house he could afford and be proud of. Mutterings in the House of `incest' and `moral tyrpitude' in crowded city slums stirred him and the Liberal government to introduce the first attempt at providing houses for workers - State houses.