“There were 500 houses built in Tītahi Bay by prefab,” he remembers. “The first people into them didn’t have anything. No furniture, no money, no nothing. I remember taking a Māori fella to his new State house and he didn’t have anything, so I took him to the dairy down on brewery street corner … and said, ‘give him what he wants and let me know the amount’. And six months later, he came to me and said ‘Peter I got a job. I got some money for you’ and he paid me back what he owed me. That’s what we did.”
