It must be an election year. Ministers are lining up to throw their biggest flops onto the policy bonfire. Even better when it was championed by a minister from another party in the Coalition Government.
Last weekend, National’s conservation spokesperson, Tama Potaka, promised to undo a notorious amendment to the Hauraki Gulf Tīkapa Moana Marine Protection Bill allowing commercial ring-net fishing operators exclusive access to high protection areas.
At the time, the cave-in to commercial interests was greeted with incredulity. Although Potaka’s press release tried to give the impression that it was a Coalition decision, it had Shane Jones’ fingerprints all over it, an impression the 14th Minister for Oceans and Fisheries did nothing to dispel.
Now, as Potaka promises to review the amendment along with the much-loathed ‘trawl corridors’ in the Gulf, the sound of Jones grinding his teeth can be heard by snorkelers in the kelp gardens of Enclosure Bay.
Another stick lobbed on to the policy bonfire is the proposed ban on Paywave surcharges. The bill, apparently an attempt to rein in inflation, was slammed by shop owners and economists who pointed out that it would in fact increase inflation.
And then there is Chris Bishop’s supposed U-turn on housing intensification in Auckland.
The Herald explained the change like this: “Housing Minister Chris Bishop today announced sweeping changes to Auckland’s densification plans, cutting the city’s theoretical housing capacity from two million homes to 1.6 million.”
As these were Bishop’s own plans, hotly endorsed by the mayor, The Herald’s next paragraph made intriguing reading.
“Auckland Minister and Pakuranga MP Simeon Brown called today’s announcement a significant win for Auckland, reducing by 23 percent the housing capacity the Auckland Council is required to plan for, and focusing growth where it actually makes sense.”
Hang on. The two million figure was, of course, bollocks, because it assumed that everyone allowed to bulldoze the family home to build an apartment block was going to do so.
“Someone, somewhere, started spinning the line that there would be two million additional houses”, spluttered Newsroom’s Jonathan Milne, “which is as explosive as a pile of bull-crap with a vape battery poked into it as a detonator.” As he pointed out, “The final 400,000 dwellings that were never, realistically, going to be built, will still never be built.”
If the announcement was a “significant win”, on paper anyway, it was for the Member for Pakuranga and the Member for Epsom, ministers with numbers of empurpled voters in their electorates who love the idea of urban density, just not where they can see it.
I almost feel sorry for Bishop, who for months has been trying to explain that two million houses were never about to sprout in Auckland.
As Waiheke Islanders, we know the pain of losing amenities like banks and post office boxes, and most would agree that affordable housing needs to be close to jobs and childcare and grocery shops and bus stops. City streets where lots of people live also need expensive hidden stuff, like water infrastructure.
Cyclone Gabrielle ravaged areas where new building can’t conceivably be encouraged – land prone to floods or slips, in our wetter, warming world. Plan Change 120 restricts development, or ‘down-zones’ on some 12,000 properties in places like these.
So, where should the council ‘up-zone’? Clearly, in areas closer to jobs, with water capacity and transport hubs. Mt Eden has a new City Rail Link station; Kingsland with its rapid bus routes and train stations; St Mary’s Bay and Ponsonby, within ‘walking catchment’ of the city centre – oh, and Epsom, home to four train stations.
Epsom’s MP is David Seymour, and he is now insisting that Auckland Council get Cabinet sign-off for its new plans.
Wayne Brown told The Spinoff’s Hayden Donnell that he’d rather keep the existing plan than submit a new one to be signed off by “a bunch of turkeys that don’t live in Auckland. We’ll just stick with the two million houses,” he said, before adding for Seymour’s benefit, “Most of those will be in Epsom.”
He was joking, although if Auckland is ever going to become a great city, it is going to need to bring people and public transport together. Like New York, where the subway increases the value of nearby apartments so much that it has been seriously suggested that landlords should recompense the cash-strapped Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The subway “is making some people very, very wealthy without paying into the system,” the president of the Regional Plan Association complained to The New York Times.
Although Bishop’s plan looked like more kindling for the policy bonfire, Seymour hasn’t got his way yet.
“Yesterday’s announcement [on housing density] was a hollow victory for Epsomites,” wrote Donnell. “They helped get rid of the big bad scary number, two million. But as Bishop kept trying to tell them, that number wasn’t real. What matters more is where development is allowed, and as things stand, it’s still set to be allowed in their backyard.”
• Jenny Nicholls
© Waiheke Gulf News Ltd 2025
