Bruce Bisset: Errors of Auckland could spread

Certainly iwi outside of Auckland should be alarmed in case Ngati Whatua and Waikato-Tainui accede to the Government's argument, says Bruce Bisset. Pictured is Housing Minister Nick Smith. Photo / NZME.

The government's late, flawed, and piecemeal recognition and response to Auckland's housing crisis means New Zealand as a whole risks having to deal with a grab-bag of impromptu legislation that strips away basic protections around land use and development.

In its frantic endeavour to devise workable mechanisms to address the issue of too few houses to cope with too much growth, National has already thrown away rules for established urban limits and preserving greenbelts and productive land around the metropolis.

Now it seems bent on over-ruling heritage protections, is contemplating forced-purchase regulations, and is trying to ignore Treaty of Waitangi settlement protocols by selling Crown land without giving iwi first option. That's not to mention the flouting - or at least, wilful neglect of a need for reform - of overseas investment rules, which significantly contributes to the crisis.

We in Hawke's Bay, as doubtless those in other provinces, might on one hand chuckle at the plight of the poor asset-rich Jafas and on the other wish we had a tenth of the growth problems Aucklanders must deal with. But while residents of the Big Smoke may be consoled with galloping equity - more than $100,000 increase in average house values in the past year - the rest of us will get nothing to offset the mishmash of "reforms" Government pushes through.

For as much as said reforms are supposedly metro-centric, you can bet your hard-earned dollars investors and developers will find imaginative ways to apply "Auckland arguments" to property deals elsewhere.

As case law builds, much-vaunted protections will cave in under such attack. Given National's predisposition to neuter the RMA and let free-market economics rule all, it would not surprise if, for example, Hastings district's staunch rules preserving highly productive land around city boundaries are soon being chipped away.

To date the Environment Court has stood firm in backing such rules. But if Government shifts the goalposts and undermines base law, the court will invariably have to alter the slant of its decisions.

When that happens, we will have the worst of the "solutions" without any benefit from the "problems", all because National cannot decouple from its hands-off ideological stance.

So when a crisis like this arises, the party is psychologically unable to cope. It is so unused to devising practical hands-on solutions that it fails entirely, grabbing any policy that sounds good with no clue as to whether it will work - or what the repercussions might be.

Already it has blundered into a constitutional fight with iwi over pre-emptive rights to "excess" Crown land.

Government's excuse - that it is selling the land to solve a social problem, namely lack of housing - is only valid at first glance. Sadly Maori can easily recall the hundreds of sites and thousands of hectares taken from them last century under the Public Works Act for military, education, and health purposes, among others. This proposition is no different.

Having fought for recognition that many of those sites were unjustifiably taken, unused, or misused, and battled long - starting with Raglan golf course in the 1970s - to win some recompense, it is difficult to imagine Maori now happily giving up their hard-won Crown concession of first right of refusal, no matter the reason.

Certainly iwi outside of Auckland should be alarmed in case Ngati Whatua and Waikato-Tainui accede to the Government's argument, for that precedent could then be applied countrywide.

This whole sorry mess reveals the myth of the free-market ethos. The market has failed to correct itself, and its champions, being unskilled at intervention, are proved hopelessly inept.

As if we didn't see that coming. That's the right of it.

Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.