A happy outcome for Takapuna golf? – Simon Wilson

Takapuna Golf Course: Convert to nine holes and a wetland to store floodwater, or can it be done a different way?

This is a transcript of Simon Wilson’s weekly newsletter Love this City – exploring the ideas and events, the reality and the potential of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. To sign up, click here, select Love this City and save your preferences.

Maybe it’s not flood management versus golf after all

There’s a chance that everyone will get what they want in the dispute over flood plans for Milford and the future of the Takapuna Golf Course. Everyone except one councillor, perhaps.

The golf course is at the south end of the Wairau Valley commercial precinct, hard against the Northern Motorway and right across from the suburb of Milford.

Milford and the Wairau Valley suffered the worst flooding in the city during the Anniversary Weekend storm two years ago. Two people diedthere and 69 were rescued by the Mairangi Bay Surf Life Saving Club, who were busy all night in their inflatables.

In the aftermath, 2500 tonnes of ruined household possessions were carted away from Milford alone and 131 homes have been designated Category 3. That means an “intolerable risk to life” remains and “cannot be mitigated”.

By way of comparison, by mid-February there were 114 Category 3 properties in Epsom and Mt Eden, 107 on the west coast beaches (after Cyclone Gabrielle) and 92 in Ranui and Swanson. Over 1000, all up.

Milford residents are desperate for history not to repeat. To help ensure this, the council’s Healthy Waters team has come up with a plan to convert the Takapuna Golf Course, on land the council owns, from 18 holes to nine. The balance would become a wetland to hold 550 million litres of floodwater, thus preventing it from sweeping through the suburb.

The Takapuna Golf Club is aghast and has spent a month, with experts, creating its own plan. This preserves all 18 holes and creates a “dry basin” catchment. The club says it will hold the same enormous amount of floodwater, although it won’t be a wildlife sanctuary or offer the informal recreation features of a wetland.

The Milford Residents Association, the golf club, the two local boards and officials from Healthy Waters all fronted up to a council meeting on Thursday. Healthy Waters sought council approval to proceed to a business case, with the aim of getting work underway as soon as possible. But it didn’t reject the new plan.

The golf people were very clear. “The Healthy Waters proposal will destroy New Zealand’s busiest and Auckland’s most popular public golf course,” they said. The club hosts 200,000 visits a year.

The alternative design presented by the Takapuna Golf Club.

The residents said: “After the storm, people had no clothes, people had no food, people had nowhere to go. You lose sight of that now, but for Milford it is still very real.”

They talked about the water rising over the piers in the estuary, at low tide, and the 90-year-old woman who was taken to safety in a wheelie bin.

They didn’t have a view on the golf club proposal, hadn’t seen it before, but they weren’t opposed to it. “We’re not opposed to anything that works,” they said.

They were also very clear about their main request: no delays.

“What we want in Milford is to know that this is not going to happen again. Do it quickly. Please, whatever you decide, make it happen.”

Local board reps said much the same. They supported the Healthy Waters plan but, as John Gillon from the Kaipātiki board said: “The golf club proposal needs to be looked at.”

Melissa Powell, from the Takapuna-Devonport board, talked about an elderly man found in his kitchen during the flood, standing on the bench, with the water only 20cm from the ceiling.

It was a “slap in the face for residents”, she said, that in Nile Rd, one of Milford’s main streets, a seven-home project was being built in the flood zone right now. Even though a Category 3 home next door has just been carted away.

Gillon and his colleague Danielle Grant wanted to stress they are not anti-golf. And, said Grant: “We want to squash online speculation that we want the golf course land to build houses on.”

Craig McIlroy, general manager of Healthy Waters, said: “We’ve only got one goal in this project, which is to come back with the best proposal. One that’s in line with the council’s requirements [for cost-efficiency and effectiveness], and meets the needs of the community.”

He regarded Healthy Waters’ proposal as “a baseline”. He gave an assurance Healthy Waters would have the golf club’s proposal reviewed by independent consultants WSP, in the same way as its own proposal had been reviewed. He did not think this would delay the process.

At that stage, everyone might have been pretty happy.

But then councillor Wayne Walker, who represents Albany, further to the north, proposed an amendment to open the process up to “anyone who might have a good idea”.

Forty-five minutes of “debate” later, deep into the afternoon, he finally got the message from his colleagues that this was a terrible idea.

It would delay the process, for who knew how long, thus horrifying the residents. And besides, as councillor Andy Baker pointed out, on pages 259-263 (no, that is not a typo) of the Healthy Waters report, it was explained that “option after option” had already been considered by WSP.

Walker’s motion was howled down, figuratively speaking. Councillors don’t actually howl.

In the end, the council accepted Healthy Waters’ assurance that it would assess the viability and affordability of the golf club’s proposal, and voted unanimously to move as quickly as it could to the business case and then public consultation stages of the process. The final decision rests with the Kaipātiki Local Board, which controls the lease.

Outside the town hall, where they were meeting, it was raining hard.

Just say no: AmCup and bed taxes

I’ve said it before: I don’t love the America’s Cup. Especially as the same sailors in exciting foiling boats will now be thrilling Aucklanders every summer for several years to come in SailGP. Why the AmCup as well?

But I guess that’s like saying we have rugby tests every year, so why bother with a World Cup? It’s a dumb argument, I do get that.

Emirates Team New Zealand and Ineos Britannia racing in the America’s Cup in Barcelona in 2024. Photo / Photosport

I also get why defending the America’s Cup here would be great for Auckland. The city’s economy depends on big events of all kinds, and none are bigger. The wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee analysis of the cup defence in Barcelona last year says there’s nearly $2 billion of economic activity at stake.

But the Government, which wants us to learn to say yes more often, has said no.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Finance Minister Nicola Willis have rejected an appeal from the council for the Crown to contribute $75 million to secure the defence in Auckland. For heaven’s sake, they’d earn more than that in the GST on hotel rooms.

“This was a golden opportunity to utilise purpose-built infrastructure and reap a timely economic return,” said Heart of the City chief executive Viv Beck. She’s so right.

Viv Beck is chief executive of Heart of the City.

Tourism Minister Louise Upston also has the Just Say No gene. She’s rejected the idea of a bed tax, despite the pleas of Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown and his deputy, Desley Simpson, the mayor of Queenstown and Local Government New Zealand.

That crack about GST wasn’t random: for some reason that doesn’t prevail in many other parts of the world, it seems the Government is the only one allowed to tax visitors.

I reported earlier this week that Auckland, with 36% of the country’s population, accounts for only 38% of economic activity. Main cities are supposed to do much better. London, for example, has 13% of the British population and produces 23% of its GDP; Paris has 18% and accounts for 31% of the French economy.

Will the Government be producing an Auckland plan that addresses this any time soon? Will it even be able to do so if it doesn’t take big events and visitor taxes seriously?

Into the west

Te Whau Pathway is on the move. This beautifully curving shared path follows the Whau River inland from Te Atatū and will one day snake for 12km all the way to Green Bay. It’s the old portage route for carrying your waka from one harbour to the other. One day it will be wonderful.

An artist's impression of the Te Whau Pathway along the coastal strip of the Whau River.

Expensive, too. The Government has chipped in almost $50m, with the council contributing a few million more. It’s not an Auckland Transport project, but is being developed by the Whau Coastal Walkway Environmental Trust, and future funding is uncertain, so progress will be slow.

Last month, though, residents near the western end were given the chance to walk and ride along the sections completed and now under construction.

The trust has some impressive numbers. It believes the pathway will be used by 113,150 cyclists and 226,300 pedestrians, and generate 164,250 cycle trips, every year. It will provide a safe route for 18,000 students attending 38 schools in the Whau catchment area.

It will also connect to 33 parks and reserves and the suburbs of Te Atatū South, Glendene, Kelston, New Lynn, Avondale, Blockhouse Bay and Green Bay. Which also means, thanks to the existing shared paths at Te Atatū, New Lynn and Avondale, it will link to safe routes all the way into the city.

Clever no more

The future of cheaper, faster housing construction is off-site. What we used to call prefabrication. Or should that be “the past”?

Fletcher Building has announced that in June it will close its Clever Core factory, the country’s largest high-tech plant making walls, floors and roofs.

Fletcher Building's Clever Core off-site construction factory in Wiri.

When Clever Core opened in Wiri in 2019, hopes were high. Fletcher said it hoped to cut on-site build times “from 22 weeks to around six-to-10 weeks”.

Core structural components would be mass-produced in the factory in as little as a day. “Manufactured wall, floor and roof components, which contain locally sourced insulation, double-glazed windows and allowances for wiring and plumbing” would then be “transferred to build sites and constructed into the weather-tight core of a house by specially trained builders”.

What a good thing.

Now, the company says: “Despite the many benefits, the volumes required to be commercially viable have not materialised, due in part to the challenging market downturn and a reluctance within the New Zealand housing industry to adopt off-site manufacturing at scale.”

Relevant to this: Stats NZ announced last month that new-home building consents fell 7.2% in the year to January 2025, compared with the year to January 2024.

From the weird and wonderful world of Auckland Transport

1: Light show. Auckland Transport (AT) is installing “in-ground” lighting for inner-city on-road car parks where you can park at some times, but not others. Clearways, for example. As in many parking buildings, if the light is on, you can park there.

Network operations manager Andrew Allen explained this week that this was “easier to understand” than signs, which he believed people found difficult to decipher.

“We’ve taken it to the Waitematā Local Board,” he said, “and they are also quite excited.”

He paused, and then added, “I hope I’m not overstating that.”

2: AI cone identification. AT is trialling an AI (artificial intelligence) method of identifying the excessive use of road cones. No word on whether it’ll send out robots to vaporise them.

AT chief executive Dean Kimpton has taken to pointing out that only 30% of the cones on Auckland roads were put there by his organisation. He wants everyone who puts out cones to put up signs saying who did this, so people won’t blame AT so much.

3: Billion-dollar bonanza. AT has awarded a billion-dollar contract to Ritchies Transport to run “expanded services” in the south and west over the next nine years. It includes 175 new e-buses.

4: Vibrating tables. AT has had complaints about “a small number” of raised pedestrian “platforms” or “tables”: when heavy vehicles go over them, the ground at nearby properties vibrates. The problem stems from instability in the earth and rock beneath the roads.

Two platforms are being replaced in Titirangi and Blockhouse Bay and five more are “under investigation”.

AT notes that these platforms were installed as traffic calming measures, often at the request of schools and other community groups.

5: Working from home. More people now have a Hop card (or travel-enabled credit card or phone) than before Covid, but we’re taking fewer trips with them.

In February 2020, just before Covid, 423,900 cards were used an average of 10.8 times. In February this year, 553,600 cards (and other contactless methods) were used an average of 7.6 times. That’s working from home for you.

On now in Tāmaki Makaurau

Lost Dogs' Disco, artwork by ENESS, in Aotea Square until late April. Photo / Simon Wilson

Lost Dogs’ Disco: A giant inflatable immersive musical sculpture has popped up in Aotea Square and, wow, that’s what I call art.

The work of Melbourne art and technology studio ENESS, it features 16 brilliantly coloured dogs you can walk among, pat and, I don’t know, say, “Who’s a good dog” to, and they’ll grunt back at you.

This is what the council says: “Sometimes in the dead of night, when houses rattle and hum with the snoring dark and a dog is no longer a puppy but not quite a dog, they will hear the call of ancestors and embark upon a secret journey to the Lost Dogs’ Disco – a place of learning, revelry, insight and discovery where dogs are gifted their deep human insight – the gentleness that understands and heals all human hearts.

“It’s the place where they learn to love doggedly, dance biggedly and be free to their hearts’ content. The only time that dogs go back to the Lost Dogs’ Disco is when they lose their way: when shut out of warm houses, when the snacks forever run dry, when their owners suddenly disappear. It’s then that they return to the Lost Dogs’ Disco. Here, their understanding for all lost souls deepens in their little doggy hearts and they know that everyone feels lost at times.

“When you are a lost dog, our dogs say come to the disco where dance, togetherness and being true get you through. If you feel like a lost dog, just go disco!”

Just gonna leave that with you. It’s a free event but not a forever one: the dogs will disappear on Friday, April 25.

Three Forty One – The Climate Musical: In the Simeon Brown heartland of deepest Pakuranga, the Eastgate Christian Centre is hosting the Toitoi Collective’s Three Forty One: The Climate Musical. Written by former Baptist minister Steve Worsley, it’s a full-blown show about a wedding party from New Zealand whose plans go seriously awry on an island not unlike Tuvalu.

Beautifully sung by a cast of 19, more than half of them Pasifika, the show is funny, insightful and urgent. Think The White Lotus, only set on this planet, not a fantasy playground. Two shows left: Friday April 4 and Saturday April 5.

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