Greg McKeown reckons some political candidates can be compared to chameleons. Photo / Unsplash
Greg McKeown reckons some political candidates can be compared to chameleons. Photo / Unsplash
Opinion by Greg McKeown
OPINION
Chameleons change colour to reflect a desire to mate and also to blend better into their environment. Attend a few public meetings and you’ll see some political candidates doing the latter, saying things on the hustings that contradict what their party has done prior to the arrival of theelection campaign season.
The question I’ve been asking is, “How might we best provide more warm, dry and affordable housing in urban areas? Is it best achieved by imposing blanket intensification across our larger cities?”
More than 65 per cent of voters live in urban areas that have suffered some sort of government-mandated intensification, without community consultation. The option to write a submission that falls on the deaf ears of a Parliamentary Select Committee is not community consultation.
In response to that problem the Greens now say that “communities should be actively involved in decisions that affect the places they live”, but surely they must be forgetting that they supported intensification legislation that excluded consultation, stripped away rights of appeal and made new zoning plans immediately operative.
The Greens are now publicly advocating for “minimising the loss of private and public greenspace” yet the infill housing they voted for does exactly the opposite. And under the Greens and Labour, city-wide plans will be developed by an appointed committee largely answerable only to itself, further distancing communities from having a say about neighbourhood planning. The Greens have a good brand derived largely from their advocacy for the planet.
But when it comes to how they voted on housing intensification and what’s being said now, they’ve been seriously off colour.
At a recent debate Labour’s David Parker espoused the view that farmers’ property rights should not extend so far as to “destroy the habitat of a tuatara”. Most New Zealanders, including farmers, would agree.
Post debate, the minister was asked to reflect on the three and six-storey-plus housing rules his government has imposed that grants developers the opportunity to destroy neighbourhood environments. He immediately changed colour and contradictorily fell on the side of defending the property rights of developers. No surprises there. Minister Parker has conflated the case for building more affordable homes with his campaign against what he calls “taste-based nimby opposition” to intensification. Labels like “nimbyism” are a cheap way of discrediting legitimate concerns about the Government imposing blanket infill housing across Auckland.
Colouring his party’s position quite differently, North Shore’s Labour candidate George Hampton wasn’t inclined to use the “nimby” word in front of Milford and Takapuna residents last week. Instead he said “[intensification] should take place in appropriate places . communities should have the voice to express themselves on this”. Even for a chameleon, it’s really too late to be saying that now. Instead, he criticised National for withdrawing support for Medium Density Residential Standards (MDRS) intensification.
Greg McKeown. Photo / Brett Phibbs
But National is owning that change and being direct with audiences. National’s spokesperson for local government, Simon Watts, front-footed the issue and said “yes we did originally support this legislation … but we took feedback from communities … and it is going to lead to outcomes which are not in the best interests of many communities around Auckland”. So that was straightforward enough. However, it’s fair to say their current policy to make MDRS optional for councils does not fix the problems caused by the legislation, which Labour, National and the Greens all endorsed.
New Zealand First has a fresh policy, does not support the current intensification plans and will support legislation to change them. Chameleons do change their colours with age, but Winston Peters has been clear that he won’t go red this year.
Based on what they’ve said, the parties most committed to reversing the three-storey-by-three-house infill housing legislation are NZ First and Act. Hansard accurately records Act’s lone votes against the MDRS legislation.
In a characterful debate at the Mt Eden Village Centre, David Seymour said “making every section of Auckland MDRS or higher just means that development happens scattergunned all over the show and it actually makes infrastructure provision less efficient”. He is a qualified engineer of course, but as a politician must have somehow found the time to read the expert evidence of a senior Watercare engineer who has said exactly the same thing.
Greg McKeown is a previous Auckland City councillor.
