Dialogue: Nothing stands in way of Anderton's favours

By JOHN ROUGHAN

It is not far, as the crow flies, from Hobsonville to Whitianga, and that crow could tell us something about the way we are governed now.

Next week Jim Anderton will offer Parliament a quick-fix amendment to the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park Act of last year to allow a fine Whitianga development through its net. All parties will support it because all except Act and NZ First voted for this legislative doozy last year.

Whitianga Waterways will not be the last investment to be ensnared by a statute that really does nothing but duplicate the Resource Management Act. A good Government would fix it once and for all. This one is going to do it ad hoc. It is beginning a pattern.

Anyone who has heard Mr Anderton make a speech this year will have heard quite a bit about building big yachts at Hobsonville. Not the whole story by any means, but quite a bit. His Ministry for Economic Development cleared the way for an expatriate boat builder, Bill Lloyd, to come home from Canada with a full book of orders and to set up his company, Sovereign Yachts, on the Hobsonville airbase.

Three months later Mr Anderton is still talking about it. For him it is the jewel in the crown of the Coalition's economics, confirmation of all he has held true through the long night of the New Right, proof of the value of "partnership" with the private sector, exhibit A against the whole idea that government should play no part in private investment decisions.

Actually, everything he and his department did for Sovereign Yachts would be applauded by the driest devotee of market liberalism. Here is what happened.

When Mr Lloyd decided to set up in New Zealand he was interested in just one site: the Air Force property on the Waitemata. But he needed it by the end of last year or soon after. Otherwise, with work pressing, he would have to expand at Vancouver.

He approached Trade NZ, who contacted Mr Anderton's new ministry. Noting the prospect of 200 jobs, average monthly taxable wages of $680,000, and $650 million in export earnings, he and the ministry went to work.

They found Defence reluctant to surrender the site, at least until there was a decision on the future of the whole base. They discovered that Maori had first claim on the land if the descendants of those from whom it was taken under the Public Works Act did not want to buy it back.

At the very least, they discovered, the site should be "land-banked" to be available for settlement of Treaty of Waitangi claims to land that is no longer available.

The ministry told Mr Anderton that clearing those and other hurdles "has been optimistically estimated to take up to five years."

He sent a solemn letter to Defence Minister Mark Burton, copying it to the Prime Minister and others. It urged them to "think dynamically in terms of the synergies between our respective policy objectives and be willing to approach the issue innovatively ... "

A few weeks later the officials had a $55 million valuation of the base and warned that there would be heightened Maori interest in it. They knew of at least three claims lodged with the Waitangi Tribunal that could include the base, and the Office of Treaty Settlements believed there was a specific claim to the site.

The Minister in Charge of Treaty Settlements, Margaret Wilson, was the next to receive the letter about thinking dynamically in terms of synergies.

There was a way around the claims of tangata whenua if descendants of those who owned the land when it was acquired under the Public Works Act could be persuaded to buy it back.

Hey presto! The officials reported. "In this case, they would be likely to be financed into the site by a third party." (Papers released under the Official Information Act do not go more deeply into this happy deliverance.)

Defence was still being awkward. It wanted an assurance that the cost of vacating the land would not come from its regular budget. Then the Department of Conservation wanted a 3m coastal strip to remain in public ownership. It also muttered about historic significance since the site containing New Zealand's first military seaplane base.

The plan was moved back a bit for the coastal strip. But otherwise all those hurdles, including the consents needed from Bob Harvey's Waitakere City Council, fell away under Mr Anderton's "whole of Government approach," as he calls it.

By Christmas everything was lined up for Sovereign Yachts and the deal was done in February. Procedures that commonly take five or 10 years had been compressed into five months.

Mr Anderton has a right to puff out his chest. But the obvious lesson of the Sovereign Yachts saga never crosses his mind. If he could do it for one, why not for all? In themselves, nothing he did exceeded the sensible role of the Government in an economy in which investments are made by those who carry the risk.

No public money was involved; no tax incentives or protection offered. It was the kind of assistance that would be economically harmless if only he gave it to all.

Mr Anderton does not want to. He could give it to all with the sort of improvements to the Resource Management Act that have just been squashed by the Government on a select committee.

Mr Anderton prefers to do it his way - personally, selectively, for investors who come to him or, as at Whitianga, make enough political noise. Sound familiar?