Rudman's city: Wimpy commissioners agree to plough under our heritage

By BRIAN RUDMAN

The butchery of Mt Roskill by Transit New Zealand bulldozers has been given the go-ahead by Auckland City planning commissioners. The only concession to those of us fighting to save the northern foothills is that the cut be clean and the amputation scar as unobtrusive as is possible in the circumstances.

Instead of standing up to the roading engineers and declaring that Auckland's remaining volcanoes were henceforth off limits, the commissioners wimped out. In that, they were not alone. The Department of Conservation and the Auckland Regional Council, both charged with protecting our heritage, were just as bad.

Instead of calling Transit's bluff and declaring its planned highway route unacceptable, the guardians of our endangered heritage, in their submissions, went for compromise instead. Save a few metres of mountain here, plant a few screen trees there.

The commissioners - councillors Juliet Yates and Faye Storer, and independent commissioners Mike Hayman (chairman), Ross Gee and Wendy Brandon - seemed happy to take the DoC and ARC lead. In backing Transit's application, though, the commissioners do seem to be pleading that their hands were tied by the wording of the Resources Management Act.

For example they acknowledge that the proposed "cut at the base of the cone" would have "a significant visual impact" and "therefore adversely affect a heritage feature."

However "the panel considers that Transit has met its obligations under the Resource Management Act to give adequate consideration to alternative routes in the vicinity of the Mt Roskill cone."

Whether it selects the best route, however, is of no consequence.

"The panel understands that the need to give 'adequate consideration' to alternatives does not require exclusions of alternatives, or selection of the best alternative."

It's this sort of legal mumbo jumbo that gives the law a bad name.

The panel then seems to wipe its hands of the whole decision: "The selection of a particular alternative by Transit ... will involve considerations of policy outside the jurisdiction of the council, which lacks the ability to direct that a particular alternative be chosen."

In defending its decision the panel argues that Transit's desired motorway through the volcanic foothills reserve does fulfil the requirements of the Resource Management Act to manage "the use, development, and protection of natural and physical resources in a way, or at a rate, which enables people and communities to provide for their social, economic, and cultural wellbeing and for their health and safety."

Using that sort of reasoning, you have to wonder if any heritage site is really safe?

I accept that in the back of their minds the commissioners were aware that if Transit were thwarted in its application, it could have fallen back on an existing right to plough a motorway much closer to the central core of Mt Roskill than the present proposal went.

On paper this is true. But this was a line on a map drawn under the draconian powers of the Public Works Act some 50 years ago when Auckland volcanoes were still, too frequently, seen as mountains of scoria just waiting to be mined.

My criticism of the commissioners and of DoC and the ARC is that they played this application looking backwards to the days when the best you could hope for against the almighty state road builders was to limit the collateral damage.

The alternative course would have been to stand firm alongside the Auckland Conservation Board and the Auckland Volcanic Cones Society and call the road builders' bluff. Tell them that there was to be no more nibbling at the sides of Auckland's remaining volcanoes.

If a united front had formed, then it would have been Transit who would have had to make the next move - to the Environment Court, the drawing boards or its political masters.

The fate of Mt Roskill now rests with two alternatives. One is a drawn-out and expensive visit to the Environment Court. The other, and more preferable, course, is political intervention.

That the future of Mt Roskill can be based on a half-century-old planning diktat is a nonsense. It is time Transit's political masters told chief executive Robin Dunlop and his bulldozer drivers that ploughing through Auckland's heritage is no longer acceptable conservation practice.

Dr Dunlop could start by consulting with recently appointed Transit board member, Labour Party president Mike Williams, who has already expressed a personal aversion to further modification of the cones. Then there's Conservation Minister Sandra Lee, who has pointed out her long opposition to any further interference in the cones and almost-local MP and Prime Minister Helen Clark, who is privately expressing her misgivings not just at the threat to Mt Roskill but about the whole State Highway 20 project.

Best of all, the Government could just come out with it, declare working-class volcanoes as precious as posh One Tree Hill and Mt Eden, and put us all out of our misery.