David Wilson wants to build communities in Whangārei - along with prosperity - through massive investment projects under the likes of the Provincial Growth Fund.
The New Zealand First candidate for Whangārei said a lack of prosperity was the single biggest issue facing the electorate and while progress was being made to address that, there was still a long way to go.
"Infrastructure is like the baseline of what you need to do but you need to build skills on top of that and you actually need to build community as well— social infrastructure, soft infrastructure, relationships, community. It's about building communities along with prosperity."
Wilson said New Zealand has done well in addressing Covid-19 but we also needed to be ready when the world opened up again by being better in what we were doing.
"For Northland, I think we need to get better in what we specialise in so we can increase our productivity, and that simply means we're selling things of higher value and we've got the opportunity, we've got the people, we've got the innovation, we backed the innovation park at Ngawha."
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Wilson's response to moving Ports of Auckland to Northland was "absolutely yes".
"Aucklanders, I think, want their waterfront back so the use of land that's got used cars on it, and bulk freight, has a really bad use of that land.
"The container port, a little bit slower but what we are talking here is the logistics for the top half of the North Island so let's get that better. We've got a huge opportunity with Northport already having deep-water access, it already has commercial land available," he said.
On local government restructuring, he supports what's called "subsidiarity"— the principle that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks that cannot be undertaken at a more local level.
"So what decisions need to be made at a regional level, what decisions need to be made at a local level? And I am not one of those people that likes to swipe the whole table clean and start again, because you already have institutions in place.
"Sometimes decisions made at the central government don't need to be made there. They could be made here with people that know their own backyard."
The quickest and easiest way of tackling the chronic housing shortage is to build more houses using locally-produced and exported pinus radiate, he said.
"For me, the answer would lie in working with the private sector and coming up with a way where we can produce warm, safe housing at an affordable price using our resource, our people, our innovation here in Northland."
Wilson sits with science on the use of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and is of the view they should be avoided if they presented a danger.
David Wilson believes that rather than being exported, pinus radiata should be used to build more affrdable houses in Whangārei.
Photo / NZME
On the meth scourge, he said it was about dealing with the effects, demand, and trying to cut off supply.
Wilson's wife, a GP in West Auckland, has had the most influence on him.
"She's been in a high-access practice ... been there for decades and she's been frontline through Covid so it's been really tough. She won GP of the Year in the first ever competition that was held for that.
"I've just watched how she's responded to this so she's my hero at the moment. She's just chucked her PPE on and gone in to war. I am proud of her."
