Brian Rudman: Council still doesn't get it on volcanic cones protection

It's good to see Auckland City finally starting to add action to the purple prose that's been flowing in recent months about its new commitment to the city's unique volcanic landscape. On Friday, proposed Plan Change 192, which restricts redevelopment on the lower slopes of Mt Eden, Mt Albert, Mt St John and Mt Hobson, was released for public comment.

"The plan change carefully balances the needs of property owners with the need to afford greater protection to the unique landforms that characterise our city," says planning committee chairperson, Glenda Fryer. "The new rules will ensure that development does not dominate these features."

Under the new rules, alterations and additions to existing homes will require a resource consent. New homes adjacent to open space on volcanic cones must be no more than 8m tall, or the same height as adjacent buildings, "whichever is lower".

Earthworks will be restricted to 5 cu m to avoid harm to the form and texture of volcanic landscapes. Subdivision will be banned if it would result in a new home higher up the volcanic cone than existing development.

That such meagre controls are not already in place beggars belief. But better late than never.

Muddying the celebrations, though, is senior bureaucrat Jenny Oxley's continuing dismissive attitude towards the famous 1915 act which saved Mt Roskill from Transit's bulldozers two year ago. I'd have thought, if you're on a mission, you'd be grateful for any assistance, even an obscure 90-year-old act of parliament.

But not the group manager, Auckland City Environments. Two weeks ago I reported how Ms Oxley had written to the Three Kings United Group saying the act was "an unsatisfactory vehicle of protection of Auckland's volcanic cones".

I challenged this. Unrepentant, she repeated, in a letter to the editor, that "legislation that is nearly a century old is no longer the most suitable method of securing protection of the city's volcanic features."

She pointed instead to district plan provisions, management plans, visitor facilities and a newly appointed team of specialists.

As John Street, chairman of the Auckland Volcanic Cones Society said in reply, none of Ms Oxley's collection of aids was enough to protect Mt Roskill in its hour of need. "No, what saved Mt Roskill was the 1915 Act."

Also into the lists last week was barrister and prominent local politician, Wyn Hoadley. Acting on behalf of Three Kings United, she wrote to Auckland City chief executive David Rankin seeking an "urgent response" to Ms Oxley's nose-thumbing of the 1915 legislation. She pointed out her clients were seeking action from Auckland City over their belief that the continuing mining at Three Kings breached the 1915 act.

Mrs Hoadley said that if the act was an unsatisfactory vehicle for protection of Auckland's volcanic cones, why was a report commissioned to show that planned excavations in Albert Park for the proposed art gallery extensions did not breach it? "It would appear that Ms Oxley is being selective as to which of Auckland's volcanic cones warrant protection under the act."

She said that Ms Oxley's claim that there are likely to have been hundreds of properties where offences have occurred under the act "is not an excuse or justification for doing nothing".

Also "Ms Oxley made the astonishing assertion that 'the act provides council with a power to enforce but not a duty to enforce and has not been enforced by Auckland City in recent memory.' It is my opinion that the council has both a power to enforce and a duty to do so, should there be shown to be a breach of the act."

I'll leave the legal niceties to the wigged ones, but I do know, as one who followed the Mt Roskill saga closely, that until the miraculous rediscovery of the 1915 act, the cone was doomed. Auckland City should be celebrating the act's existence, embracing it as a sort of Treaty of Waitangi that gives legitimacy to its newfound respect for the unique landscape we inhabit. It was promoted by the prime minister of the day to prevent the volcanoes from "being destroyed by quarrying".

Instead of trying to bury it, we should repatriate the original document from the national archives and make it the symbolic focus of the new pro-volcano mood.