The Front Page: Does NZ’s building industry have too much red tape?

The Winton advertising campaign calls out Prime Minister Chris Hipkins and the Government's red-tape bureaucracy.

A rich-lister’s cheeky advertising campaign describing New Zealand as the “land of the long red tape” has grabbed headlines.

Chris Meehan, the owner of developer Winton Land, told The Front Page podcast strict regulations have played a role in the housing crisis.

“Not only have they [the regulations] worsened it; they’ve created it,” he says.

“We only build on 1 per cent of our land mass. It’s not like we’re short of land. We’ve got everything open and available to us to keep building more houses, but we’ve forced ourselves into this housing crisis by having over-regulated the market.”

His recent frustration comes from his long-running attempt to fast-track plans to build 5,000 affordable homes in an environmentally friendly project called Sunfield in South Auckland.

His application for fast-tracking was rejected by Government agency Kāinga Ora, leading to Meehan instituting court action.

Upon rejecting the application, Kāinga Ora described Winton as a “capable and well-funded developer seeking reduced timeframes and complexity for this development”.

Meehan did not shy away from this accusation.

“We are and we shouldn’t apologise for that, because the country needs houses,” he said.

“What the country needs is more well-funded developers like Winton getting on and building houses.”

So, are Meehan’s claims about New Zealand being the land of the long red tape accurate, or is this just a case of a developer looking to speed up the building process?

John Tookey, a professor at the AUT School of Future Environments, also joined The Front Page podcast and said there was some truth in what Meehan was saying.

“It’s a bit from column A and column B,” says Tookey.

“Yes, we have quite an extensive level of legislation around the building industry, primarily related to the Resource Management Act, as well as the quite complicated Building Act. And we also have a fear of screwing up our infrastructure and environment, so we tend to be careful, as any developed nation would be.”

Tookey says while caution is good, the problem is that the process of getting building consent tends to favour pre-existing solutions and tends to avoid anything they haven’t seen before.

The professor says that this has the effect of slowing down innovation and dissuading builders from pursuing new technology that might be used elsewhere.

“In a system like that, we tend to emphasise what we’ve always done in the past, rather than what we could do in the future.”

Tookey argues that if the Government is serious about building more high-quality housing, affordably, it should be looking at areas where builders should be incentivised to innovate.

“My contention is that you actually have to put your thumb on the scale a bit to incentivise the types of innovations that we’re going to need for the future.”

So, what type of building should be incentivised? What red tape could we do away with? And is there any hope of seeing these changes any time soon?

Listen to the full episode of The Front Page to hear more from Meehan and Tookey on the red tape wrapped around New Zealand’s building industry.