The Auckland Racket

Roads to Real-Estate: Auckland always has been, and remains, a racket.

AUCKLAND has always been, and looks set to remain – a racket. At its heart lie two crucial elements: land, and the transportation networks that inflate its value. To be a true Aucklander one must have a proper understanding of this all-important relationship: real estate = roads, roads = real estate.

The man who first demonstrated the centrality of this relationship was Auckland’s most notorious merchant adventurer, Thomas Russell. It was Russell and his political cronies who, in the early 1860s, persuaded Governor George Grey to build the Great South Road – a feat of military engineering which not only made war with the Maori King Movement inevitable, but also (and this, of course, was its true purpose) transformed Auckland, and the lush plains of the Waikato, into a happy hunting ground for property speculators and developers.

Auckland, as a viable commercial centre, owes its existence to the war made possible by Mr Russell’s Road, and to all the other roads the speculators and developers who came to dominate the city’s ruling class have, for nearly 150 years, persuaded the rest of New Zealand to build for them.

It’s been a constant struggle – to secure this public subsidisation of private greed – and at the forefront of the public fightback has been the Auckland Racket’s perennial rival: the state-owned railways.

Railways and the State have enjoyed a long and mutually rewarding historical relationship in New Zealand. Not only did they knit a geographically chellenging nation together, but they also provided successive governments with a cheap and effective model of urban and rural development.

Though costly to construct, New Zealand’s railway network largely paid for itself by opening up vast swathes of the countryside to settlement. The Crown, as New Zealand’s primary title-holder, was able to recoup the capital required to lay the track and acquire the locomotives and rolling-stock by selling-off the land the railway passed through. As a means of building a nation it had only one significant drawback: it severely restricted the profit-making opportunities for private speculators.

It was the internal combustion engine that rescued the Auckland racket – but only in the nick of time.

Had the rail-based plan for its post-war development been carried out, Auckland would’ve been a very different city. Drawn up by the Ministry of Works between 1946 and 1949 – the final term of the First Labour Government – the plan called for a much more compact city than the sprawling conurbation we know today. Following the Hutt Valley model, public housing would’ve been clustered around the stations of an electrified commuter rail network linking all the communities of the isthmus. The main arterial roads would have gone ‘round, rather than through, the MoW’s Auckland.

It was the election of the First National Government that saved the Auckland Racket from Labour’s social architects and the MoW’s civil engineers. By the mid-1950s, National in Wellington, working hand-in-glove with its local-government surrogate, Citizens & Ratepayers, had hauled Auckland’s future out of its electric railway unit and thrown it onto the back seat of the property developers’ Bentley. Auckland became a loose collection of taxpayer-subsidised (but privately constructed) dormitory suburbs, held together by taxpayer-funded (but privately exploited) motorways.

Instead of becoming the southern hemisphere’s Copenhagen, Auckland became a cut-price Los Angeles.

And that’s the way the people who run the Auckland Racket would like to keep it. Sixty years after Labour’s plan was ditched, the NZ Herald is still trumpeting the virtues of the automobile and the motorway, and belittling the advocates of rail.

In an editorial headed "ARC’s ‘green’ transport plan ignores reality", the paper blithely declares: "Auckland is not and never will be a ‘compact and contained urban form’. Its environment and terrain invite sprawl. The regional plan has been trying for 10 years to contain coastal ribbon development and force population growth into higher density concentrations near railway stations.

"Aucklanders have resisted for good reason. They have come to the region for its coastlines and climate. Planners of land use and transport need to work with the demonstrable demand, not against it."

No prizes for guessing exactly who will be constructing all that "coastal ribbon development" – the very same people responsible for generating all that "demonstrable demand".

Seldom has the Auckland Racket’s ingrained hostility towards any and all forms of democratic urban planning been so overtly displayed. The Herald’s leader-writer openly celebrates the pending elimination of the Auckland Regional Council and its replacement by the new Auckland "SuperCity": "… Auckland’s transport will then be managed by an ad hoc authority representing the Government as well as the Auckland Council."

In other words, the very same arrangement that characterised the region’s development in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. When the Auckland Racket’s political friends in Wellington repeatedly forced the long-suffering New Zealand taxpayer to fund the construction of a succession of multi-million dollar motorways, linking together an ever-growing number of multi-million dollar subdivisions, erected by the Queen City’s indomitable clique of multi-millionaire property speculators and developers.

Opponents of the new Auckland SuperCity have characterised it as a thinly disguised mechanism for privatising what remains of the region’s publicly-owned assets. No doubt there are those among the new structure’s boosters who drool at the prospect, but privatisation may not, in the end, turn out to be their principal objective.

One has only to consider the fiasco over the Cabinet’s attempt to split the Rodney District Council in half, to see the Auckland Racket’s extraordinary political influence at work.

First get a new road built from Albany to Puhoi – thereby opening up the northern "coastal ribbon" that’s in such "demonstrable demand". Then, re-design the entire political architecture of the Auckland region so that you and your mates can get their hands on the aforesaid real-estate without having to clamber over all those pesky democratic hurdles.

It’s just possible, however, that the Auckland Racket has over-reached itself. Have none of the people behind the SuperCity scheme ever paused to ask themselves: "What if we fail to win control of the new council?" Like the Great South Road, Auckland’s new constitutional framework is designed to facilitate plunder, but, when you think about it, Mr Russell’s Road could just have easily brought the Waikato Maori into the city, as kept them out.

The Auckland Racket simply must win next year’s election – it can’t afford to lose.

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 1 October 2009.