Greenfields: Minister of Building and Housing, Dr Nick Smith, has argued consistently that Auckland needs to grow out as well as up. He has just acquired a powerful ally in Prime Minister Key, who has hinted that if Auckland Council doesn't delete the Urban Growth Boundary from its forthcoming Unitary Plan, then it may suffer the same fate as "Ecan" - the Canterbury Regional Council - whose elected councillors were sacked by Dr Smith and replaced with his hand-picked commissioners.
OUR PRIME MINISTER has not ruled out denying local democratic
representation to nearly a third of New Zealand’s population. If the Auckland
Council’s forthcoming Unitary Plan retains the city’s much-maligned Urban Growth
Boundary, John Key is threatening to replace them with Commissioners.
Once again, councillors’ strongly held opinions about highly
complex planning issues are being used to justify a significant curtailment of
democracy. Aucklanders have been put on notice that if a majority of their
elected representatives refuse to vote for a resumption of urban sprawl, then
the Council’s “Governing Body” will be sacked and replaced by a group of
unelected “experts” appointed by Cabinet.
Cantabrians know better than to doubt the Prime Minister’s
resolve in this matter. Since 2010 their right to a say in how their regional
taxes are spent has been suspended. After six years of no regional democracy,
they are now being invited to participate in a hybrid system featuring both
elected and unelected councillors. The full restoration of democratic regional
government in Canterbury will not take place until 2019.
The present government justified its suspension of democracy
in Canterbury on the grounds that, in its deadlocked state, “Ecan” was
incapable of making a number of extremely important – and long delayed –
decisions about regional water allocation. At the time, National was under
enormous pressure from Federated Farmers to break the deadlock and green-light
the irrigation schemes farmers needed to make dairying feasible on the dry
Canterbury Plains.
Government ministers argued that, economically, New Zealand
could not afford the interminable wrangling between urban and rural interests.
If the only people standing between Canterbury’s farmers and an
irrigation-assisted boost to New Zealand’s dairy exports were a bunch of
intransigent regional councillors, then the temporary suspension of democratic
norms was a small price to pay for their removal.
That the deadlock between the representatives of farmers,
and the representatives of those who valued water for cultural, environmental
and recreational reasons, might signal the presence of a genuine policy dilemma,
does not seem to have occurred to the National Government. Clearly, the
deterioration in the flow and water quality of Canterbury’s rivers and streams
was also a small price to pay for economic growth.
Equally clear, however (at least from the National
Government’s perspective) is that most Cantabrians and, quite possibly, most
New Zealanders, did not – and do not – consider a nine-year suspension of
regional democracy to be all that big a deal. Regional government, unlike local
government, has never really engaged the emotions of its electors. (Unless, as
happened in Canterbury, a vocal minority of voters came to the view that it was
thwarting their commercial ambitions.)
The question raised by Mr Key’s threats to the Auckland
Council, therefore, is whether or not the suspension of local (as opposed to
regional) democracy will be met with Cantabrian levels of voter indifference.
In the years since the constitution and ancillary economic institutions of the “Super-City”
were imposed on the citizens of Auckland, has it inspired sufficient loyalty
and affection to render it invulnerable to such naked central government aggression?
Not without a crisis big enough to justify such heavy-handed
interference.
Fortuitously, in the absurd escalation in Auckland house
prices; and in the related, socially catastrophic, shortage of affordable
housing for first-home-buyers and the poor; a crisis is exactly what the Prime
Minister has got.
Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s cynical chief-of-staff,
infamously affirmed that: “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what
I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do
before.”
So, what is it that John Key believes the current Auckland
housing crisis will let him do – that he could not do before?
The Prime Minister’s defenders will say that it offers him a
virtually politically costless opportunity to rid Auckland of the irksome
Urban Growth Boundary which so many politicians believe is responsible for its eye-wateringly
high land prices. The only problem with this response is that Key and his
government, as legislators, can abolish the Urban Growth Boundary any time they
like.
So, what else will Auckland’s very real housing crisis let
National do?
Helen Kelly put her finger on it during Saturday’s broadcast
of TV3’s The Nation. Key’s threats,
she insisted, mark the beginning of his party’s campaign to seize control of
the Auckland Council.
Against all of the Right’s expectations, the first and
second elections for the Auckland Council did not deliver it into the hands of
the hard-line neoliberals for whom it was intended. Nor have the recent efforts
of the Auckland National Party to assemble a winning team borne much in the way
of palatable political fruit.
Enter the professionals.
Auckland’s housing crisis is entirely the Council’s fault.
Therefore, vote out the guilty councillors. Then, give the Government a council
it can work with.
Or else.
This essay was
originally published in The Press of
Tuesday, 31 May 2016.
