Is fast-track backfiring on National?
Hawke’s Bay, Canterbury, Queenstown, and Auckland ratepayers are being asked to carry the infrastructure bill for growth their own councils tried to stop.
At least five fast-track applications for residential subdivisions have been lodged or approved in Hawke’s Bay: Wairatahi in Flaxmere, Iona and Arataki in Havelock North, Brookvale Green on the former Te Mata Mushrooms site, and now Middle Road.
Hastings District Council asked for Middle Road and the neighbouring Wall Road site to be kept out of its own growth strategy, to protect fertile soils. Both are being pursued through fast-track anyway.
Few processes fly more directly in the face of local planning than approving development on land a council explicitly asked to protect.
An election-year rush of fast-track bids is colliding with the district plans and growth strategies councils spent years building, and with a growing revolt from the mayors who backed the law.
CDL Land has won fast-track referral for 300 to 350 new homes on Middle Road, the fourth such subdivision to land on Havelock North’s boundary in three years.
Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop was satisfied it would deliver housing and jobs, overruling the council’s own planning document. Hastings District Council has gone from decision-maker to submitter on its own patch.
Of the candidates standing in Tukituki, only NZ First’s Taine Randell is campaigning on the water, electricity and productive land fast-track keeps building over — and a council that backed the law on land it wanted protected shouldn’t be surprised if voters reward whoever says so out loud.
Ten years on from the aquifer contamination that made thousands of Havelock North residents sick, the region’s shallow aquifers remain vulnerable to the land uses sitting above them.
Havelock North is not unique. In Orewa, an independent panel approved 1217 homes at Delmore despite Watercare telling the panel it cannot connect the site to public water and wastewater until at least 2033, and possibly not until 2050. Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown called the approval a “mockery” of the fast-track law, telling the Herald the process was “beyond stupid.”
On 10 August, Brown and Queenstown Lakes Mayor John Glover wrote jointly to Bishop asking for an immediate pause on greenfield fast-tracking, warning ratepayers could be on the hook for up to $1.5 billion in infrastructure developers never paid for.
In Waimakariri, Wolfbrook — co-owned by National Party donor Steve Brooks — bought Pegasus Golf Course and told the council it intends to use fast-track to rezone the land for housing, after two earlier bids nearby were declined. More than 15,000 people have signed a petition against it. Mayor Dan Gordon and MP Matt Doocey both oppose the plan.
There has been extensive media coverage of Pegasus and other proposed developments in Canterbury. Q+A ran this feature:
Land is only worth what it can be used for.
It has already happened south of Auckland. The Pukekohe-Bombay soils are among the most productive in the country — roughly 4,400 hectares producing about a quarter of New Zealand’s vegetable revenue by value — and government scientists warn they are being lost to housing “by a thousand cuts”, with ministers now proposing to strip planning protection from more of it.
Orchardists and market gardeners should not be priced off fertile ground because a developer can persuade a panel that a district plan doesn’t matter. Every home built on it pushes food production further away, and food, like water, only gets more expensive once its source is gone.
The Middle Road site sits beside the James Wattie Retirement Village, named for the food-processing pioneer whose fortune was built on this same soil — soil the council itself wanted protected.
Building over the plains that fed Wattie’s cannery is less a coincidence than a punchline. No council vote turns a driveway back into a paddock.
One Havelock North developer has already said there is a “gross oversupply” of subdivisions chasing insufficient demand. Some contractors have gone under.
You can’t eat concrete.
You can’t pay the mortgage on a new build on a former orchard once the packhouse next door has closed.
Fast-track was sold as the fix for a housing shortage. In Hastings, Orewa and Pegasus, it is starting to look like a subsidy for oversupply, funded by ratepayers and cashed in by donors. In an election year, it is fast becoming the reason National’s own voters hand the job to someone else.
