Cautionary tales

The government has been slow to realise that severely unpopular policies threaten its chances of re-election.

- JANE CLIFTON

This isn’t quite how Aesop put it in one of his famous fables, but be careful what you wish for, because if you ever get it, chances are you’ll have forgotten you ever wanted it and it’ll be a major pain in the behind.

After years of everyone bewailing the housing shortage, the government’s mighty turbocharger of rapid home building, the Urban Development Act (UDA), has finally lumbered into action. Well, “action” in so much that it has finally found its first housing-acceleration project after two years in existence, and may preside over its first sod turning in another couple of years, all things being equal. That this time frame seems no improvement on the glacial pace of housing preceding the UDA is only one of the embarrassments to result.

By the time those 6000 “fast-tracked” houses are built, near Porirua north of Wellington, New Zealand will almost certainly be in housing

What this proves, if little else, is that nothing can hurry our resource-consent bureaucracy – not even another bureaucracy superimposed over the top of it, with sweeping powers to overrule it. UDA implementer Kāinga Ora has been given a slew of “collaborative” criteria surplus. Many economists say we’re already there. 

that are so extensive it has taken two years to find a development it can agree to. It turned down one in South Auckland because it “couldn’t add value” to what developers and local stakeholders were already doing.