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Hipkins said the Auckland lockdown cost Labour votes. (Photo: Getty Images)
Hipkins said the Auckland lockdown cost Labour votes. (Photo: Getty Images)

OPINIONPoliticsFebruary 8, 2023

Chris Hipkins sets fire to Labour’s policy programme

Hipkins said the Auckland lockdown cost Labour votes. (Photo: Getty Images)
Hipkins said the Auckland lockdown cost Labour votes. (Photo: Getty Images)

The prime minister has unveiled what he calls a ‘new direction’ for the Labour government, and it involves launching a wrecking ball into Jacinda Ardern’s extensive policy programme. Stewart Sowman-Lund reports from parliament.

We knew something was coming, but we perhaps weren’t expecting quite so much policy carnage at parliament today.

Prime minister Chris Hipkins, fresh from chairing the first meeting of his new cabinet team, sauntered into the Beehive Theatrette, first to reveal additional funding for flood-stricken Auckland and then to boulder straight into dismantling many of the government’s most high profile projects. 

So what was thrown onto the bonfire?

Least surprisingly, Hipkins confirmed the end of the planned merger of TVNZ and RNZ. It’s gone for good. It follows roughly three years of work across three different ministers on the Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media outlet, which was initially planned to be up and running later this year. The scrapping of the merger has been rumoured for weeks, if not months, and one media executive anonymously told Te Ao Māori News this afternoon that it was never going to work anyway. When questioned today, Hipkins admitted he didn’t know how much would be saved by ditching the merger. That’s because some of the leftover will now go into additional funding for RNZ and NZ On Air. What we do now is the cost: millions.


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Next there was the social insurance scheme, a sort of welfare safety net for people left out of work through unemployment or redundancy, and a policy baby of finance minister Grant Robertson. A final decision on its future has been punted back until after the election, but for now it’s dead in the water. “We will need to see a significant improvement in economic conditions before anything is advanced,” Hipkins said. It could be revived in the future, said Hipkins, who noted that work in this area would continue. But: “There isn’t public support for this scheme at the moment.”

The biofuels mandate was next to be tossed on the fire. Hipkins said this would have increased the price of fuel, “and given the pressure on households that’s not something I’m prepared to do”.

Confusingly, given it seems entirely unlinked to the cost of living crisis, Hipkins also confirmed he’d be ditching proposed hate speech legislation. Officially, it’s not gone for good, but it’s been resigned to the furthest reaches of the backburner: the Law Commission. Already watered down dramatically while Jacinda Ardern was prime minister, the Human Rights Amendment Bill was set to protect people from religious discrimination in the wake of the Christchurch mosque attacks. 

The first question in this afternoon’s post-cabinet press conference was addressed at that apparent disconnect between living costs and hate speech. Hipkins said it wasn’t so much about redirecting funding, but about balancing the government’s ability to get work done. “Focus”, Hipkins’ buzzword since taking office, was the word of the day again. The hate speech laws would “take up a lot of the government’s time and focus”, said Hipkins.

“I would rather we took a step back and tried to reach that political consensus that we have been able to reach on issues that the law commission has considered in the past.

“Anyone who’s read the Royal Commission report following March 15 would have to acknowledge that there are some very legitimate issues that have been raised, but I don’t want to have them mired in a debate which is going nowhere, which frankly is where the debate has been going.”

Cynics, or perhaps realists, will note that the hate speech legislation, even in its weakest form, was hugely unpopular and a major target for the opposition. Hipkins – who denied today’s announcement was simply a politically easy way out of the policy – will secretly be thrilled to see the end of it, even if his cost of living excuse for ditching it won’t have convinced anyone.

While the policies above are the ones we know to be gone for now, Hipkins made it very clear further proposals will soon be added to the growing bonfire. Three waters is safe for now, but Hipkins said “careful consideration” on its future was required. It didn’t take too much reading between the lines to infer that the co-governance elements of three waters will be part of that careful consideration. “If we make any changes to the structure that means by definition you need to look at the arrangements,” Hipkins said. We can expect these changes to be formally unveiled in the coming weeks, with Hipkins set to deliver his prime ministerial address at the beginning of the parliament sitting year. 

While the extent of the carnage was somewhat unexpected, Hipkins has made it clear from his very first press conference that he was planning to “reign in” several of his predecessor’s more unwieldy policy proposals. This has all been in support of his intended focus on “bread and butter” issues. At this afternoon’s conference, Hipkins refused to “look back” when asked whether it was a mistake for the government to have spent so much time, effort and, most importantly, money on policies that have been dumped for good. His reflection was limited to a few remarks. “I think it’s an acknowledgement that governments only have so much bandwidth to take on a variety of challenges. You can lose focus. We would rather do a small number of things,” he said. Governments often opted to reprioritise policies, he added.

Asked whether any of the scrapped policies could be pulled out of the bonfire just in time for the election year, Hipkins wouldn’t comment either way. “I’m not going to write the manifesto today,” he said, before adding that “many of these things are worthy, they’re just not priorities”.

While scaling back on policies rather than simply launching new ones isn’t traditional electioneering, in this case it’s clear the new prime minister reckons it what might be needed to score a third term come October. And he could be right.


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Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

OPINIONPoliticsFebruary 8, 2023

The truth about new housing and the Auckland floods

Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

A pair of Auckland councillors have leveraged the city’s flood disaster to protest government’s legislation enabling more medium density housing. Hayden Donnell says our elected representatives would be better off pointing the finger at themselves.

As residents across her ward worked to clean out their waterlogged houses, Mt Eden-Puketāpapa councillor Christine Fletcher logged into Facebook to take aim at what she saw as the culprit for the flooding which wrecked their properties. Her post didn’t mention Wayne Brown or Civil Defence. She identified another issue: the fact we keep letting people build houses. “We must stop those who are determined to foist more and more housing on Auckland, well in excess of the Auckland Unitary Plan. Their plans are flawed. Auckland cannot cope now,” she wrote.

That post was picked up by Newshub and echoed by Waitematā councillor Mike Lee in a story by the Herald’s Bernard Orsman. “We need to intensify where suitable, not intensify everywhere and every which way because that will only lead to more disasters,” he said, adding that development should only be allowed where good stormwater infrastructure is in place.

If these councillors believe Auckland’s development patterns have contributed to the severity of the floods, they’d do better to take a deep breath, put on a guided meditation, and look inward. While it’s true the government has moved to enable medium density housing across the city, its bill only became operative in part in August last year, and includes provisions for councils to restrict development in flood-prone areas. Unless the flooded houses were built in the last five months, they were consented under rules set by prior councils, including the 2016 Unitary Plan.

Māngere: Building density zoning under the Unitary Plan, left; and flood plain mapping, right. Zoning map legend: Pink and purple are business zones; tan, yellow and orange are housing – the darker the orange, the higher the density. More detail here.

That plan shunted disproportionate amounts of growth to areas like Henderson, Ranui, Māngere, Wairau, Sunnynook, and Mt Roskill, all of which went underwater last Friday. At the same time it banned dense housing in the places where it makes the most sense, restricting construction to a single house per lot across large swathes of the city’s central, well-connected villa suburbs under so-called ‘special character’ rules. Lee and Fletcher have been among the most vehement supporters of those rules, which cover 41% of all the land within 5km of the city centre and more than 90% of places like Ponsonby, but an analysis done for The Spinoff shows how they may have contributed to the damage wrecked by Auckland’s storm. In general, less of the residential land in special character areas sits on flood plains, while the poorer suburbs with fewer restrictions on development are more vulnerable to inundation. Outside of rural and coastal settlements, Auckland is building fewer houses where flood damage is less likely.

Houses in Auckland’s ‘special character areas’ are less likely to be located in areas at risk of flooding (an exception is homes on the coast). (Graph: The Spinoff)

A look at the council’s floodplain maps throws up some stark examples of this discrepancy. Dense development is almost entirely cut off in several areas least vulnerable to flooding, including Ponsonby and Herne Bay. In some of the most susceptible areas, including Henderson, Māngere, Ranui, and Mt Roskill, medium or high density housing is the norm. Auckland’s councillors are attempting to retain the vast bulk of their character protections even in the face of the new government legislation which makes them, at best, legally questionable. They continue to foist floodwaters on the poor in order to protect the lifestyles and aesthetic preferences of the city’s richest residents, who happen to be their most reliable voters.

Ponsonby and Herne Bay are filled with single-house zoning despite having almost no flood plains.
Henderson is zoned for dense development despite being heavily affected by flood plains.

Their planning decisions have also hindered our ability to build resilient, high quality infrastructure. With development cut off in many central, desirable areas, housing has sprawled across Auckland’s countryside. Drive 40 minutes in any direction from the Sky Tower and you’ll be confronted with affluent suburbs springing up in places like Warkworth, Drury, and Kumeu. Those kinds of greenfield developments are expensive, requiring new roads, power lines, and pipes. Multiple studies have shown that sprawl costs more than twice as much as more compact development. It’s hard to pay for a state-of-the-art stormwater system in the central suburbs when you’re having to plug potholes for thousands of residents in the backstreets of Pukekohe.

There’s a perverse logic to Lee and Fletcher’s response to these problems. If we simply don’t let people build so many houses in future, there’ll be fewer around to flood. But that begs the question of how Auckland will accommodate its future growth. One solution could be the construction of a wall at the top of the Bombays to keep out newcomers. Another is the forced relocation of housing opponents to Tauranga. Instead, both councillors lapse into magical thinking. Lee has long advocated a kind of degrowth agenda, while Fletcher says the city doesn’t need housing because it hasn’t had a lot of inward migration lately, which may or may not have something to do with a global pandemic which shut down most inward migration.

Coming up with these sorts of excuses to avoid having to build needed infrastructure is a patented, time-honoured technique for Auckland’s local body politicians. If the ideal approach to future planning is planting trees under whose shade you will not sit, their approach has generally been to have a meltdown over the price of seeds. Their short-sighted, penny-pinching history can be seen in everything from the city’s inadequate public transport network to its faeces-spewing sewer pipes. But the area where it’s most evident is housing, where planning rules designed to choke growth have contributed to a punishing and intractable price crisis.

The best way to avoid future disasters isn’t to perpetuate that crisis even further; it’s to build more houses in places that won’t go underwater. Thankfully there are several such areas in the heart of Lee and Fletcher’s electorates. If we want to prevent a repeat of the Auckland floods, constructing 20-storey apartment buildings in Ponsonby and Mt Eden would be a good start.

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