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WellingtonJune 12, 2024

Character housing goes to court: Will Wellington’s new District Plan survive?

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A character housing group is suing to stop new housing from going up in Wellington’s character suburbs. Do they have any chance?

Character housing advocacy group LIVE WELLington (Not to be mistaken for Wellington – Live) has filed a judicial review application in the High Court attempting to block the new Wellington District Plan’s decision to shrink character precincts.

The character precincts are areas where it is incredibly difficult to build new housing. Removing or demolishing any house build before 1930 requires a resource consent, and the areas have strict height limits and design requirements. In the previous District Plan, character precincts covered 306 hectares of Wellington’s inner suburbs. The council recommended reducing that to 86 hectares, but the independent hearings panel recommended it be bumped back up to 206 hectares. In the final vote, the council put it back down to 86 hectares, and that decision was approved by RMA reform minister Chris Bishop.

LIVE WELLington spokesperson Jane O’Loughlin declined to provide a copy of her group’s legal filing to The Spinoff and wouldn’t go into detail about the legal arguments the group planned to bring. “The legal case will have more legal detail and basis. I’m not sure I want to say any more to you,” she said. A press release from the group indicated it was focused on predetermination, that councillors held a “fixed and narrow view” and did not properly consider all available evidence.

What is a judicial review?

Judicial review is a legal action to challenge any decision by a government body. It doesn’t apply to parliament, but it does apply to every ministry, government agency, council and even public schools. As Eddie Clark, a senior lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington, puts it, judicial review is “the only way to hold governments to account between elections”. But you can’t just argue that the government or agency has made a poor decision. You need to prove it failed to follow the law.

What’s their argument?

To win on predetermination, LIVE WELLington would have to prove a majority of councillors had always intended to overturn the independent hearing panel’s recommendation to expand the character areas, regardless of any evidence presented. That’s a hard bar to clear; according to Clark, no one has won a case on predetermination against a council since 1974. That was a case called Lower Hutt City Council v Bank, where the council agreed to lease land to a developer before consulting the community.

“The law is that councillors must come in with an open mind, not an empty mind. You must be open to changing their position, but the fact that you don’t isn’t proof of anything. It’s not just based on appearance, you have to have evidence someone was never going to change their mind,” Clark said.

Throughout the District Plan process, the council’s legal advisors were extremely wary of a judicial review on predetermination grounds, and repeatedly warned councillors not to make any public statements about their views on the District Plan.

“How democratic is that? They’re trying to hold elected officials to not say what they think and promised, because they’re worried about the small risk of judicial review,” Clark said. “Even though any council hasn’t lost on predetermination in 50 years, lawyers and officials are utterly paranoid about it.”

Wellington city councillors during the final District Plan meeting (Photo: Joel MacManus)

How can an elected official not have an opinion?

The fear of judicial review created an absurd situation in the District Plan process where councillors couldn’t speak their mind, even though many of them had campaigned on housing issues. Some had built their entire careers based on supporting more density or protecting character precincts. But for a couple of months, they all had to pretend they had no official position and couldn’t speak to media about anything other than the technical process. (Not all councillors followed this rule; Ray Chung was openly getting into debates about apartments in the Scoop comments section).

Ahead of the final vote, hundreds of residents who felt strongly about housing reached out to their local councillors urging them to vote one way or another. But officially, councillors couldn’t take any of that into consideration, because it would have been considered outside the scope of evidence, which could also open them up to judicial review.

‘Hutt Valley, Kāpiti, down to the south coast. Our Wellington coverage is powered by members.’
Joel MacManus
— Wellington editor

What evidence is there?

LIVE WELLington is leaning on the independent hearing panel’s view that the District Plan provided enough housing capacity in the outer suburbs for a projected 30 years of growth, so there was no reason to reduce the character areas. “The paltry reasons provided by the Council for their rejections of these recommendations indicate the move was based more on political performance than evidence or reasoning,” the group’s press release said. 

Of course, the District Plan isn’t just about housing capacity, it’s also about urban form. Large character areas would push density outward, creating potential issues with transport, emissions, and access to services. These are all inherently political issues about the future shape of our city that elected officials hold strong views on.

The press release also takes aim at RMA reform minister Chris Bishop, who made the final decision on each point where the council and the independent hearing panel disagreed. He sided with the council in every instance, except for the decision to remove heritage listings for 10 buildings, including the Gordon Wilson flats. Bishop made it clear he would have personally liked to remove the listings, but felt the council did not provide enough evidence.

“Chris Bishop likewise provided very few details regarding his reasoning and the matters he took into account when accepting the Council’s recommendations,” the press release said.

Clark thought that argument lacked merit, too. Bishop’s office proactively released the background analysis for his decisions, which were extremely carefully written, as if pre-emptively defending the decisions from this exact argument. Clark described Bishop’s decision document as “the most lawyerly set of I’ve reasons I’ve seen”.

The court documents were filed on Monday but have not been processed by the court yet and the date hasn’t been set for hearings. As of now, the new District Plan is in full effect across Wellington.

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KaiJune 10, 2024

No Country for Cheese Scones: A love letter to the elusive Kiwi delicacy

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Would you still move to Melbourne or London knowing it’d be a cheese-scone-less life? Bryer Oden talks to New Zealanders abroad pining for a Kiwi cafe favourite.

In Wellington, to call cheese scones elusive would be to call the wind elusive, or rich ladies in quilted jackets, or psych students, or Doc Martens. That is to say, at any given time you’re no less than a few hundred metres away from a piping hot cheese scone (as long as it’s before 2pm, as for some ungodly reason cafes are for “morning people”).

However, the Kiwi classic that you find stacked high in every cabinet is not as common as you think – it turns out as soon as you wave goodbye to Gandalf at the airport, you’re also waving goodbye to your favourite mid-morning staple. That’s right, you heard it here first: Australia “doesn’t do” cheese scones (at least not to anywhere near the degree Wellington does). 

A selection of cheese scone-related messages in my DMs (Image: Bryer Oden)

I found this out by accident. After a gruelling (not really) month of doing Veganuary (vegan January), I was over the moon to be able to finally get my mitts on a “real” cheese scone. I posted a photo on my foodie Instagram account healthsensation with the caption: “I have been waiting to have a cheese scone for over a MONTH.” How petulant, how pathetic this statement then became when my friend Madi replied, “Sydney has no cheese scones!! I have been waiting for a WHOLE YEAR!!!!!”

I can’t believe that this is how I found out that, much to the chagrin of New Zealanders who have moved across the ditch, savoury scones do not have the same presence overseas as they do in Aotearoa. 

My friend Jemima (an Australian) revealed to me that she thought cheese scones were “so weird” when she first moved to Wellington, but one of her flatmates worked at Pravda and over time she grew to love the endless stockpile of them in the freezer. Now living in Norway, she told me, “I think I’m being influenced to brave -11° to go and get the ingredients to make cheese scones.” I have nothing but admiration and respect for those who have to trudge uphill in the Norwegian snow to get a cheese scone, and I am now feeling guilty that in New Zealand I can just waltz into the nearest food establishment and be on my merry way. 

For those of you who want cold, hard facts about this scone situation, I took STATS192 and I’m ready to rumble. According to data from Google Trends, we can see that searches for a “cheese scone” in Australia are scarce compared to the number of New Zealanders searching for their favourite mid-morning snack:

Google search trends show New Zealanders have more interest in cheese scones than Australians do.

 

Don’t ask me what happened in August. Maybe there was a torrent of New Zealanders moving to Oz who were met with confusion at the lack of cheese scones and needed to convince themselves they didn’t make them up. Or maybe one person skewed the stats when they spent a dream-like montage researching them with the same fervour as Bella Swan researching vampires in Twilight.

But wait, the plot thickens: they’re not particularly common in the UK either. The scone is believed to have originated in Scotland in the 1500s and arrived in Aotearoa with the first settlers. As The Spinoff reported in 2019, adding cheese to scones in New Zealand only started to find favour in the 1930s, and from then on they were embraced (at least south of Auckland). While cheese scones can be found in Scotland – usually served with soup or even haggis – they’re something of a rarity in England.

This news has shocked me to my core. The word “scone” itself drums up images of Queen Elizabeth II hosting a tea party, plying her guests with doughy goodness with a side of crumbs for the corgis. However, as we can see from an event that DailyMail refers to as “Sconegate”, the English are busy waging wars about whether jam or cream should go first – and the question of “sweet or savoury” doesn’t even come into the equation.

New Zealanders abroad lamenting the lack of cheese scones (Image: Bryer Oden)

As you can see in this Google Ngram search, when comparing the frequency of the word “scone” versus “cheese scone” in a corpus of English books from across the decades, cheese scones barely register. 

The frequency of the word ‘scone’ vs ‘cheese scone’ across all searchable English language text.

Honestly, how can they still be members of the Commonwealth when the greatest wealth we have is not even common? Sweet scones seem to be plentiful abroad – but not even date ones. You’re more likely to find raisin or random variations such as glacé cherry, blueberry or Nutella. If New Zealand is worried about the “brain drain,” maybe Tourism New Zealand needs to promote the fact that cheese scones are mythical creatures overseas. Perhaps then, fewer people would abandon ship.

In the depths of this investigation, I found out some even more shocking truths. The world does not revolve around us. I am not so naive that I thought the Kiwi classics could be found overseas (RIP New Zealand Marmite, Pineapple Lumps, and mince and cheese pies); however, there seems to be a whole subset of basic household ingredients that don’t appear to exist elsewhere. Francisca couldn’t find baking powder in Switzerland, Annika couldn’t find malt biscuits in Scotland, and Jess couldn’t find reduced cream in America. There are no English muffins in Denmark, no hundreds and thousands in Norway, and most parts of Australia don’t have feijoas or onion soup sachets. Even international brands aren’t necessarily popular overseas – perhaps the reason people in England are obsessed with a post-town kebab is because they’ve never had Indomie noodles before. How are New Zealanders abroad supposed to take on the feat of educating their friends when they are robbed of the tools they need to instil a much-needed dose of Kiwiana?

What other great Kiwi snacks is the world missing out on? (Image: Bryer Oden)

If you’re feeling especially cynical, you may be thinking, “who cares about scones?”. Well I do, and so do the reams of New Zealanders who flock to cafe cabinets every day. 

Francesca, who used to be the manager of a central Wellington cafe, dearly misses her proximity to cheese scones now that she is back in Europe. She theorises that scones are popular not only for their taste, but for their convenience. She said that “scones were the most common items” at the cafe, and believes this is due to how “they are very easy and quick to eat, perfect for taking away but also for an office meeting. If you don’t have time for eggs or stuff like that, a cheese scone and a coffee is the perfect breakfast.”

Maybe it’s the hustle and bustle of city life that cements cheese scones firmly in Wellingtonian culture. They are hotly debated among friends, and the subject of many a workplace ranking session. The foodie community often go on quests to rate scones based on cheesiness and texture, and there are even sconespiracies about how some of our favourite scones are manufactured by the same company and shipped out to different cafés without us realising (no, I will not name my source). 

On the back of all of this discourse, I decided to take it upon myself to review as many scones as possible for my food account and find “Wellington’s best scone” for once and all. I thought this would be a simple task – however, when I asked for cheese scone recs from my followers, I think practically every single cafe in the city was recommended to me. 

While pondering how this could be true and which sconnoisseurs were lying, the real truth of the mysticism and magic behind the iconic baked good was revealed: by and large, people’s favourite scone is probably the one closest to their house, or their work, or at the cafe they like to hang out at the most. 

A cheese scone is not supposed to be a culinary work of art. It is humble, warm and filling. It’s meaningful in the way ratatouille is meaningful in the 2007 comedy/fantasy Disney Pixar film Ratatouille (sorry for the spoiler). The cheese scone is a signifier of home, of the vast possibilities of the weekend stretching out in front of you, of a morning spent in good company, of the ancient human desire to combine dough and cheese to feel joy. The scone is irrevocably intertwined in the fabric of our daily lives. Maybe the real cheese scone was the friends we made along the way.

The moral of this story is: if you’re planning to move abroad in the near future, you’d better get your hands on a good recipe stat – because the responsibility of baking your own and spreading some Antipodean joy has now fallen on your shoulders. Until then, keep your scones close to your chest and appreciate them in all their golden, nearby glory.