Firstly news that a rich right wing white guy wants to run for Mayor of Auckland. Great, I’m always saying rich white old guys just don’t get enough of a break in this city, especially millionaires.
Millionaires aside, what about this next million people ‘they’ want to cram into Auckland…
Bryan Jackson: First ask who wants another million?
Who wants another million people in Auckland? Len Brown does. Auckland City Councillors do. Auckland town planners do. The Government does. I don’t. None of my friends do. No one I have spoken to does.
Bryan Jackson asks who wants another million people crammed into Auckland. It’s a good question, as a person who lives in Central Auckland, I don’t see the badly needed infrastructure to look after the current population let alone another bloody million.
Baby boomer Aucklanders have jumped upon the property express to prosperity with the passion of their first love in the 1960s and sure as hell don’t want to be told that their garden water feature complete with Koi fish and Japanese sand art will be in the shadow of an 18 storey apartment complex.
The pressure to put that many people into our city is being directed by central Government and their need to show growth. The Auckland SuperCity either goes along with these demands or suddenly find themselves as un-needed as Ecan found themselves and the Government simply appoint Technocrats to run Auckland instead.
What is most fascinating about the 300+ pages of the Auckland Plan is that they look out to 20, 30 and 40 years on almost every variable EXCEPT ethnicity. For that they only go out to 9 years. Isn’t that interesting? The powers that be need to hide the ethnic make up of Auckland and are trying to quietly insinuate this extra million will be internal migration. What a load of nonsense, it took an earthquake for Christchurch people to move to Auckland, this migration will be external and it is happening now.
The current free market laws allow for foreigners to buy up as much domestic land as they can get their hands on, the Overseas Investment Office only gets involved if the purchase is over $100 million so the impact of rich immigrants buying up residential property is completely masked expect in the ever increasing property prices which are locking out Gen Xers and Gen Ys from ever owning property.
If you were one of the first generations of user pays, this country holds little hope for you now.
The problems are complex. Property speculators don’t care about rich immigrants buying their property, as long as they pay a high price. Local city politicians will do as they are told by central Government who see growth over all but don’t want to pay for the infrastructure and property developers don’t care about public transport and want to sprawl all the way to Hamilton.
Meanwhile the poor slowly rot. Without the money to have a voice, vast tracts of South Auckland and their needs have been ignored.
The current crisis for public transport and better infrastructure highlights how underfunded and under prepared Auckland really is for this mass external migration. Putting road tolls everywhere to pay for more people to move here from overseas will begin the seeds for a nasty blowback of political resentment.
The vested interests involved in determining the future of Auckland are all insidious and selfish, and it will be the increasingly powerless locals who get angrier and angrier.
We must intensify the urban city and we must fund the infrastructure necessary for that intensification, but who is Auckland being built for? Locals or wealthy immigrants?
New Zealand has always been economically fueled by lazy and ill planned migration, what we are seeing now is a third great migration and the delicious irony of Pakeha suddenly knowing what it really feels like to be as disenfranchised as Maori.
Not only is Aotearoa for sale, it’s being sold and the paper work forwarded.
If the left bases its opposition to the corporate agenda of Labour and National on thinly veiled anti-Asian racism, like this article does, then we’ve failed.
Thinly veiled racism….it is not, it’s a reality that Kiwi’s have become second class citizens in their own country and this mother of seventh generation pakeha is angry and getting angrier everyday at the sham of a democracy this government has become, lead by businessmen who care little about the people or land, my WW2 fighting grandfather always said ‘they couldn’t beat us, so they’ll just buy us instead’ damn sure he didn’t leave his new wife and newborn son to spend 4years fighting overseas so our country could be sold to the highest bidder.
I don’t think this article alluded to anti-Asian racism in any way; it expressed concerns regarding the impact of wealthy immigration and the property market, however. Not all wealthy immigrants are Asian.
About the limited projections of Auckland’s ethnic composition; consider what ethnic groups are the poorest in Auckland? Along with the rest of the country it’s Maori and Pacifika. Thirty years (and counting) of neoliberal reforms has made this group poorer. For many they’re clutching on to the remnants of the old welfare state to simply survive; benefits, state housing, etc. State housing – remove those inhabiting it to free up more prime property for “investment” and “growth”. Rising property prices and rates also affect the ability of low income earners, the elderly and disabled to retain their free-hold housing, owned due to better times. By pushing plans favourable to the free-market, I think will see Auckland’s ethnic composition change by the rapid decline of Maori and Pacifika. One could say plans favouring the free-market are anti-Maori/Pacifika. But the reality is such plans are to the detriment of all New Zealanders not wealthy.
Interestingly the rich right-wing American “celebrity” contender for mayor suggests shifting growth to Manukau. Will this growth be for the benefit of the poor living in South Auckland through opportunities such as employment, etc? Or will it make South Auckland more “acceptable” for those well-to-do to settle there at the displacement of the poor and brown?
I totally disagree with you. He is stating facts. The truth is no-one wants a million more people in Auckland. I for one don”t want a million more Chinese in Auckland. If I wanted that I would go live in
China. You can hold your hands up in horror and cry racism all you like but I can’t lie about that. I’m sick of seeing national politicians and fat real estate agents (rubbing their greedy hands together) saying it isn’t overseas buyers driving the prices up. Liars all of them.
Sir, there are huge benefits from migration and growing Auckland’s population. I agree about foreign land ownership, it should be controlled in some way. But the Unitary Plan, while I don’t think it goes far enough, will enable much more affordable homes for people. Remove regulations like minimum parking requirements in some areas will mean that apartments can be cheaper, and allow the poor to get into the home market.
As for transport infrastructure – tolling wouldn’t be requried if the transport projects were properly prioritised. Ditching the unneeded Harbour Crossing project would save about $4 billion for a start. We need to prioritise important projects like the City Rail Link.
Oh, this will ALLOW the poor to get into the housing market. The reality is that the accommodation supplement that is being paid to us poor by the government goes straight into the hands of those property investors be they local or overseas investors….another tax break or government subsidy for the rich…as Confucius said ‘if a state is governed by the principles of reason, POVERTY and MISERY are subjects of shame;…”
Here’s some more facts from a poor person 52% of my DPB is paid out in rent, thanks to Paula Benett I can now earn $100 ( an increase of $20 after 2 decades, will have to look up how much the cost of living has increased over that period) over my benefit but I lose 30 cents in every dollar in secondary tax and student loans, the next $100 I lose 30 cents in tax and 30 cents to WINZ as according to them I now earn to much, the next $100 I lose 30cents in tax and 70 cents in every dollar to WINZ. Very few of us are in a position to save and as everything we receive and earn is spent on supporting our families, we are again taxed on everything in the form of GST. Guess I’m missing the bit which will ALLOW us poor to get into homeownership. Oh and by the way this governments recent changes to child care subsidies for us poor has just increased my child care payments to almost double what it was previously, no wonder I struggle to feed my children or have no idea where I’m going to get $55 to purchase new school uniform pants urgently needed for my teenage son, because he can’t just wear plain navy shorts that I can buy for $19. And yet at every opportunity we are slammed by government, the media and better off New Zealanders as being dole bludgers, suggest you go spend sometime with a poor family before making anymore comments a about allowing us into the housing market and high rise inner city slums are certainly not my goal for the future of my children and before assuming I’m another woman who got pregnant to make a living(what a joke) of the DPB, I was made redundant after giving birth to my son so a skinny woman could take my management role in hospitality. Feel free to email me if need anymore facts about us poor.
…suggest you go spend sometime with a poor family before making anymore comments a about allowing us into the housing market…
I doubt the commenter or anyone else imagines a housing market in which social welfare beneficiaries are participants. The term “more affordable” doesn’t mean “affordable for people on benefits” and there’s no obvious way it could.
As to “high rise inner city slums,” I lived for years in a 50+ years old inner city apartment in Germany and it was a far better quality building than any I’ve lived in here, ever. There’s nothing inherent in a multi-story apartment block that suggests inferiority over detached houses.
@Psycho milt: Why wouldn’t the previous commenter think beneficiaries could participate in the housing market when Paula Bennet bought a house with WINZ assistance – and you obviously haven’t seen the apartment style state housing in Glen Innes and Onehunga etc for you to have such an optimistic vision of what the government thinks is ok to house low income citizens – the only element differentiating these NZ buildings from Cabrini-Green (Chicago Housing Project – high rise inner city slum) is size which is exactly what this plan is suggesting – just so we’re clear this discussion is about NZers ideas of what is appropriate living standards of which living on top of each other is not the norm or ant kind of desired future scenario
Well, sure – like Bennett, back in the late 80s I also was able to get a $50,000 house in a provincial town with Housing Corp assistance. Not as a beneficiary, but as a shop assistant I was probably bringing in no more than Bennett was and the income was less secure. It should be obvious just how much that isn’t relevant to the housing market in Auckland these days.
…just so we’re clear this discussion is about NZers ideas of what is appropriate living standards of which living on top of each other is not the norm or ant kind of desired future scenario.
Indeed, NZers seem to imagine you can have a city with a population in the millions in which everybody lives in a house with a garden. Fine if you love urban motorways, not so fine if you like to live in a city rather than a small town that’s 50 kilometers across.
Down the bowels of a broken land where numbers live like men,
Where those who keep their senses have them taken back again,
Where the night stick cracks with crazy rage, where madmen don’t
Pretend,
Where wealth has no beginning and poverty no end.
Homeless Brother (1974) – Don McLean.
Those lines of song to me exemplify the effects of free-market thinking on major population growth. Well-to-do proponents of the free-market don’t see people with values as part of the human condition – just numbers for economic benefit. Who benefits – the wealthy. Humaneness and environmental well-being are negligible afterthoughts. The nation governed by cold madcap schemes to maximise wealth, while the growing poor wait for a trickle.
Lobby groups suggesting the necessity of a population of 15 million in 50 years. A million more in Auckland – there’s a perfectly good country available outside Auckland. The situation was so much more reasonable in the past, yet the victors of today constantly lecture us on how the problems of yesterday were so much worse than today. That’s not what I can recall, why for many were their lives so much better?
Martyn, exactly how do you thnk you’re going to STOP Auckland’s population expanding by 1 million over the next 30 years? Do you think that if we don’t improve our infrastructure it won’t? Do you think we can ban migrants from coming here; or stop existing Aucklanders having kids? Do you want to tank Auckland’s economy so all the jobs go elsewhere?
I’m seriously. How would you propose to STOP Auckland growing?
Daphaie,
Your comments are typical of the simplistic absurdity that marks out the advocates of Auckland’s rush to increase its numbers.
Much of the increase is of course due to immigration, much of it is also due to the direct effects of migration (I.e the vast majority of immigrants are of child bearing age). What you are saying is in effect the alternative to an extra million residents in Auckland is to stop all migrants coming here – that is absurd, the issue is about the sheer numbers. If the numbers were not so high, the projections would of course not be nearly as high, pretty logical I would have thought.
David
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