National overthrows traditional private property rights!
In the near future property owners can have significant drops in the value of their property and have no access to a right of compensation, or to stop those causing that drop in value. Currently, if a person builds a dam on their property and it breaks, flooding and damaging the land of a neighbour, the dam holder will be liable to compensate for that damage.
Now, in Wellington for example, a 6 story building could be built very close to your suburban property boundary. The shade from that building can come onto your property, and into your house, and you will have no right of compensation for that loss, or a loss of privacy. Sun and privacy are hugely valuable parts of your property in Wellington, but you will get nothing. This removal of control/objection and compensation strikes at the heart of traditional private property rights.
National by brazenly attacking traditional private property rights opens up the possibility that the ratepayers and local residents can democratically own ‘how land is to be used in their city’ rather than being hostage to private land owners commercial interests and choices. With Nationals approach changes in land use can be required without the cost of compensation.
The power of this can be seen in what could have been. For example in Wellington, we have 5 schools and a university near the Basin Reserve (Wellington High School, Wellington College, Wellington East, Saint Marks, Mount Cook, Massey University – and many years ago it had Saint Patricks). If people could ‘democratically own’ the city as a community asset it could have demanded that the Aquatic centre and the sports centre were built near the basin rather than over the hill in Kilbirnie. The local businesses could be shuffled around or incorporated into venues.
Thousands of students would have had fantastic facilities they could easily access directly after school without the need for huge amounts of travel. Schools would have had less need for expensive onsite facilities. The current over the hill travel to Kilbirnie has increased congestion on the Mt Vic tunnel which was a known risk and problem at the time, and now we have hugely expensive solutions being proposed.
Our current deference to private property rights in our cities is causing massive costs and problems for the liveability of our cities. National has now given a pathway and example to overthrow private property rights. They have initiated it.
The Tories have finally reacted to ridiculous ‘NIMBY-ism’, probably only 30 years too late.
Recall the reason that Auckland didn’t get the brand new Viaduct national stadium a decade ago: a few apartment owners in condominiums nearby went on television, and complained it would be ‘ugly’!
Now Auckland is stuck with two outdated stadiums, which are totally unfit for hosting cricket or the A.F.L. Christchurch now has the same problem (even once New Lancaster Park is opened).
But I think ultimately the insufficient supply of new real estate will have to be solved with mass developments.
Compulsory acquisition of land, immediate rubber stamping of permits en masse, and the entire suburbs/towns built by a large foreign developer, with a reputation for building huge projects fast — that can get things moving.
These can be thoroughly planned by elected officials, which is hard to do with piecemeal developments.
There are not enough very tall high-rises in the downtown areas, or the satellite towns. This should be a priority, particularly in a place like Wellington, which suffers from lack of available land (due to poor geographical placement of the initial downtown area).
Towns such as Wellington and Christchurch also suffer from difficult zoning issues: streets that are too narrow, missing transportation infrastructure, insufficient public spaces etc. — which can be solved more easily through mass development.
In Auckland government have been destroying neighbouring amenity for the past 10+ years while Labour has been in power, not just the Natz. It might have started by the Natz but Labour and Greens have not repealed to give neighbours and communities any rights (apart from iwi), and accelerated intensification of McMansions and polluters around the neighbourhoods with the rabid moniker of more houses will some how equal less poverty – well we all know how that lack of detail has worked out. A bit like building houses on flood plains and on raft foundations.
It is fine in NZ law to block sun, light, privacy and amenity to others for your own gain, as well as destroy native species habitats. Developers just say it is minor and polluters tend to have extensive amounts of money to fight, so the majority of NZ legal precedents in environment court are for the polluter wins.
Our legal system has been set up to destroy local democracy and property rights and environmental and social controls have been eroded ever since. NZ has so much flooding, landslides as in NZ – climate change is all about pretending to care and marketing, not actually doing something like proper resource consents, solar panels, or protecting flora and fauna.
Our laws, councils, environment court, literally allow anybody to do anything in NZ that pops into their heads if they have the money to drive it through and can get a few paid reports going, which is a booming industry.
There is no legal enforcement to check if ‘expert’ reports submitted to councils are wrong and misleading, and consents are not revoked if the original consents are untrue, based on poor information and misleading.
Experts often make mistakes but actually nobody checks qualifications anymore anyway so who knows how many people in NZ are pretending in their jobs or are not competent to do them. It seems like at record proportions.
When people die in CTV buildings or Pike River over appalling errors, nobody gets prosecuted even when they fake their qualifications. Too much hassle for our bovine justice system – more interested in media pretending to care, than stopping it from happening in the future.
This engineer killed his wife, it is presumed that mistakes he made in his job contributed to this.
A 50-year marriage ended with a man murdering his wife with a hatchet, then killing himself
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/131318388/a-50year-marriage-ended-with-a-man-murdering-his-wife-with-a-hatchet-then-killing-himself
Another fake ‘seisemic’ engineer gets only a $5000 fine after 38 frauds and the engineering firms are not named and shamed for using her – why bother to change
“Even if Ms Singh could have conceivably considered she could rely on her work being checked by others, at the time the work was carried out, she did not even have a Bachelor of Engineering degree … She has continually through this process diminished her own responsibility.”!
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/467061/student-engineer-signed-off-dozens-of-projects-while-posing-as-structural-expert
Not just fake or incompetent engineers in NZ, it seems like being a fake doctor is popular here too!
Fake doctor examined dozens of patients over six months at busy Auckland hospital
https://www.smh.com.au/world/oceania/fake-doctor-worked-for-six-months-at-auckland-hospital-examining-dozens-of-patients-20220907-p5bg76.html
We export the fakes that ‘trained’ in NZ as well as recruiting the overseas fakes.
Fake Kiwi doctor Zholia Alemi jailed after ‘abject failure of scrutiny’
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/fake-kiwi-doctor-zholia-alemi-jailed-after-abject-failure-of-scrutiny/H6IHX6ZJ5FGFXLWDNVTCNPETAU/
I guess when the universities, recruiters and government are more interested in money than cheating and ethics that is what you start expanding in your wokeforce, fraudsters with inevitable destruction to other people’s lives.