Bob Jones: All that red tape's tying us in knots

The Empire State Building was completed in 13 months in 1931, but such a feat would be impossible now. Photo / Getty Images

Think of what we’d achieve if we didn’t have so many regulations and tradesmen didn’t have cellphones.

In 1931 the then-world's tallest building, New York's 103-floor Empire State was constructed in just over a year. In 2015, a simple deck restaurant on one of my Auckland office building's terraces was completed in the same time, at a cost 0.14 per cent of the Empire State's. Why should that be? The answer is today's much-complained-about, safety-obsessed red-tape.

In a non-inflationary age our building industry rightly attributes the paradox of soaring costs to excessive red tape. There's constant reform talk but I'm sceptical of significant changes occurring.

We teased the Auckland office over the restaurant saga, after being told last November that it would be opening "next week". Thereafter it was "next week" every week over the subsequent three months, mostly silly Council interventions causing the delays.

We spend millions annually on building fit-outs etc, and thus suffer these absurdities, nevertheless profit from this state of affairs. That's because ever-rising construction costs, mainly incurred through bureaucratic excesses, lift existing buildings' values, thus our complaining is more of principle than cost. So too with residences, soaring new build costs raising existing houses' values.

Despite all the hand-wringing about first home buyers' difficulties, as they comprise less than 1 per cent of the entire housing stock, the existing home-owning 65 per cent of New Zealanders are naturally joyous about their property's rising value. Perversely therefore, bureaucrats could argue that their costly nonsense is bringing great happiness to the majority, namely existing home-owners.

Last year an Australian house-builder claimed the New Zealand industry doesn't know how lucky it is on this red tape front, compared with New South Wales. He was certainly right about that, and not just with construction, Sydney's bureaucracy being of Kafkaesque proportions, nevertheless that's no excuse.

I regularly receive pages of guff from the Sydney Council. This notifies me that someone, perhaps four blocks from my Sydney home, wishes to, say, alter their kitchen. I'm advised in case I wish to object. It cost $25,000 paid to the council to circulate the neighbourhood when I made interior changes to build a library a decade back, as if anyone cared.

Sydney's latest bureaucratic stunt demands that new office lessees submit floor-plans showing desks' placement to the Council for approval - wait for it - so as to ascertain that wheelchairs can move about freely.

Where are all these buggers in wheelchairs? I haven't seen one in yonkers yet my company is obliged to spend a fortune on wheelchair access and toilets.

Wheelchairism is approaching the maintenance burden of women's toilets, this for reasons I won't spoil your day detailing, but costing us tens of thousands of dollars annually. The men's toilets cost nothing. Regardless, all commercial expenses ultimately affect every consumer's pocket.

But builders are also partly culpable for our having the second highest housing costs (after Norway) in the developed world, for one particular reason, namely cellphone obsession. Driving with a friend in Auckland we came across a building nearing completion. Numerous tradesmen's vehicles suggested lots of subbies, typical of a building's concluding stages. I wagered at least half would be on a cellphone.

We entered and found 21 tradesmen, 19 babbling into phones. I'm serious about this. Visit any construction site, especially housing, and see for yourselves. I banned them in the contract for some house alterations as being my home I wanted the job done quickly. One morning a car pulled up and a bloke got out and lay against the bonnet, settling in to his cellphone fix. I complained to the contractor.

"Sorry," he said. "I forgot about him. He's a plasterer and only has half an hour's work." I left for the office, passing the plasterer still bawling away. The following morning the contractor said, "I thought you were a bit eccentric but my God I see your point now."

Apparently the plasterer stayed until late afternoon, 90 per cent of the time babbling on his phone. It's a wonderful invention but its addictive mis-use is another contribution to soaring construction costs, moreso with the advent of texting etc.

It's also a factor with rising new estate costs, particularly roading, reputedly extraordinarily high here by world standards. Drive past roadworks and you will see why. On my observation the ratio of paid watchers to actual workers is two to one, plus, of course, the ubiquitous cellphonist. I had 50m of my drive resealed recently. There were two machine drivers, one other worker, two watchers and a cellphonist in the six man crew.

The initial design and approval of the Empire State building took literally two weeks and construction 13 months. Other design features were completed during construction, as once was the practice here. It cost circa $700 million in today's money.

It would be impossible to gain design approval and build the Empire State building in under five years in Auckland today, despite modern technology. That alone tells just how seriously excessive red tape contributes to Auckland's housing crisis.