Red tape 'stops Maori getting decent homes'

Tim Howard addressing the Northland Housing Forum. Photo / John Stone

Too many Maori families live in shacks, caravans and cowsheds because red tape prevents them from building quality homes on multiple-owned land.

That sentiment was voiced several times at a Northland Housing Forum (NHF) in Moerewa this week.

As well as being over-represented in low socio-economic statistics, Maori were disadvantaged when it came to accessing loans because banks viewed land as an asset or a commodity with a market value, speaker Hine Porter said.

"There is a breakdown in how we value our land and how the banks value our land," Ms Porter said.

The gearing of planning and consent requirements towards district council or Resource Management Act functions and policies inhibited Maori from developing multiple whanau housing on their shared land because, in terms of those rules, any new multiple housing was classed as "development", she said.

Her family was building quality, off-grid, rammed earth whanau housing on their land at Ahipara. The prototype she and husband Rueben Porter built two years ago had created a template that simplified the consent process for subsequent houses.

Ms Porter, NHF chairman Tim Howard and others, including Labour MP Kelvin Davis and Green MP David Clendon who gave brief outlines of their parties' housing policies, called for more collective and solutions-based resourcing to help cut through existing red tape.

Tui Shortland, from Ngati Hine Health Trust's environment unit, said she was at the hui to work with others on housing solutions "that get whanau out of shacks, caravans and cowsheds", she said.

Paul Hansen, co-manager of Healthy Homes Tai Tokerau, said that of the 7000 Northland houses that have been insulated under the retrofit scheme to date, 6000 were low income families', and many were substandard houses.

Mr Hansen said that in some cases insulation was like putting a small sticking plaster on a gaping wound. There were on average 284 road deaths a year in New Zealand. There were 1600 "winter deaths" from respiratory and associated diseases due to poor living conditions, he said.

"Private dwellings have public consequences," he said. "If we attempt to lift up that bottom level and improve it then we improve things for our whole community."

The harsh view was "we are saving public money".

Also at the meeting was Treasury official John Park, manager of the Commercial Transaction Group, whose talk fielded lively responses.