Housing Minister Chris Bishop has pushed back at Act leader David Seymour’s claim that the Auckland Council could generate maps for the city’s revised 1.6 million‑home density plan “at the push of a button”.
Speaking on RNZ this morning, Bishop said he had big respect for his Cabinet colleague, but Seymour’s claim about the maps was not quite true.
Bishop said some people seemed to imagine “a giant button inside Auckland Council that spits out these maps”, but a city the size of Auckland can’t produce detailed, street‑level material that way.
Seymour’s weekend column in the Post, in which he said the maps could be generated at the push of a button, was written in his role as the MP for Epsom rather than as a Cabinet minister, Bishop said.
Asked about Bishop’s comments, Seymour told the Herald that Aucklanders and MPs should see what a 1.6 million home capacity would look like before Parliament voted on it.
“We do not need a finalised plan, just an indication of what it would look like that the council could easily produce. It would be gracious and democratic of the council to provide the information for all to see,” Seymour said.
Asked if this statement was backing away from the need for maps, a spokesman said Seymour’s position had not changed.
Seymour would not be drawn on Bishop’s saying his button-pushing comments were not true.
Bishop’s position is that the council needs to come up by March 17 with “a summary of the provisional zoning changes the council would make once we legislate” to lower the housing capacity from two million homes to 1.6 million.
Mayor Wayne Brown has said “there will be no maps” before the March 10 council meeting, where councillors will come up with a response to Bishop’s request for a summary.
“I do not wish to invest millions of dollars in preparing maps based on a letter, without clarity on what legislation requires of us,” Brown has said, adding the council has spent $13 million on different iterations of new density plans for the city.
Council planning director Megan Tyler has also said that producing maps has not, and never has been, possible at the push of a button, saying the process “involves robust modelling and testing of locations against factors like accessibility, infrastructure availability, population growth and demand”.
Her view has been challenged by councillor Maurice Williamson, who believes it is possible to produce indicative maps in a matter of days.
“My view is leave everything as it was, change the number back to 1.6 million and create some indicative maps,” said Williamson, noting that similar indicative maps were created for the earlier two-million housing scenario.
“I don’t know why we wouldn’t produce these maps,” he said.
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