Brian Rudman: Dithering councillors need to gird their loins

Legislation to save the foothills of the Waitakere Ranges from rampant suburbanisation has been stalled while Waitakere City indulges in round 724 - or is that 859? - of consultation.

It's as though cautious councillors want every last elector to love them twice over before they're prepared to gird their loins and do the right thing.

I have news for the ditherers: in a democracy, they're rarely going to get 100 per cent support for anything. And in this case, while they try for the impossible, the region's lungs remain imperilled.

For most politicians, the overwhelming support already recorded in polls and the consultation processes for action would be enough to proceed.

The Colmar Brunton poll last May, for instance, showed 81 per cent of Waitakere City residents and 77 per cent of other Aucklanders supported legislation to give permanent protection to the ranges, including the foothills.

This support has held in the latest round of community consultation, reported back to Wednesday's special council meeting. Of the more than 3500 written responses received, 71 per cent supported special legislation.

Depressingly, at Wednesday's meeting, a majority of councillors demanded more time to consult affected land-owners. Why? Because some land-owners apparently distrust the council.

What a surprise that isn't. It hardly needs more consultation to reveal some people are never going to agree, however fair and reasonable the proposed legislation is.

Unfortunately, the Eco-city's inaction this week has put the kibosh on any hope of the proposed legislation being passed into law before this year's national election.

Local Labour MPs, including Minister of Conservation Chris Carter, had promised to shepherd it through Parliament this year. But that depended on the draft bill being approved by Waitakere City by the end of this month and getting into Parliament pronto. That deadline will now be missed.

With Waitakere's additional round of consultation, the draft bill won't be back before councillors until May. At best it'll make Parliament by July and be stranded mid-passage, to make way for the election. And who knows what that will bring for the new year.

To think the week had begun so well for the Waitaks, with the Auckland Regional Council showing welcome leadership in matters regional on Tuesday by unanimously endorsing the draft legislation. Encouraging, too, was Rodney District representative Christine Rose saying the district council wanted to be included in the "national heritage area" the proposed act would establish.

Waitakere Ranges Protection Society chairman John Edgar was disappointed but amazingly magnanimous after Wednesday's setback. He said that some of the councillors had only had four days to study the proposed legislation, and needed more time.

It's a generous view of the stone-walling that occurred. You'd have thought any councillor up to speed with the community would have been aware of the issues and nuances involved before coming to the meeting. Four days seems more than enough time to read and understand a short and simple bill.

The aim of the proposed legislation is to establish a new category of protected land called a national heritage area, which will be protected for all time by stricter rules on development and subdivision.

The aim is to bring a co-ordinated approach to any further development within the area and protect the foothills from what parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Dr Morgan Williams famously described in a 2000 report as "death by a thousand cuts".

While the doomsayers cast round for faults in the proposed act, John Edgar concentrates on the positives. With the pioneering legislation in place, he sees Waitakere City becoming the lodestone for communities wanting to control their future development. "People will come from all over the world to see how they did it."

He sees the ranges heritage area becoming the model for environmentally sensitive areas such as the Wakatipu Basin, Taupo and the Bay of Islands - places where development is rapidly destroying the environments that attracted the development in the first place.

But the legislation must be passed first, and that can't happen until the dithering councillors of Eco-city do the right thing.