There is legal action over the right of first refusal for iwi and the discovery the Ministry of Education had already started that process for another of the four plots Smith took the bus tour to. That was before the Government decided to use it for housing instead. It had since decided to use it for housing but nobody told John Key that - he was busy saying no actual plots had yet been decided on.
Instead they were simply "conceptual" despite the Government's announcement of a multimillion-dollar package to develop this conceptual land. Key used the word thrice, as if repetition would make it true. There is much anticipation Smith will soon boast of a vast plot of land on an island - only to discover it was a traffic island.
Smith has blamed officials for tendering incorrect advice and the media for forcing them to rush the job by asking pesky questions about where all this new housing land was. This apparently resulted in him forgetting the key rule in explorer Charles Heaphy's 1842 recipe: "First catch your weka."
His argument appeared to be that if the media had not asked a blatantly obvious question, he would not have rushed to hustle up four empty blocks, take the cameras to them and then stride manfully across those grassy plains like some pioneer from the Wild West setting boundary lines for a land grab.
Labour is having the time of its life. Iain Lees-Galloway tweeted a photo of Smith leaning on a fence beside one of the grassy fields, gazing over it like a proud parent. Lees-Galloway took inspiration first from the Beatles' Fool on the Hill, tweeting "Day after day, alone on a hill". Lees-Galloway's next caption for the photo was "If I conceptualise them, they will come" - an adaptation of the Field of Dreams baseball movie quote "If you build it, he will come."
Ironically, the Tamaki Collective dispute over the right of first refusal coincided with the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta - a document Act leader David Seymour informed us promoted individual freedom against arbitrary authority of the state and "established the notion that the law is not simply the whim of the king or of government".
Unless it is the Housing Act. The Tamaki Collective's right of first refusal has been bypassed because the Housing Act allows the Government to do that where the land is wanted in pursuit of the Government's "social objectives" for "state housing purposes".
In layman's talk, "state housing" means just that - houses owned and provided by the state. But the definition of state housing purposed in the act includes building on the land and "disposal by way of sale, lease, or tenancy". The Government has taken that to mean it can let private developers develop it and then it can hock it off to the developers who can hock it all off to the wealthy.
Key has taken to using the word "social housing" a lot, although his definition of "social" appears to mean any house in which socialising may occur.
In his celebration of the Magna Carta, Labour's David Parker called on the inspirational words of lawyer Dennis Denuto in the Australian movie The Castle. "He said: "It's in the vibe of the thing." The Castle too was a legal stoush over the state's right to take over land, although in this case it was housing land to be turned into an airport extension. That too involved aboriginal rights, kind of. Denuto referred to the case of Mabo to prove his point. In the meantime, there is no serenity for Smith in the Bonnie Doon he has created for himself.
