Election 2020: Act wants to ‘build like boomers’ and allow councils to create alliances

The Act Party wants millennials and Gen Z to “build like the Boomers” to avoid being prevented from owning a home.

He also wants councils to be able to form regional alliances to take on central government funding and prop up large-scale projects.

The speech of the leader of the law, David Seymour, is “to get politics out of infrastructure.”

Revealing his wish list for housing and infrastructure in Tauranga, Seymour said the Act also wants accelerated foreign investment in infrastructure, to repeal and replace the Resource Management Act and introduce mandatory private insurance for new homes.

Successive governments had failed to confront the planning system that he claimed was to blame for the housing crisis, Seymour said.

“We just don’t allow there to be enough buildings, whether outside or outside, to house our growing population. Governments of all kinds have failed to meet this challenge.”

Seymour said the label “boomer” had been used as a mocking term “but that generation knew how to build houses.”

Referring to the Statistics New Zealand data, Seymour said that New Zealand’s population had grown by 2 million since the mid-1970s, but “we are building fewer houses than we were then.”

In fact, that chart shows a peak of 40,025 new monthly home permits granted in February 1974 before a sharp drop, then a steady rise, and a decline until July 2011 when approvals bottomed out at 13,236.

Then they went up again and in June of this year they were 37,614.

Seymour said that an entire generation had been left homeless and thousands of people lived in unsafe housing, while others were homeless.

Act joined Labor and National in their commitments to eliminate and replace the RMA.

The Law would replace it with the Laws of Environmental Protection and Urban Development.

National would replace the RMA with an Environmental Standards Act and a Planning and Development Act. While the work is a Law of Natural and Built Environments and a Law of Strategic Planning along with other laws of climate adaptation.

The Green Party is calling for reform, but with guarantees that it will not come at the expense of environmental concerns or public consultation.

Seymour said the Act’s plan would allow for faster infrastructure development and ambitious projects “without living in fear of the Environmental Court.”

It would also promote more sensible land use regulations so that more Kiwis could afford to live in cities, he said.

“If we allow more New Zealanders to move to higher-wage cities and increase their personal productivity, we could significantly increase overall income. That effect alone could make New Zealanders significantly richer.”

The law also wants mandatory 30-year construction insurance from a company regulated by the Reserve Bank that would give homeowners the security of receiving compensation if their home turns out to be poorly built or made of poor quality materials.

That would have the ripple effect of requiring municipal inspections that Seymour says would help houses build cheaper.

Seymour said the Act also wants local councils to be able to form 30-year infrastructure partnerships to enter into long-term contracts with the central government – for example, Auckland, Bay of Plenty and Waikato could form a golden triangle partnership.

Those associations could then obtain funding from the government, the private sector or foreign investors, which would be allowed through their plan to reform the Foreign Investment Law.

“At the heart of the problem is the separation between planning, which is done at the local level, and financing infrastructure, where the central government has the overwhelming majority of the revenue,” Seymour said.

“The central government can pay, but cannot plan, infrastructure and local government can plan, but has little income.

“Governments have chosen where to build roads, bridges and railways, based on political advantage rather than economic necessity, and changes of government every three years bring uncertainty and the risk that decisions will be reversed.”