The real reason Fletchers is building at Ihumātao

Saturday, 27 July 2019

People at Ihumātao have plant trees in front of each standing police officer.

OPINION: I first saw the Ihumātao protesters at the annual general meeting of Fletcher Building in October 2017.

They were the butt of shareholders' disdain, and were silenced.

Now everybody's listening to them as the protests over Fletchers' plan for a housing development on a chunk of history-laden Auckland land confiscated from local Iwi in dubious circumstances in 1863 have made headlines, including the prime minister.

Government steps in, halts all building plans for disputed Fletcher’s Ihumātao site.

Back in 2017, the building company's board of directors was doing a massive 'mea culpa' to shareholders over mounting losses over the spiralling costs of developments including the SkyCity International Convention Centre.

**READ MORE:

* Ihumātao eviction

Shareholders and worker listen to Fletcher chairman Sir Ralph Norris at the Fletcher AGM in 2017.

* 'Cultural erasure': What Ihumātao reveals about NZ's protection of Māori heritage sites**

Fletcher workers protest outside the Fletcher AGM at the Auckland Museum in 2017. So did Ihumātao protesters.

Chairman Sir Ralph Norris announced directors would take a 20 per cent pay cut.

The Ihumātao protesters, who had earned the right to be there by buying Fletcher shares, didn't get much airtime.

Fletcher Building's own workers were protesting low wages, and they grabbed the headlines, along with the mounting losses for shareholders (which would get worse the following year), and the director pay cut.

Norris gave the protesters short shrift. He had the microphone one was using to ask questions turned off to silence her.

Fletchers' position was everyone had had a chance to have their say about the Ihumātao development, that the development was legal, and that it was going ahead.

Ihumātao protector Mihirangi Fleming says people power is what changes power.

The feeling in the hall towards the protesters from the shareholders of Fletchers, who all stood to gain from the development, was really hostile.

Three people have jumped the fence into a paddock during the Ihumtao protest, police entered to apprehend them.

The directors got a warmer reception than the Ihumātao protesters did.

Everyone was united in their wish the protesters would shut up, go away, and let shareholders get their development profits.

A couple of weekends after the meeting, I went to Ihumātao to find out what the fuss was about.

It didn't take long for me to conclude the land confiscation, and its subsequent passing to settlers, was far from the colonial government's finest hour.

I was unfavourably impressed by the crass nature of the planned development, and that we would get yet another grey-toned, cookie-cutter, car-dependent development on the fringe of the city.

It felt like another nail in the coffin of history, an insult added to a long line of insults.

Ihumātao itself is a remarkable place, and is something quite unique in a city that has a tendency to bulldoze its history.

The wholesale destruction of the fort at Britomart, and the grinding down of some of Auckland's volcanic cones to make roads, shows disregard for history is a culture that goes back a long way in Auckland.

But Aucklanders have got used to crass developments, and the steamrollering of the past, and feel powerless to stop it. Our tendency is to shrug and just push it from our minds.

The truth is Fletcher is building at Ihumātao not because it is a good idea, but because it is convenient.

This is how we do development.

Auckland has a lot of poorly-used land holding large and ageing warehouses, rundown racecourses, low-density housing, under-used golf courses, huge car yards, sprawling malls.

Much of this land would be far better for housing development than Ihumātao, which, if it is ever completed, will create yet more car-dependency in a city already grinding to standstill.

But the land on which these wastes of space sit is not available, and Ihumātao was available to Fletchers, which bought it in 2016, the latest in a series of private owners since the land confiscation of 1863.

We do have the Public Works Act, which the government can use to buy land.

The tradition is, however, that it is used for transport (road-widening, rail links, etc), not to buy land in places we actually want Auckland homes, or to preserve historical, culturally significant landscapes.

It's a tradition that has left its mark on Auckland.

It has its upsides.

Not using the Public Works Act to buy land for development a powerful protector of property rights for land owners from avaricious politicians and developers leaguing together.

But it does mean that when chunks of valuable, easy-to-build-on land like Ihumātao become available, they are especially highly-prized by the likes of Fletchers, and money has tended to steamroll over other concerns like history and good planning.

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