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• Published date: 01 April 2021
• Date: 01 April 2021

Housing has become a huge issue. Māori complain that the government is not doing enough to house Māori, and the rest of us are concerned that our kids will never get on the home ownership ladder.

In terms of Māori, I contacted Kelvin Davis and Willow-Jean Prime, highlighting the housing issues some of us volunteers encounter when approached by families who want to house their kids on Māori land. After obtaining consent from the land trustees, these families are all set to go when someone objects, triggering the long-winded and off-putting Māori Land Court process. Most give up.

I was told by our MPs that a law was going through Parliament to hasten the process, and was sent a copy of the bill. They probably thought I wouldn’t read it, but I did, right up to Clause 286, when my eyes started to glaze over. If our MPs think that the long, complicated process of this new law is going to hasten things, they’ve got to be joking. If we think the building process is darned difficult, try building on Māori land.

Research revealed that things might happen a lot faster if Māori had a plan for housing on Māori land. Many do not. I approached Ngāti Rehia, and asked what they were doing to house their people, and was told the process was very difficult.

As I have posed in your column many times before, it is difficult and costly because we don’t plan – at central and local government level, and at community level. Whose fault is that? Look in the mirror!

Now, on to planning. A year ago the Government announced a change to the Building Act so that simple modifications could be made to an existing home without triggering a building consent. We all applauded that.

So what does Far North District Council do? They decide to bring in zone changes that, particularly where we are concerned, could trigger a resource consent for doing the very things the Government said we could now do. In other words, local government could see an income stream being lost, so came up with another income stream.

And don’t get me started on the huge rate increases council says are required to meet the costs of our expensive infrastructure because they continue to allow places like Kerikeri to spread out and away from a much cheaper centralised infrastructure system.

Housing will continue to become a major issue until we do something like Christchurch did after the earthquake. Housing was taken away from local government. Unfortunately, this government is too risk averse.

Jill Smith

Kerikeri

Ancient climate change

About your article ‘Ancient trees crucial to discovery’ (Age, February 23), on the remains of kauri trees from a long time ago, I do at least agree that they are evidence of climate change in ancient times, so we cannot claim that this is a unique thing of recent times, and that it is mostly man-made.

But there have been instances of it within recorded history, over the last 2000 years, and they were certainly not man-made.

A shifting of the magnetic poles and of our planet’s tilt in relation to the sun are very probable, but an alleged date of 40,000 years ago is nothing but wishful thinking by bigoted evolutionists. The muddy sediment that preserved those trees is more likely from the deluge of approximately 4000 years ago – something like 2000 BC – as we can calculate from Genesis, Chapters 7-9.

By this time radiometric dating has been proved, and by Christians with the highest science...