This Year Zero plan shafts Auckland’s heritage

In a devastating blow to Auckland’s heritage protection, the independent hearing panel preparing Auckland’s new Unitary Plan has issued “guidelines” indicating all 87 existing viewshafts to the isthmus’s iconic cones have to be re-justified on economic terms.

While conceding that “the volcanic cones are a defining element of Auckland’s natural heritage” and that “views to and between the cones are generally worthy of protection”, the panel rejects the existing viewshafts developed over 50 years of painstaking negotiations and legal wranglings as not meeting the requirement of the Resource Management Act, and wants to begin again at Year Zero.

It dismisses an unknown number as not “regionally significant” and calls for an assessment of the “public value” of all 87, taking into account “employment and economic growth opportunities (including lost opportunities)”. It suggests submitters ‘‘convert the effect of viewshafts in terms of lost floor area into dollar terms”.

In a truly “cor blimey” moment, the panel declares itself unconvinced “that any development that penetrates a viewshaft would be inappropriate”. This ranks in the silliness files with Dame Tariana Turia’s claim it’s okay for “our people” to eat the odd kereru on special occasions. How many buildings does the panel think can penetrate a viewshaft before the view becomes as extinct as the volcano we can no longer see?

Just as well for the cones they’re, on the whole, already safe in public/iwi ownership. Otherwise they’d be having to justify their future as undeveloped blots on the landscape as well. Not so long ago, road and railway builders were busy gnawing away at them, the economic good transcending any other consideration. Mining at Three Kings has just stopped. The cones are still full of valuable rock the road builders lust after, but Aucklanders eventually decided they were more valuable — priceless even — as, to quote the panel, “a defining element of Auckland’s natural heritage”.

Most Aucklanders are oblivious to the fact that their unbroken view of One Tree Hill driving up the motorway from the south, or of Mt Eden from the harbour bridge, are not there by chance. They have a viewshaft dating back to the 1970s to thank. Following the sudden eruption of The Pines apartments on the side of Mt Eden, Aucklanders were aghast at losing a view they’d always taken for granted.

Auckland Regional Council planner Roy Turner proposed a cross-section of views be preserved for all time. As a result, the proposed Sky Tower had to be re-sited from its preferred spot in Upper Symonds St to its present CBD site.

In 1996 the ARC and the Auckland City Council began a joint review of the scheme, eventually notifying a revised list with 34 additions and 25 removals in 2005. Ten years of appeals and negotiations later, the revised network is finally in place. But like rust, the developers never sleep, and have seized the Unitary Plan process to launch yet another assault.

Disgracefully, one of the leaders of the pack is the Crown-owned Housing New Zealand. It owns various state housing enclaves near cones and is complaining that viewshafts are causing “a potential capacity loss of 1150 units” to HNZ and 24,500 to developers city-wide.

For the Volcanic Cones Society’s Greg Smith and his small band of unpaid volunteers it’s very dispiriting. After 20 years of submissions and hearings on the latest viewshaft network, the panel now expects him to get out with a theodolite and start all over again.

He asks how are you supposed to rank views. “It’s the collective field that’s the thing. It’s not just focusing on Mt Eden or Rangitoto. It’s a representative collection of views that have been protected.” Every day we’re losing more and more of the unprotected views. He says they’re gone for good. The viewshafts are a small collection saved for posterity.

He asks how do you put a dollar value on public amenity, and if you do, where does it stop? Do you get rid of the $600 million of medieval manuscripts at the public library? Or sell off half the Art Gallery’s Lindauer paintings? “If we start taking that track we’re doomed.”