The Auckland housing number and the Government's housing vision now looks like a school project gone wrong.

Chris Bishop, by anyone's standards, is a competent, if not excellent, political operator but he appears to have come unstuck on Auckland housing.

His two million homes got the sort of reaction anyone with anything to do with Auckland might have expected, so after a lot of gnashing and expletives it got readjusted to 1.6 million and now, if you can believe it, it's 1.4 million.

The real issue of course is the number. All the numbers are huge, so they freak people out.

Not helping is the fact Bishop is not from Auckland, he is from the Hutt. Which doesn’t mean he can't make decisions on Auckland, it just means he doesn’t seem to know what rarks Auckland up, and the obvious suggestion is made that maybe that’s because he is from Wellington.

Making it worse is the Government has a Minister for Auckland, but he seems to be nowhere to be seen and one wonders whether he was in Bishop's ear at any point suggesting bandying around large numbers and causing confusion about high-rises in suburbia wasn’t the smartest thing he could have done.

It's not helpful either for the Government, given it's election year. Like it or not, elections are won and lost in the country's biggest city and economic engine room.

Also about to land is a report on volcanic view shafts, another of Auckland's special features Bishop doesn’t seem to get.

We can delve into it another day, but in a sign Bishop is all about bottom lines and not the real world, the report suggests there is $4 billion worth of lost productivity because of these view shafts, which is $2500 per household. The inference being if we just got on and built stuff, even if they are high-rises smack bang in the middle of your Rangitoto view, we would be off to the races economically.

I can tell Chris even before the report is released that this will go down worse than his original two million homes idea.

In really simple terms, if the National Party, and by default the Government, want to piss a large number of Aucklanders off, let Bishop loose on the place and we'll catch up for a drink at the Opposition benches.

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