“A complete balls up”. How about that for what might be quote of the day?

That’s how Christchurch city councillor Andrei Moore is describing the council’s handling of the housing intensification row.

It’s a row that has been shut down for good by Housing and Resource Management Minister Chris Bishop, who has rejected Christchurch’s bid to have its own, separate housing intensification rules.

Which I have no problem with. If he had given-in to Christchurch, it would’ve opened the floodgates right around the country. So good on Chris Bishop.

It’s a final decision too, by the way. No correspondence will be entered into. The council can’t blow any more money running off to the environment court. So Christchurch has to like it or lump it.

What it’s going to mean is high density, multi-level residential housing in the CBD (good), Riccarton (good), Hornby (good) and Linwood (good).

Even if it means neighbouring properties losing sunlight. Which is not necessarily good - but that’s just reality. We need to get over that.

Not that I’ve felt that way from the outset. When these new rules were first proposed three years ago, I didn’t like the sound of them.

And there was no shortage of people saying they felt the same way. And I suspect that a lot of people will still be very unhappy about the prospect of a new place going up next to them and losing their sunlight.

But that’s just reality. I accept that now.

Because what other option is there in a city where the population is only going in one direction?

Do we want the city to spread out even further, chewing up land that is much better used for things like growing food? Of course, we don’t.

If there’s one very small example of how the city has just kept on spreading outwards, it would be Musgroves - the second-hand building supplies outfit in Wigram.

I’m still amazed at how that place is surrounded by buildings now. When I remember it being pretty much in the wops not all that long ago.

And, if we don’t allow the city to become more built-up, we’re just going to see more and more houses built in places like Rolleston and Prebbleton. Which aren’t in Christchurch - they’re in the Selwyn district.

Which means more and more people travelling into the city every day, using Christchurch’s roading infrastructure but not paying a bean towards it. Because they pay their rates to Selwyn.

But let’s come back to councillor Andrei Moore - who is saying today that the council has ballsed this up.

He said back in April that he thought it was nuts that the council was insisting on pushing back on more intensified housing in Christchurch.

He said - and I agreed with him a hundred percent at the time (and I still do) that “it’s high time we wake up and deal with the reality of city growth”.

What’s more, it hasn’t been cheap. The most recent, available figures show that the council has spent about $7 million fighting the Government’s proposals.

It’s not a total loss for the council. Three of its ideas have been accepted by the Government, which include increasing the building height limit on the old stockyards on Deans Ave to 36 metres.

Mayor Phil Mauger says: “We obviously wanted to get our alternative recommendations approved. So, to only have three of them get the tick, is a kick in the guts.”

As a result of the Government telling the city council to pull its head in, we’re potentially or eventually going to see 10-storey apartment buildings within 600 metres of suburban shopping areas. Even if it means neighbouring properties losing sunlight.

Urbanist group Greater Ōtautahi thinks it's brilliant and gives the city certainty.

They say the quarter-acre dream of a standalone house on a large section is unsustainable.

Spokesperson M. Grace-Stent says: “Not everyone wants to live the exact same lifestyle. Allowing more housing to be built allows people to make that choice for themselves.”

They say: “We want people to be living near the city centre, near the amenities, not pushed out further and further into the Canterbury plains”.

And they’ll get no argument from me.

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Imagine a school having $800,000 in the bank.

Imagine all the things a school could buy with that amount of money.

This is a state school I’m talking about, not a Flash Harry private school that can put the call-out to the old boys and the old girls when it needs cash to do something.

So a state school with $800,000 in the bank, and this state school has to spend that money fixing up a cock-up forced on it by the Ministry of Education.

The cock-up I’m referring to is that disastrous experiment called the “modern learning environment” – where our kids have been the guinea pigs, forced into huge barns instead of your old-school single-cell classrooms.

And the school I’m talking about, having to spend $800,000 of its own money to get out of this ideological nightmare, is Shirley Boys’ High School in Christchurch.

Good on it for flipping the bird at the modern learning environment, but I think it’s crazy that the school has to dip into its own reserves to pay to sort it out.

I know whether it’s the school that pays or the Ministry of Education that pays, it’s all pretty much taxpayer money. But the difference is Shirley Boys' is spending money it’s actually got in the bank, which could be spent on all sorts of other things. That’s why I think the ministry should be paying for this work.

I’ve been anti this modern learning environment nonsense right from the outset. Which was pretty much straight after the earthquakes when schools in Canterbury needed rebuilds.

And what happened is the powers-that-be jumped on the bandwagon and started telling schools that this is how it was going to be. That, if they wanted classrooms, they were going to be barn-like structures with up to 200 kids in them.

To be fair, it wasn’t just the Government and the Ministry of Education forcing this one. There were some teachers and principals who thought it was a brilliant idea too.

I’ve mentioned before how I was on the board of our local school for about six years, and they got sucked into the modern learning environment frenzy.

In fact, they didn’t wait for new buildings. They had the caretaker knocking out walls left, right and centre every weekend, it seemed. And I thought it was nuts at the time and I still think the concept is nuts.

As does Shirley Boys'. As does Rangiora High School, which did the same thing. It cost them even more – they spent $1.5 million turning their open-plan classrooms into single classrooms.

But here’s what the principal at Shirley Boys', Tim Grocott, is saying about why they’re doing it.

"The level of distraction was just too high. There was too much movement going on. They can hear what is happening in the class next door. Particularly if something was being played on TV or anything like that. So that level of distraction was a negative factor."

He says the school did a formal inquiry into how the kids and the staff were finding the open-plan set-up and found that there was widespread unhappiness and so the school had no option but to do something.

So it started the work during the last school holidays and will finish it during the next holidays.

Tim Grocott says the changes that have been made so far have gone down very well.

He says feedback has been “overwhelmingly positive and instantaneous”. I bet it has.

He says: “The staff on the first day were absolutely thrilled. One of our teachers was hugging the walls in her classroom because she was so thrilled to have walls. The boys are just much happier too."

Tim says he thinks that open plan classrooms are a flawed concept that just did not work for his school.

Are they ever.

And the Ministry of Education needs to admit that and needs to front-up with the money to pay back Shirley Boys’ High School for the $800,000 it’s spending to fix up this flawed concept, and elsewhere too.

Or, more correctly, it needs to front-up with the money to pay schools back for the mess caused by this failed experiment.

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John was joined by Matt Doocey and Tracey McLellan this week for Politics Friday.

They discussed the situation with Shirley Boys High School, who have spent $800,000 to move their school away from the modern learning model. Is it fair that schools have to foot the bill for this? The decision has been made around punishment for Te Pati Māori, does this affect Labour's view of working with them in future, and is there really gas to be found in New Zealand?

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