25 August, 2022

Mayoral-race outsider stirred up by density push

Narrow Neck resident Mike Kampkes put his fishing kayak aside to mount a campaign against the government’s moves to increase housing density – and ended up running for mayor. He talks to Helen Vause.

Last November, when Mike Kampkes was quietly reading his morning paper at home in Narrow Neck, he read something that filled him with such outrage it prompted a life decision.

Kampkes had read about new legislation in the name of enabling housing supply that would effectively force councils to allow widespread intensification, with townhouses able to be built up to three storeys high, three to a site.

He couldn’t believe this new legislation could arrive as a complete surprise to most people.

And next, although he was a guy with plenty of opinions he’d never been afraid to share around the kitchen table or the campfire, he did something that surprised himself and everyone who knew him.

Kampkes decided he was going to lead the charge to stop the new bill. He marshalled supporters under the umbrella of Citizens Against The Housing Act, called public meetings, and pounded the keyboard tirelessly into the small hours to keep up the momentum of protest.

And as if that wasn’t enough, within eight months he’d be joining the race for the Auckland mayoralty.

The issues surrounding the journey of the bill were so important, Kampkes reasoned that someone had to step up and try to send it packing back to central government. And that someone – once again to his surprise – was going to be him.

As Kampkes has been heard to say, “It dragged me out of my fishing kayak and off the sofa and into working for free every hour of the day in opposition to this legislation.”

Kampkes is no stranger to hard work. He was born and raised in Hawke’s Bay by Dutch immigrant parents. He was the middle child of seven kids who were born quite close together over around 12 years. His father was a labourer, and hard work was the norm in a family where everyone had to pull their weight. They lived on the outskirts of Napier surrounded by growers of all types of produce, from vegetables to a range of fruit crops.

As a boy, Kampkes worked long hot hours in those market gardens and orchards most school holidays.

He reckons he picked most things grown in the region at one time or another: grapes, tomatoes, orchard fruits including apricots and plums, and other produce too. Other times he’d pump gas part-time.

“That’s what all the kids around there did. There was plenty of work going.”

Kampkes had his first real job at age 11 – a milk run. He’d be out of his bed, up and away and ready to start delivery at 5.30am, before the first morning light. He remembers being dropped off with his full milk cart and setting off around his patch in the darkness.

“I wasn’t very big and I could barely lift a milk crate,” laughs Kampkes.

But he was proud of all the jobs he did and of being able to save up a respectable sum of money.

“I lent my mother money, so that she could buy a car and get a job and go back to work. She had worked so hard to raise a big family, but as we got older she wanted to go back out into the workforce again. I was so proud to be able to help her get a car and help her to get out and do what she wanted to do again.”

Tragedy struck the family when Kampkes was just a toddler. His father worked night shifts. In order for him to sleep during the day, the kids would play in the front yard, where their voices would be less likely to carry to their parents’ bedroom. But one of the children, Wilma, was hit and killed by a vehicle when she ran through the front gate and onto the road, in pursuit of a ball.

After the schoolboy holiday jobs, Kampkes went to work at Watties, one of the big employers in Hawke’s Bay, becoming a supply manager.

When he and his wife Tania moved to Auckland in 1997, Kampkes had a new job in supply and logistics management with Tegel Foods.

From there, he continued up the ladder, specialising in general management in medium-sized businesses, until restructuring led to him leaving that phase of his working life behind in 2014 and, with it, the long commutes to and from home in Narrow Neck.

Kampkes, who had always been a practical guy, was far from done with his working years, and welcomed a change of pace and direction. He jumped at the chance to become a chippy with a friend of around the same age who has a construction business. He also took time out for an ambitious DIY remodelling of the back of the family house, before getting back to work.

Along with enjoying working life and being a family man – he and Tania have three grown children, Jake, Sam and Leah (the only one still living at home) – he’d always had a passion for fishing, and just one visit to Narrow Neck 25 years ago convinced him that it would be the perfect place for a man with regular fishing forays on his mind.

On many a morning he has wheeled his fishing kayak down Old Lake Rd to be on the boat ramp at daybreak. The fishing has been very successful, says Kampkes but he has also been rewarded with a relaxing dose of solitude and the maintenance of fitness. Sometimes he’s paddled all the way out to the lighthouse near the northern end of Rangitoto Island and even all the way to Motuihe Island.

“I feel angry and devastated that our quality of life that we have worked so hard for could be taken away from us.”

Mike Kampkes

He’s long had an interest in environmental issues and says he is passionate about reducing carbon emissions.

Chatting to The Flagstaff, he points to a gas oven sitting outside on the deck, waiting to be taken away. It’s the latest in a line of gas-burning products, including the hot-water heating system, which he and Tania made the commitment to remove and replace with electric.

His next career move might have been starting an enterprise in the sustainability sector.

But that plan, along with the faithful kayak, has been parked in recent months, as Kampkes has – on top of his day job – campaigned against the housing-intensification push from Wellington.

Lately, he’s got himself a billboard on a trailer for his mayoral campaign. Although, like other low-profile candidates, he hasn’t been able to attract the kind of attention won by the frontrunners in the race.

His priority is repeal of the new housing law, which he believes will have a far-reaching negative impact on quality of life.

He says the new legislation, with its controversial new height-to-boundary ratios and support for intensification, goes against the very reason families aspire to live in the suburbs. It is “needless and idiotic in the context of the existing, far-superior Unitary Plan,” Kampkes says.

“I feel angry and devastated that our quality of life that we have worked so hard for could be taken away from us.”

The proliferation of multi-storey dwellings, to be allowed for across many suburbs of major cities, is a cruel threat to our way of life, that could pitch neighbour against neighbour, he says.

He believes Auckland Council should use every resource it has available to it to stymie the legislation and contain intensification inside existing density zones.

Kampkes will now literally be stepping up his efforts, after NZ Post decided it wouldn’t deliver unaddressed election material. With 40,000 newly printed flyers ready to go out, Kampkes and his team have no option but to pound the pavements to spread the word.