When 70-year-old retired psychologist Syd Davies set about rebuilding his family home at Katherine Bay, he was looking to secure a warm, dry retreat on ancestral Māori freehold land—a sanctuary big enough for his 9 children, 32 grandchildren, and 2 great-grandchildren.
Instead, the Great Barrier kaumātua found himself facing the full weight of Auckland Council’s compliance machinery, leading to a legal dispute he says was completely unnecessary.
“They threw the book at me,” Davies says. “My lawyer reckoned they would have spent $100,000 of ratepayers’ money to take a 70-year-old man to court who had only renovated a house he built in the 1980s.”
Davies has pleaded guilty in the Auckland District Court to carrying out building work without consent. While council prosecutors sought tens of thousands of dollars in fines, the court ultimately rejected their proposed penalties, convicting and discharging Davies with no financial fine.
The roots of the project trace back to 1984, when a young Davies builds a council-approved, two-storey 180m² home on his whānau whenua. After he moves overseas in 1985, the dwelling sits vacant for decades, falling prey to storms, vandalism, and decay.
Returning to the island in 2021, Davies pours his life savings—around $60,000 in materials—into replacing the damaged structure with a 243m² home over the original footprint, working sporadically as his health, time, and budget allowed.
By early 2024, council compliance teams flew out from the mainland for site visits, citing unconsented structural, plumbing, gas, and electrical work. The site was ordered shut down, leaving the structure watertight but unfinished.
The matter has escalated into a full prosecution in the city, where council lawyers argued for a fine starting point of $40,000. However, Judge John Hassan disagreed with the council’s assessment of severity, lowering the baseline to $17,000 before applying discounts for Davies’s early plea, clean record, and “truly impressive record of community service.”
“You went a lot further than just reinstating and repairing the fabric of a three-bedroom 180m² dwelling… At no stage did you even check with the council about whether you might need building consent for this ambitious project,” Judge Hassan noted.
“Your offending was out of mistake, an error of judgement in a project intended to benefit your whānau’s connection to their whenua, and you otherwise have a stellar record of service to the community.”
Noting that Davies is a pensioner whose only remaining asset is a 20-year-old vehicle, Judge Hassan opted against imposing a fine altogether.
Davies remains bewildered by the resource scale deployed to inspect an island build. “They sent five people to do an inspection, then sent another five to do another inspection. That’s close to 10 grand just in airfares,” he says.
He acknowledges his technical mistake in assuming his earlier consent covers the work.
“I’m an honest guy. If I’ve done something wrong I’ll stand up and say so,” he told Stuff.
However, the enforcement action delays his retirement plans by years: “It was all closed in and watertight, but it has meant our home won’t be finished for two years longer than we wanted.”
Auckland Council team leader of investigations Paul Cowling defended the decision to litigate, stating prosecution was an “appropriate course of action given the scale of the unconsented building works” after the owner failed to address initial breaches. The council stated it was unable to confirm the total cost of the prosecution.
With a Notice to Fix pending, Davies is focused on bringing the project to completion and obtaining a code compliance certificate.
“It’ll take me another year, maybe another a year-and-a-half. I’m plodding along. Everyday I get up and do a few hours. It’s only really the lining left to do,” he said.
