Podcast: Housing Affordability: NZ at the Global Policy Frontier (Part 3) - Finishing the Revolution
This concluding episode examines what it takes for housing reform to endure. Minister Chris Bishop reflects on his journey to Competitive Urban Land Markets (CLM) and why housing affordability is best understood as a problem of land supply.
The conversation situates Bishop within a decade-long reform arc spanning governments and parties. Building on earlier work under Bill English and Phil Twyford, he discusses how CLM has been socialised within National and translated into the Going for Housing Growth agenda. A central theme is the generational nature of the housing challenge. Bishop observes that the divide on housing is less partisan than generational, and frames the current term as a narrow window in which to act: if progress slows, gravity reasserts itself.
Part 3 also explores durability, examining why both local and central government struggle to stay the course when reform becomes politically uncomfortable. The discussion turns to the risk of relying on unusually capable ministers to champion reform, and the need for rule-based systems that hold course regardless of whoever office. Bishop frames his new ministry as an attempt to pull the reform arc into a single institutional locus, a partial answer to the challenge of maintaining coherence across political cycles.
The series closes with CLM no longer being a question of whether it offers the right diagnosis, but whether New Zealand is willing to embed that diagnosis deeply enough, as an explicit goal of the planning system, in law, and supported by institutions and incentives, for it to survive its own champions. Bishop's answer is the roadrunner: keep running and leave the road on fire behind, long enough to make it irreversible.
Related links:
- To read 'The housing theory of everything', click here.
Listen to part 1 of this series, 'Clarity Emerging from the Mists', here.
Listen to part 2 of this series, ‘From Heresy to Reform’ (with Phil Twyford), here.
To listen to our latest podcasts, please subscribe to The New Zealand Initiative podcast on iTunes, Spotify or The Podcast App.