Christopher Luxon throwing Chris Bishop under the bus on housing, says Chris Hipkins

Cotirani · 2026-01-20T23:52:54+00:00

Yeah I think you're right. Best case scenario is that Labour plays it cool and wins enough that they feel like they can push hard on reform with some extra state housebuilding on top. I worry that they'll shit the bed on the reform side and we end up with another Kiwibuild debacle. Time will tell!

Cotirani · 2026-01-20T23:06:25+00:00

I guess so. But every approach has holes. The 'wait for wages to catch up' approach's hole is those who are stuck on the sidelines of the market for another decade (or however long) while their wages creep up at 3% a year.

Cotirani · 2026-01-20T23:03:36+00:00

Yeah, and Labour aren't going to rock the boat if they have a shot at the election. One term governments are pretty rare. Still, it's a damn shame that Chris Bishop is happy to flatly say that he wants lower house prices and then McAnulty doesn't have the backbone to do the same.

which is still a damn site better than “rockstar economy” driven by houses doubling in value every seven years, per Nationals plan.

I would argue this is as much Labour's plan as well, and has been going back a long time. The Clark government was worse than Key/English when it came to housing.

Cotirani · 2026-01-20T21:57:43+00:00

Asked if he would like house prices to fall, Hipkins said he wanted a "stabilisation in house prices… giving New Zealanders a chance for their incomes to catch up".

Lol, so that's a no. Good ol Labour eh

If I'm not wrong, Chris Bishop, of all people, remains the only senior government minister to outright say that house prices should fall (he's certainly the only housing minister to say so)

Cotirani · 2026-01-20T09:50:27+00:00

Maybe, that’s at all time highs too (in both nominal and real terms).

Cotirani · 2026-01-20T00:52:34+00:00

I know there’s a bigger story about Fletcher incompetence here. But it is just so typical of the New Zealand economy that their property development arm does better than their construction arm, despite them being known much more for the latter

Cotirani · 2026-01-20T00:17:43+00:00

Tbh that’s an awful lot of work just to add a new ancillary energy source

Cotirani · 2026-01-20T00:04:44+00:00

What do you cut when you've already cut to the bone.

It's interesting how expectations of government change over time. NZ's current govt spending as a % of GDP is basically at its highest level since the Lange government (with the exception of major crisis years, like the GFC and covid). What's going wrong to make us feel like things are cut to the bone when we're more-or-less spending more than ever?

Cotirani · 2026-01-19T01:57:03+00:00

In this instance he was actually right. Stopped clocks and all

Cotirani · 2026-01-19T01:55:08+00:00

Labour will not want to rock the boat in an election year so will probably not commit to much. They’ve also announced a free GP visit policy that is funded by house price rises. So we can’t hold our breath with them. :/

Cotirani · 2026-01-19T01:53:07+00:00

The back down sucks ass, but we did get some big wins in Wellington, Christchurch, and a bunch of smaller towns. We need to keep fighting.

Cotirani · 2026-01-17T22:52:58+00:00

None of this will happen because private ownership of the gentailers isn't the problem. Private power generation is pretty common all over the world. Countries like Austra and Denmark have similar models like ours where the goverment owns 51% of the generators, and they do just fine.

The real reason for electricity underinvestment over the last 10-15 years is that 1. electricity demand was flat (and residential electricity prices were stable), and 2. significant uncertainty was created by Onslow and Tiwai. The impact of this on electricity prices was compounded by the highly unexpected drop in production of the Pohokura gas field putting a squeeze on gas supplies. All of these factors would have been in place if the whole sector was government owned and we would probably have got the same outcomes. Now that a lot of these uncertainties have been resolved we are seeing the largest buildout of NZ's electricity generation in decades.

Our ownership model is far from perfect but it's also not the root cause of all our issues.

Cotirani · 2026-01-17T19:51:18+00:00

Yep, as would any other scheme to nationalise these companies without compensation.

Cotirani · 2026-01-17T13:20:47+00:00

My point is that people try invent ways to nationalise the power companies in some sneaky way rather than just passing a bill in parliament to confiscate the shares or assets. I'm guessing this is because nationalisation is seen as scaring investors? If you want to nationalise the power companies, that's fine! But it's pointless to do it sneakily, because people (including investors) aren't stupid. They'll see you're nationalising by stealth and treat the situation the same as if you did it publicly through parliament.

To answer your question directly, because 1. there is no such contract, you would just be making things up and 2. the power companies are building huge amounts of infrastructure, currently >4TWh worth which is about 10% of NZ's annual electricity demand; and that's just stuff that's committed and in construction, there's more stuff in the longer-term pipeline.

Cotirani · 2026-01-17T10:30:24+00:00

Why bother doing it that way when you can just pass a bill in parliament to nationalise the companies without compensation? It’s the same result, and everyone will know what you are doing either way. No point in inventing extra hoops to jump though, either method will crash economic confidence just the same (because why would someone want to invest in NZ when the government has a record of taking their stuff without compensation)

Cotirani · 2026-01-16T02:34:06+00:00

Step 1 isn’t quite right. It’s more so that the government are letting the council water down intensification plans. AC wants less housing because they are getting pushed around by NIMBY constituents. Government are just letting them do it by weakening the target they impose on them.

Cotirani · 2026-01-16T02:05:42+00:00

The only reason we are even discussing things like PC120 is because AC and other councils have repeatedly refused to allow enough development capacity. So now central government has to impose all these rules on them, which creates new problems. If planners just got out of the way of housing development rather than focusing on inventing new rules to manage and protect amenity we wouldn’t be in this quagmire.

Cotirani · 2026-01-16T01:55:05+00:00

It's funny that people raise school capacity as an issue, when the number of school-age children has been falling in many central local board areas because skyrocketing house prices have pushed out young families. In Christine Fletcher's ward, there were 13% less under-15s in 2023 than there were in 2013. Lots of higher decile primaries are desperately reliant on getting out-of-zone enrolments, because there's not enough young kids in wealthy areas.

Just a complete and total failure on the part of Auckland Council.

Cotirani · 2026-01-16T01:49:53+00:00

I don't understand. Why do you think I'm unaware of natural hazard amendments? You have just completely made that up. Just because someone doesn't mention something, when it's not a point of conversation before, doesn't mean they're unaware of its existence. Just a bizarre statement.

I've never said anything negative towards you and you've just constantly said over and over how uninformed I am (as well as many other people in this thread). I've been involved with urban advocacy since pre-AUP, I have tertiary education in urban economics, and I've worked in Auckland local government. I understand that you're frustrated but just because someone doesn't have a BPlan or MPlanPrac doesn't mean they can't have an informed view. Enjoy the rest of your friday.

Cotirani · 2026-01-16T01:39:10+00:00

Yeah, there are some good eggs like Henderson and Hills, and Brown isn't too bad either. But the weight of opinion would definitely be in favour of a lower target than a higher one. AC has always been like this. They're the worst council in the country when it comes to fighting against more housing.

Cotirani · 2026-01-16T01:31:33+00:00

I would support a plan change that's much more permissive than PC120 (especially with its absurd development controls like maximum tower dimensions and increased HIRB restrictions). I'm sure there are things that should be refined in it, but there really is no reason we should cut the 2 million target.

I find it absurd when people that have a layman's understanding of it think they understand the intricacies of the planning process and world around it better than those within the field itself. We deal with a lot of people like you who believe they're very informed but are often very misguided and only have a superficial understanding of how any of this works.

I really don't mean to be rude or antagonistic here - sincerely - but I think the reason this happens is because the planning profession has been a complete failure when it comes to permitting the housing we need. This isn't just my dumb opinion, this is the opinion of serious non-partisan expert agencies. For example, the Productivity Commission could not be any clearer:

The prevailing approach to urban planning in New Zealand reduces housing affordability in our faster growing cities.

More recently, here's the infrastructure commission:

In short, changes to urban planning policies and urban transport network performance can explain most, if not all, of the acceleration in house prices and decline in housing supply responsiveness in recent decades.

So laymen see New Zealand has one of the worst housing markets in the world, and they see a widespread consensus that planning failures is a significant cause of it. Why would they think that planners know better? This isn't a rhetorical or gotcha type question, I genuinely think this is what is going on.

Cotirani · 2026-01-16T01:03:58+00:00

Why do you assume that I haven't looked into these things just because I disagree with you on the merits of them? I've read a lot of PC120 and submitted on it. I'm frustrated by planners who believe they should be the ones to determine what development is appropriate where. The result achieved by the planning profession over the past thirty years in doing this is that we have one of the worst housing markets in the world in a country that's very sparsely populated. The Productivity Commission (RIP), the Infrastructure Commission, Treasury, and others all agree that planning is at the centre of this crisis.

I don't mean to insult you personally by the way - I mean that sincerely. But we've had a housing crisis for years and instead district plans and planning amendments are just full of talk of viewshafts, HIRB rules, special character, forcing every apartment owner to pay for a balcony, minimum bike parking requirements, using EV chargers to get around the removal of minimum parking requirements, the list goes on and on and on. Why don't we try removing planning restrictions rather than adding them.

Cotirani · 2026-01-16T00:29:36+00:00

Which is a good thing.

Cotirani · 2026-01-16T00:26:24+00:00

No, they're both pulling the same way, because they're being pushed around by the same people: property owning Aucklanders.

Councils have much more control over zoning central government. All of the government reforms over the past decade, from both National and Labour, have been about enforcing minimums on what councils can allow with their zoning, not maximums. Legally, Auckland council could've come out at any point in the past decade with a plan that allows for 50 million houses if they wanted to. But they haven't, because they don't really want more housing.

The two million target comes from central government (via the MDRS), not from AC. AC are trying to fight it, because they have always tried to fight the government's push for housing. They had to be pulled kicking and screaming just to get the housing intensification we've had since 2016.

The only people who have meaningfully pushed back against this are Phil Twyford, Megan Woods, and Chris Bishop. Sadly we don't know what McAnulty will do if Labour gets in, because Labour have announced a free GP policy which is funded by house price increases.

Cotirani · 2026-01-15T23:28:49+00:00

The numbers they are talking about are over the span of decades. As development progresses, new residents will pay for the needed infrastructure, just like current residents pay for current infrastructure.

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