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| Dr Benno Blaschke | Research Fellow | benno.blaschke@nzinitiative.org.nz | ||||||||||||
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When zoning restricts what can be built and where, owners of land where building is allowed have a strong upper hand. The Bill aims to flip that around by making enough land available across the wider urban area so that landowners have to offer better deals for buyers. This disciplines land values, exerting downward pressure on house prices. But the Bill neither defines what “competitive land urban markets” mean nor provides a test for it. It furnishes no way to measure whether it is happening and no consequences if it is not. A judge will eventually have to decide whether a council’s plan meets this goal. Lacking guidance in the law, the judge will fall back on how planning has always been done. The old system will end up defining the new goal. And the old system is the reason houses are unaffordable in the first place. Some will say the details can be worked out later, through regulations. But the goal of creating competitive land markets sits at the heart of the new planning system. Officials drafting regulations will say, rightly, that something this big should have been settled in the law itself. So, it will not get done later. It will just sit there, undefined, doing nothing. Our research note proposes a fix: Tie the goal to observable things, such as differences in the prices of adjacent parcels of land across zoning boundaries, and to comparing land prices within the urban area to those outside it. Make it measurable. Suppose land on one side of a zoning boundary is persistently worth multiples of land on the other side. This tells you the planning system has failed to make enough land available. The council should then be required to release more land for building. Additionally, the Bill also allows councils to assess their own performance. A student who marks her own exams will never fail. New Zealand has tried planning reform before. Every time, bold goals were quietly sanded down in the years that followed. Meanwhile, the housing crisis remains relentless. Government has a narrow window to get this right. The committee has our proposal. We hope it uses it. |
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| Dr Marian Tupy | Guest Contributor | insights@nzinitiative.org.nz | ||||||||||||
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Few countries are as well placed as New Zealand to benefit from geothermal power. Few can match its potential in supercritical geothermal energy. If New Zealand exploits this advantage, it could move from energy adequacy to energy abundance. Cheap, reliable, plentiful energy is the master resource behind nearly every form of prosperity. It powers homes, factories, data centres, transport and the innovations that make all the rest possible. A society with abundant energy can afford to be cleaner and more resilient. Then there is capital. Political and economic instability in the United States and Europe is bad news in many ways, but it also creates openings for countries that remain stable, lawful, and attractive to investors. Right now, billions of dollars linked to investor-class visas are looking for productive homes. New Zealand is rightly welcoming that capital. But putting it to work requires easing regulatory burdens. The same is true of land use. However incomplete the current reforms may be, the government is at least pushing in the direction of growth. Land use rules can either enable a country to adapt, build and expand, or they can lock it into stagnation. A society that makes it easier to build houses, labs, factories and energy projects is a society that makes room for the future. Closed societies try to force the future into outdated rules. Open societies reform their rules to accommodate the future. New Zealand has shown, in at least one striking case, that regulation need not be the enemy of progress. The country built a functioning regime for rocket launches with remarkable speed. Initially, it relied on NASA authorisations while it developed its own regulatory environment. If the mindset were applied more broadly, it could become a serious home for frontier industries. New Zealand’s success is not guaranteed. There are plenty of voices arguing for stasis, degrowth and zero-sum thinking. The public sector often frustrates initiative rather than enabling it. Opportunities do not become achievements on their own. They must be recognised and acted upon. Rational optimism is not wishful thinking. It is the discipline of seeing genuine possibilities and having the courage to pursue them. Join Dr Marian Tupy for his Wellington based public lecture, Why the future is more abundant than you think, from 5:00pm Thursday, 19 March 2026. |
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| Dr Oliver Hartwich | Executive Director | oliver.hartwich@nzinitiative.org.nz | ||||||||||||
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For decades, nobody bothered to check. Now someone finally has. Three weeks ago, the Infrastructure Commission delivered New Zealand’s first National Infrastructure Plan. It spent two years producing something no previous government had thought to ask for: a proper account of what we have. The Commission’s findings were not cheerful. New Zealand has spent around 5.8 percent of GDP on infrastructure annually, among the highest in the OECD. Yet it ranks near the bottom for efficiency. For asset management, it comes fourth last. For “Accountability and Professionalism,” it is dead last. Over the years, only half the central government agencies that manage major public assets have maintained proper records of those assets, or how to maintain them. Nobody kept track of the condition of our schools, hospitals, courts or prisons. The defence estate has accumulated a maintenance backlog of $480 million. Half of all spending proposals in recent Budgets have arrived without even a business case. One might call this faith-based asset management. The state of our infrastructure has become a matter of belief rather than knowledge. But there are advantages, too. You cannot be accused of neglecting assets you did not know you had. Nobody can prove a pipe was deteriorating without data on the pipe. And without a long-term plan, you retain glorious flexibility to spend money on whatever catches your eye. The Commission documented what all those years of comfortable neglect had left undocumented. Parliament held a special debate on its findings last week. All parties agreed that infrastructure was far too important to be left to everyday politics. Instead, they would think in decades. They would build durable, bipartisan consensus based on hard data. But then, Government MPs promptly championed projects in their own electorates. Opposition MPs attacked the government’s priorities. One noted that a proposed expressway would cost the equivalent of seven Dunedin Hospitals. Another defended it as long overdue. New Zealand’s first attempt at generational, bipartisan consensus lasted roughly thirty minutes. Establishing the habit might require a bit more practice. Still, the Commission’s work confirmed one thing. We are world-class at spending money on infrastructure. Now we just need to find out what we spent it on. |
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