Published in The New Zealand Herald (Auckland), 3 September 2026
What is politics? According to Max Weber’s classic definition, politics is “a strong and slow boring of hard boards”.
Having worked around politics for over two decades has given me a good idea of what Weber meant by that. Achieving proper policy change is a tough business indeed.
It is never good enough only to have a bright idea. You must also overcome the defenders of the status quo, build alliances between groups who may have little in common and then hope that the timing will not work against you.
Only when all those stars align will you have a chance to introduce some genuinely new policies.
In New Zealand, that just happened last week. And unless you are a complete policy wonk with Parliament TV on all day, you are likely to have missed it.
In the final stages of the planning successor to the Resource Management Act, debated late at night in Parliament, something extraordinary happened.
In a world first, New Zealand will soon have a planning law that does not just name housing affordability as its goal. New Zealand will also have an independent office watching land prices and councils will be required to act when their rules push them up.
And, even more amazingly, this policy novelty has the support of both the Government and the Opposition Labour Party, which means this new approach should even outlast a potential change of government.
It is hard to overstate just how seminal these changes are. What Parliament has just passed goes against decades of planning doctrine, not just in New Zealand but in many other countries around the world.
At its core, planning had always been about restricting land supply. Planning was often in conflict with the idea that there should be a functioning market in urban land. And town planners rarely considered the economics of their decisions.
New Zealand’s new planning law will change all of that.
I have been in and around land-use planning debates for a long time. My very first job in think-tank land was at Policy Exchange in London back in 2005, working on a housing and planning project with the late Alan Evans, a professor of urban economics at the University of Reading.
What Evans and I researched were the roots of Britain’s housing affordability crisis, which was severe even back then. And chief among the various reasons for sky-high house prices was the UK Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, the British equivalent of our very own Resource Management Act.
The working of both acts is fundamentally the same: they enable town planners to limit new housing development and they achieve this by keeping buildable land scarce.
You can measure the effects of such policies quite easily. All you have to do is compare the prices of two patches of land: one inside a zone where development is permissible and another one, right next to it, where the law prevents you from building. The classic example of such comparisons is green belt policies, the rings of protected countryside around British cities, and their effect on land prices.
When we wrote our reports, a hectare of land without planning permission sold for about £10,000 ($23,091) in England, while residential land fetched more than £2.6 million per hectare. With other urban economists, we argued that such price differences are the clearest evidence that planning has systematically distorted land markets.
The New Zealand situation up until now is just like that. Here, too, land zoned for development is worth several times more than neighbouring land where you must not build.
Of course, the effects of limiting land supply have been well known for decades. And so governments have tried to force councils to release more land for development.
However, such policies have rarely been successful. Councils could always claim they had earmarked sufficient land for future development. But there is a difference between such a claim on paper and making sure land is actually available.
And this is where our new planning bill comes in.
In the future, simply claiming that a council’s town planning releases enough land will no longer be enough. A new independent watchdog, the Urban Land Market Officer, will check land prices and councils must fix their planning regimes where they have caused distortions.
What sounds like a technicality has the potential to be revolutionary for urban land markets. Town planners will no longer get away with ignoring the economic fallout of their decisions.
That New Zealand will get this new planning watchdog is a small policy miracle. But it is a miracle made possible by the development of a cross-party consensus on housing over the years. It started with National’s Sir Bill English, developed under Labour’s Phil Twyford and continued under National’s Chris Bishop and Act’s Simon Court.
These politicians, coming from different sides of the political spectrum, have together rethought what planning is for, what makes housing affordable and how urban land markets can be made to work.
Last week, as the new Planning Act received its final shape in Parliament, their efforts culminated in the world’s most exciting law to deliver affordable housing.
The new officer is not finished yet. Its rules will need tightening so that a future minister cannot quietly hollow it out, and that fine-tuning will fall to the next Parliament.
It will be another strong and slow boring of hard boards. Last week showed that it can be done.
