Last week, Sir Bill English told RNZ that New Zealand has reached “amazing, almost bipartisan” agreement on housing. Coincidentally, we recorded Part 2 of our Competitive Urban Land Markets podcast around the same time with former Housing Minister Phil Twyford. 

The underpinning consensus is specific: competitive land markets are the durable path to housing affordability because they maintain threat of entry, enabling land to be brought to market easily and abundantly. This creates downward pressure on urban land prices.  

Hearing both Sir Bill English and Hon Phil Twyford in the same week brought into focus how unusual this moment is. 

New Zealand may be doing something larger that wealthier countries have struggled to achieve. Our podcast traces how that view formed.  

It is a globally significant history in the making.  

Part 1 closed with recounting Treasury official Chris Parker presenting on competitive land markets to then Minister of Finance Bill English in 2016. In that ‘chew session’, Bill English concluded, “Clarity is emerging from the mists.”  

In Part 2, we follow Phil Twyford’s story. He describes his early search in opposition for an explanation that could make sense of spiralling house prices and their debilitating costs on society. 

That search led to an unlikely network of economists, academics and urbanists who had begun analysing the crisis. Land prices were rising because scarcity was designed into the system. Competitive land markets began to “make sense” to Twyford because they explained both the problem and the solution. 

That idea led to an ideological shift in Phil Twyford. 

Our conversation reveals how hard it was to convert that insight into policy. Officials struggled with a new paradigm that sought to make room for people who would inevitably join our cities. Ministers were teaching officials, not the other way round. 

Solving the initial policy crunch led to structural shifts that many countries have discussed but not yet achieved. Although we have yet to fully achieve housing affordability, this period has had lasting impacts on our political and policy landscape. 

Sir Bill English’s comments show how far that shift has travelled.  

He links resource management (planning) reform directly to generational fairness and economic performance. He places Twyford and Bishop on the same reform arc set out to achieve competitive land markets. He argues New Zealand is ahead of Australia, where reform has “not even got started.” He frames bipartisan alignment as evidence of a deeper structural change that will outlast electoral cycles. 

We finish with Twyford passing the torch to current Housing Minister Chris Bishop, who joins us for the final part of this world-leading experimentation in national policy to achieve housing affordability.

You can listen to our latest podcast episode with Hon Phil Twyford here. Part 3 of this podcast series featuring Hon Chris Bishop will be released in January 2026.