Podcast: Housing Affordability: NZ at the Global Policy Frontier (Part 2) - From Heresy to Reform
This episode traces how Competitive Urban Land Markets (CLM) made the leap from dissident economic insight to the organising principle of New Zealand's housing reform agenda. Phil Twyford reflects on his time as an Opposition MP, where he absorbed CLM's logic, underwent an intellectual shift inside Labour, and worked with a small circle of economists to translate competition and abundance into a language government could act upon.
Once in Cabinet, Twyford and aligned thinkers became the policy entrepreneurs who embedded CLM in the Urban Growth Agenda (UGA). For officials trained in planning orthodoxy, this proved a conceptual shock. Ministers often found themselves teaching the system (literally sketching the framework on whiteboards) as economic reasoning clashed with established planning culture.
The episode revisits the structural wins that followed: wins Twyford now reflects on as the most meaningful work of his ministerial career. A small policy network, spearheaded by Twyford's political courage, pressed ahead of global academic thinking to articulate a practical blueprint for restoring housing affordability. This work helped position New Zealand at the frontier of global housing policy.
What emerges is a portrait of policy entrepreneurship: an emotional and political journey where leadership, economic clarity, and persistence pushed the boundaries of what a small country can achieve. By the close, the broader arc comes into view, including the cross-party consensus highlighted by Sir Bill English, showing how a once-heretical idea became a bipartisan reform movement.
Related links:
- To watch the Sholly Angel’s Making Room for Urban Expansion video, click Making Room for Urban Expansion - YouTube
- To read the reports by the Urban Land Markets Group click here for the first paper (“A New Paradigm for Urban Planning”) and here for the second paper (“How We Supply Infrastructure Makes Housing Unaffordable: Introducing a New Approach to Funding and Financing our Cities”).
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