A new book challenges the left to stop being the parties of ‘no’ and adopt a new type of politics – one that builds. But can anyone in New Zealand politics credibly embrace abundance, or are we doomed to squabble in scarcity for ever? 

For the first time in a long time, being a renter doesn’t have to suck.

RNZ reported recently that Auckland landlords are offering a free week’s rent or food vouchers to entice tenants in. Figures from realestate.co.nz suggest average rents have actually fallen 4% in the year to February. Those numbers are far from agreed upon, and there are still plenty of petty humiliations and insecurity that rental life brings, but the balance does seem to be shifting thanks to a very simple thing: more homes available to rent.

In the five years to 2023 Auckland built 68,800 new dwellings, outstripping its population growth for the first time this century. We are probably not quite at a spot where we can say there are more houses than there are renters to take them, but we may be on our way there. In other words – we may end up with housing abundance.

That word has been heard a bit in the last few weeks. American journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson just released a book with that title which seeks to crystallise and campaign for a new type of somewhat leftwing politics – one that builds. “Yimbyism” for more than just housing, this “supply-side liberalism” would stop the left being the parties of “no” – whether that is no to new housing, no to the possibility of scientific invention getting us out of the climate crisis, or no to public projects that are not rooted in intersectional justice. 

This is a vision that sets itself against the “degrowth” movement, or anyone that believes that environmental constraints must restrict eternal economic growth. It wants a “left” that builds big but also looks under the hood of why building big has got so hard – eliminating blockages like endless consultation or requirements that disadvantaged groups get better access to contracts. In other words, it wants a left that stops obsessing over process and gets far better at making progress.

New Zealand isn’t mentioned in the book, but perhaps that is because we are about two years ahead of the US, rather than the usual 20 hours. Many New Zealanders don’t know it, but our spurt of housing policies between 2016 and 2020 have become the envy of many across the Anglosphere – from the Auckland Unitary Plan through the National Policy Standard on Urban Development (NPS-UD) to the Medium Density Residential Standards. 

These policies are exactly the kind of thing that Klein and Thompson are calling for: a broad deregulation of the “supply” of housing so far more of it can be built cheaply, bringing things progressives generally want – like cheaper homes in places that don’t require a car – while setting aside smaller concerns like whether you have to cut some trees down to do it. 

Yet as the debates over the fast-track bill and the replacement for the Resource Management Act roll on, the politics of this “abundance” are far from settled. We are nowhere near the utopia they paint at the start of the book, where we all have essentially free electricity, absurdly cheap rent, and cheap weekend holidays anywhere we want. And it’s not clear which party might take us there, or if any single party could.

Are Labour or National the party of abundance?

Abundance’s authors address their book specifically at the Democratic Party in the US. I don’t know if they are aware of either of our Christophers. They do this because that is their own tribe, they don’t believe Republicans really believe in climate change, and they think that Democrats are the ones who have done the most damage to the cause of abundance. 

They argue the environmental laws the Democrats and other left parties around the world fought for in the second half of the 20th century were good at the time, but have over-performed and halted too much building and economic mobility, stopping states like California with total Democratic control from being able to build light rail or enough homes.

This may suggest that the book’s challenge should only really be made to Labour in New Zealand, but I don’t think that is the case.

For one, the US Democratic Party is a ludicrously wide church that could easily fit almost everyone from National as well as Labour inside it. Most National MPs have far more in common with the neoliberal Democrats like Larry Summers of this world than tariff-loving Republicans like Howard Lutnick, and they have for a while now.

For another, the last people to restrict the supply of new housing was the National-led government. Upon coming to power in 2023, the new government immediately destroyed the Medium Density Residential Standards (MDRS), which were set to stop urban councils being able to regulate away dense townhouses across our major cities, by making them “opt in”. This policy was forecast to add 105,000 dwellings in the next 10 years, and had been borne specifically of bipartisan compromise, in a deal that National welched on.

But Labour, opposing the fast-track bill and parts of RMA reform, is hardly able to claim the crown easily either – if indeed the party wanted to.

Labour’s housing and infrastructure spokesperson Kieran McAnulty had not read the book when I spoke to him, but was aware of the wider arguments. He saw the relevance of the arguments in New Zealand, but cautioned against swallowing them wholesale.

“It is a pretty cynical and simplistic view of politics that says unless you agree with all development at all times you are anti-development,” McAnulty said.

“I struggle with the idea that the left in general doesn’t support things and needs to change. If you look at the last Labour government, no one could credibly say that we weren’t committed to building houses.”

McAnulty moves the conversation away from the word “abundance” into the more regular Kiwi argot of “development”. He says Labour supports development, is happy to be loudly pro-development at things like the recent infrastructure investment summit, and sees the need for lots of projects to get “across the line” – from housing to energy to transport.

He defends Labour’s opposition to the fast-track bill as less one about development and more about the propriety of ministers making the call on individual development, and argued that National had really hurt abundance by cancelling so many projects as it came to government.

Housing and infrastructure minister Chris Bishop, who has the book downloaded on his Kindle but has only read reviews so far, was far more excited to embrace the agenda, which chimes in well with the prime minister’s war on the word “no”.

“It’s impossible to say it’s not positive. It’s clearly positive that people are starting to talk about how we build things, how we get things done, how we get rid of the structural barriers that we’ve built up over the previous decades to getting things done,” Bishop said.

“I think we are advancing the NZ equivalent of an abundance agenda.”

Bishop played down the mangling of the MDRS and says that he is in fact operationalising a lot of the work that Labour housing Minister Phil Twyford set out but didn’t finish. 

“I see my housing reforms as building on what Phil [Twyford] started and was unable to complete. The MDRS was a good-faith, well-intentioned attempt to overlay stuff on the failure of Phil’s policy[…] There will be medium-density zoning in the new RMA. We will set housing targets for our major cities, and that will require the use of standardised zones.”

(A day after Bishop was interviewed for this piece, the NZ Herald revealed that cabinet had blocked his plan to force Auckland Council to zone for 540,000 new homes.)

The blind spots of abundance

There are many, many parts of this book that are hard to disagree with. The authors rightly skewer older rich liberals who say they want to support the homeless and fight climate change while refusing to allow new housing to be built. Their argument that liberals are far too obsessed with performing governing legitimacy through consultation and the like, instead of focusing on state capacity, outcomes, and accepting that every regulatory burden does have trade-offs, is well-made.

But their north star of “abundance” brings in so many disparate policy issues that it can become quite a muddle. Is it “scarcity” politics to suggest a small congestion charge instead of endlessly building new lanes for highways, a policy one of the authors supports? It is easy in the abstract to be against the idea of regulatory burdens stopping both the government and private actors doing good things like building houses, but what about when they want to create new coal-fired power plants? What if those burdensome safety regulations stop something like the leaky homes crisis or the UK’s Grenfell Tower fire happening? What if people really do just want their neighbourhoods to never change? 

And for a book about politics, one that stridently dismisses the possibility of degrowth policies ever cutting through, it is one that can seem strikingly disinterested in how political change happens. Klein and Thompson are so confident in the strength of their policy prescription that they don’t seem to anticipate the knee-jerk reactions likely when “abundance” is properly suggested.

One can get a taste for this when looking at the replies to a tweet Bishop made celebrating those cheap Auckland rents. One reply read “You pigs are going to flood us wirh [sic] Indians so all of these will be soaked up soon enough” while another suggested that the government “Better flood in a few hundred thousand Indians to keep those landlords afloat.”

Twitter is not real life, but it is real politics. UK prime minister Keir Starmer’s drive to enact the exact kind of policies that Klein and Thompson are pushing for has been met with huge numbers of people saying the new homes are only needed because of all the immigrants. The UK Tories’ attempts to zone for more houses were consistently defeated by its own MPs. And here in New Zealand, it was the Act Party that managed to kill the MDRS, arguing on behalf of its suburban voters against swathes of new townhouses next door to them. 

In other words, the left may have a lot to answer for when it comes to making things hard to build, but many on the right seem plenty attached to the status quo of scarcity. If you want to build an “abundance” that includes immigrants, as the authors explicitly do, how exactly do you get political consensus for that in political cultures where many people will immediately blame immigrants for any change they don’t like?

The authors posit that abundance will fix these “scarcity” politics – that once we all start getting richer and our lives start getting better, we will relax a bit about the pace of change. But a cursory glance at the last time the world was getting materially better every few years in the mid-20th century doesn’t exactly remind one of a post-racist utopia.

Beating the clock

Then there’s actually getting there. The planning law changes of today do not result in decreased houses tomorrow. Indeed, we are probably just now seeing the effects of the Auckland Unitary Plan, which became operative in 2016. How do you win fights today that will result in more road cones and disruption tomorrow for a possibility of a better world in half a decade’s time? This is not easy, as the New Zealand experience has shown.

Another issue is the zero-sum nature of physical reality. There is no version of light rail in our major cities that does not require removing a parking lane or two, thanks to the brute physical reality of our strange geography and the buildings that already exist. New energy infrastructure will always ruin someone’s untouched vista. Doing almost anything requires ruining an “abundance” of things that some voters quite like – car parks outside their favourite shops, views without windmills – and the fruits of your new abundance may be quite some time away.

There are other rich countries where it is far cheaper and faster to build housing and major infrastructure projects than it is in the US and New Zealand – France, Spain, and across East Asia. But they don’t speak English so we never seem to steal their ideas.

McAnulty and Bishop both agree that things cost too much to build here, but a clear way to fix that is not exactly obvious. McAnulty points to moves the last government was making on building supplies. Bishop says the business case study industry has grown into a monster and is now slowing things down too much, and anything that takes longer naturally becomes more expensive. McAnulty argues Bishop’s government has cancelled too many projects, leading to construction workers going abroad; Bishop says most of the cancelled projects weren’t very close to happening anyway. Both agree bipartisanship is needed here – which explains the seemingly genuine effort to get bipartisan sections of the new RMA hammered out, as well as singing from a similar song sheet on investment.

Then, New Zealand is not a two-party state. Just as the Act Party forced the National Party to ditch its support for the MDRS, it’s fairly easy to imagine the Green Party or Te Pāti Māori adding new procurement rules for public projects once in government that slow things down. There may be a good theoretical case against these add-ons, but politics is not built in theory, it’s built by pounding the streets, knocking on doors, and listening to people complain about things. 

Does this mean abundance is doomed in New Zealand? Of course not. The National Party spent nine years failing to reform the RMA last time it was in power, and seems a lot more serious about it now. Labour did more on housing than any other government had in decades. The energy from young people of all stripes to do basically anything to fix the housing crisis is clearly having an outsize effect on the most innovative brains in our major political parties.

But there is no big red button labelled “abundance” to press. The journey there would be messy and divisive and earn you plenty of nasty front pages. By the time you saw any results you could well be tossed from office, and teasing out if your reforms really did the nice new thing would be an endless item of debate. I guess there’s a reason most of us don’t become politicians.