A deep dive into the unintentional political commentary of a weird internet game made by an anti-density activist group.

For the past few days, I’ve been obsessed with an online flash game called Beat the Bish. It’s not a particularly good game; it’s a generic Space Invaders-style arcade game with some AI artwork pasted on top. It was made by Live Wellington, an anti-density group that recently sued Wellington City Council and housing minister Chris Bishop over their decision to allow six-storey apartments in the so-called “character suburbs” (basically anywhere within walking distance of the CBD). Live Wellington lost that case badly. This game is part of a fundraising campaign to cover their court costs. 

As the game puts it, “your job is to stop the Bish before he bashes you and the things you love”. Standing on top of the Beehive, disembodied Chris Bishop heads fly at you from all directions. You throw various objects – a cricket bat, a scooter, a coffee, a pie, and Don McGlashan – at the heads, which scream in pain as they’re hit and destroyed. When you inevitably lose (I haven’t managed to get past level 5), your screen fills with the words “you got Bished”. 

The political commentary implicit in this game is remarkable. One of the playable characters is a “homeowner” – a frightened-looking grey-haired couple with a wooden villa, standing on top of the Beehive, lobbing projectiles at a politician who legalised higher-density housing. It’s an unintentional masterpiece: a perfect caricature of the voters who dominate New Zealand’s political economy while still painting themselves as victims. 

The other character choices are telling: an environmentalist, a cyclist, a te Tiriti supporter (an unlicensed depiction of Stan Walker), and the Gordon Wilson flats, which look as derelict as ever. What fascinates me most about this game is how it is so left-coded. 

Live Wellington sees its position of restraining growth, preserving old houses and defending existing communities as aligned with leftwing values. That contrasts with the reality of the District Plan process, where the group’s strongest political allies on the city council were the core four of the right: Diane Calvert, Ray Chung, Tony Randle and Nicola Young. Their anti-density position was opposed by a coalition of young, progressive activists concerned about the cost of housing and the environmental impacts of sprawl: Generation Zero, Renters United, A City for People, and every Labour and Greens councillor. 

It shows how dramatically liberalism – and the politics of housing in general – has shifted over the past few decades. The predominant leftwing position on housing has shifted from anti-growth to pro-growth.  

This was demonstrated in a recent argument Wellington City Council’s position on the government’s going for growth housing plan between Iona Pannett, an environmentalist who was kicked out of the Greens for her anti-density views, and Rebecca Matthews, an environmentalist who was heavily recruited to the Greens due to her pro-density views.

Pannett was concerned because new apartment buildings use steel frames, and steel is produced using fossil fuels: “It’s for me, fundamentally, philosophically, and policy-wise, flawed. We cannot have eternal growth… we just cannot, we have to stop. We are in very deep trouble as a planet because of the growth ideology that has dominated since the 1950s. This council, from my perspective, has not engaged with the issues around growth.”

Matthews, with visible frustration, responded: “I have to say something now. People have to live somewhere. To say we are anti-growth in that we don’t allow more housing means they’ll live nowhere. This submission is not an endorsement of the use of coal or fossil fuels… Housing densification is actually the greatest intervention that we can make to allow people to live while reducing their emissions.”

The housing debate isn’t just shifting within Wellington’s council chambers. When you look at how abundance discourse has become the hot new political debate in the US, it’s striking to see how far New Zealand has come in a few short years. 

On RNZ’s Morning Report on Friday last week, Chris Bishop was asked if it was a good thing that house prices were dropping. “I think it is,” he said. After the interview, Corin Dann mulled, “It’s remarkable to hear a minister say falling house prices is a good thing. There was a time when politicians dared not utter that.” 

We’ve gone from a place where no major politician wanted to admit house prices were a supply problem, to bipartisan agreement that we need central government edicts to enable growth. One of the main strategies of the Yimby movement globally has been to shift the decision-making powers on housing to higher levels of government, because local government can be overpowered by the interests of local residents’ associations, while state and federal governments consider larger productivity measures.

At the recent Building Nations infrastructure conference, Bishop said he saw his role as housing minister as “carrying out Phil Twyford’s legacy.” Twyford, the former Labour housing minister, was the first major politician to realise that local governments generally can’t be trusted to enable enough growth. He passed the NPS-UD, which required councils to allow six-storey apartments around train stations and eliminated car parking minimums. 

Bishop has taken that stance even further – and with a sense of uncontained glee. He scolded Christchurch for delaying its plans, required Auckland to zone for 15-storey buildings around City Rail Link stops, changed wording to prevent councils from getting cute about the definitions of walking catchments and whether trains are really trains, and passed legislation specifically to allow the demolition of the Gordon Wilson flats. 

The fact that this has come from a National minister arguably makes it even more effective: leftwing local politicians quietly back him, while criticism from anti-change conservatives carries less weight. 

The question is: can this cross-partisan consensus last? Is Bishop the new model of a National Party housing minister, or just an anomaly? Will the next Labour government be as willing to force local councils’ hands?

Auckland is currently debating a major advancement in its housing plan, enabling up to two million new homes by densifying the inner suburbs. There is no shortage of cross-armed locals who are grumpy about this plan (as detailed by Hayden Donnell), but there doesn’t yet seem to be the same kind of rage that was generated back in 2016 when the council proposed a much less dramatic upzoning (as detailed by Hayden Donnell). That might suggest a change in public opinion towards density – or it may just show how effective the Twyford/Bishop strategy of neutering local oppositional power has been.