Thread by @cha0s10g1c

Probably kind of cliche at this point, but I'd love to see some sort of Abundance-like agenda in NZ Politics 🧵

We're certainly making some progress on the housing front, as someone who thought blanket upzoning is a decent idea it's kind of sad to see the MDRS go in some cases, but it's not like we're going back to the dark ages of NIMBYism

It'd be good to see some more of the same in local government, Wellington did well with their last district plan. Ideally we'd see the same in Christchurch and Auckland. At least Auckland seems to be taking advantage for the opportunity for transit-oriented development

IMO we need to take advantage of the opportunity to move quickly, there might be some risks doing this but equally there's undoubtedly risks upholding the restrictive planning status quo

Right now it feels like there's a decent amount of consensus that property prices in NZ (as with other parts of the Anglosphere like Canada and Australia) that housing prices are overly high and action is needed to bring them down

While I don't think upzoning is the only thing that can bring prices down, downzoning and restrictive planning has definitely limited scope to build our way out of subsequent shortages

Probably one of the biggest weaknesses of the neoliberal reforms NZ (and other countries) went through was not implementing a sufficiently liberal planning system at the same time

Right now our opportunity is to reform the planning system into something sufficiently liberal to allow for abundant new housing, new energy generation, and additional competition in things like supermarkets

Similar to housing, there's certainly the need to expand our largely-renewable energy supply with an abundance of new generation.

IMO, more permissive consenting, especially for wind and solar, is probably the biggest opportunity, but there's probably others

Certainly an opportunity to encourage more base load capacity as well, whether through battery storage, hydrogen, gas, or other methods.

Not entirely certain the severity, but intermittency does seem like a weakness of relying on variable sources such as solar or wind

In terms of the political aspect, there's certainly been a range of views from parties on issues such as these.

Some good, some bad, some meh.

But maybe a case of realising consensus doesn't always translate to actual outcomes. Such as the lack of bipartisanship on RMA reform

IMO the work-in-progress RMA reform by this government seems positive, so long as the urban-NIMBY Act doesn't manage to water down policy on upzoning.

Still ironic that Act's desire for less red tape and more adherence to property rights doesn't extend to increasing density

But it's good to see the current direction of travel seems to include:
-More homes
-More interconnection between housing and transport policy
-More funding for infrastructure
-Support for congestion charging
-Support for renewable energy

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