Four years of housing uncertainty. Thanks National.

Important to remember that on top of Chris Bishop's announcement this week of recommended changes to the Resource Management Act, unlikely you'd think to be passed before the next election (with all the uncertainty that that will generate), is his and his boss's other injection of uncertainty into housing — i.e., what the planners will and won't allow on a building site — with an admission, buried in a speech yesterday, that this uncertainty will persist until at least 2027!

Dan Brunskill spotted the admission tucked into the speech, calculating that "National's U-turn on the bipartisan accord caused a three-year delay to housing reform"! He explains:

In a speech to the Property Council summit in Auckland on Thursday, Bishop said "Going for Growth” and other reforms would only be bedded in “from 2027 or so onwards.” 

This delay follows the National Party’s decision to abandon a bipartisan housing agreement, called the MDRS (medium density residential standards), negotiated from the National side by Judith Collins and Nicola Willis in 2021.

At the time, Willis said Labour and National had come together “to say an emphatic ‘yes’ to housing in our backyards.” [And this gave every developer certainty.] 

But new party leader Christopher Luxon sided with his NIMBY caucus colleagues in the run-up to the 2023 election and forced [sic] Bishop to rush out an alternative policy after letting his opposition to the arrangement slip during a public meeting.

National’s new policy allowed councils to opt out of the denser housing rules, provided they zoned their cities for 30 years of growth "immediately" — but, almost two years later, not a single council has formally adopted the policy.

Bishop said on Thursday the finer details of the policy’s first phase were still being worked through by officials and local councils should be ready to implement them in 2027.

This is partly due to a “sequencing problem” as the Government is also planning to introduce an entirely new resource management regime towards the end of next year. ... 

Housing reform and the new resource management rules will be implemented as part of the 2027 Long Term Plan cycle [they hope], or roughly four years after Bishop backtracked on the MDRS.

Four fucking years! George Gregan would be proud.

Speaking of NIMBY numpties, here's Bishop's idiotic boss protesting a new apartment development on the site a of a decommissioned and abandoned mechanic's workshop: