Peter Drennan says Auckland's messy housing debate has clarified. We now know who actually wants to fix the housing crisis and who's strip-mining it for political advantage

Auckland's housing debate has always been messy. But the mess has clarified. We now know who actually wants to fix the housing crisis and who's strip-mining it for political advantage.

The Pragmatist: Wayne Brown gets it done

Whatever you think of Mayor Wayne Brown, the man has staked out the clearest position in New Zealand housing politics. His response to David Seymour's demand for suburb-by-suburb zoning transparency before legislation could proceed was magnificently blunt: "I'm not sitting up here to have David Seymour tell me what to do."

This wasn't bluster. It was the frustration of a pragmatist who understands that every additional layer of process is another opportunity for vested interests to strangle reform. Brown has watched Auckland Council spend $13 million across various iterations of the housing plan. He knows the city was never going to build two million homes, but he also knows that generous zoning capacity is the single most important lever a city has for keeping the market honest. Zone broadly, let the market decide where the demand is, and get out of the way.

Brown's genius is his refusal to pretend this is more complicated than it is. Auckland needs more houses. The rules need to allow more houses. Everything else is decoration. When David Seymour demanded that council publish detailed zoning changes before Parliament could legislate, Brown's response was immediate: we'll just stick with two million and carry on.

The irony is thick. Brown is a conservative, a businessman, a figure of the centre-right. Not, by temperament or ideology, a housing activist. But he has become the most effective champion of housing supply in the country, simply by applying honest assessment and pragmatic problem-solving to a problem that desperately needs both.

The True Believer: Chris Bishop's quiet war

If Brown is the pragmatist who doesn't care what anyone thinks, Christopher Bishop is a true believer operating inside a machine that doesn't fully share his convictions. Bishop understands housing at a technical level few New Zealand politicians can match. His record on the portfolio has been one of genuine ambition: pushing intensification, embracing the bipartisan MDRS and NPS-UD framework, and treating housing supply as the central economic challenge of a generation.

The reduction from two million to 1.6 million wasn't Bishop's preference. You could hear it in phrases like "more politically sustainable" and "more enduring politically." That's the vocabulary of a minister who fought for more behind closed doors and is now selling the best deal he could extract.

But here's what matters: we know what Bishop's vision is. He has been transparent about where he wants to go, even when the path requires compromise. Eighty percent of the vision is better than failure, because voters can see the destination and forgive the detours. The zoning framework, even at 1.6 million, is transformationally more permissive than what existed five years ago. Bishop knows that if the architecture is right, the specific numbers matter less than actually landing the plane. That's the difference between strategic compromise and ideological surrender.

The Nimby in Chief: David Seymour's libertarian costume

Which brings us to David Seymour, and a political transformation so complete it deserves to be studied.

ACT was founded on individual liberty, property rights, free markets, small government. You didn't have to agree with it to respect it as a coherent worldview. The party existed to argue that people should be free to do what they want with their own property and that government should get out of the way.

Now consider what Seymour actually did last week. Auckland Council was moving to implement broad upzoning, a policy that would allow property owners to build more on their own land, let the market determine where density goes, and reduce the regulatory burden on development. This is, by any honest assessment, the most libertarian housing policy available. It is the free market in action.

And David Seymour tried to stop it.

His demand was superficially reasonable: publish the suburb-by-suburb zoning maps before Parliament votes. Transparency! Accountability! But the practical effect (and Seymour is smart enough to know this) is to give every neighbourhood association and heritage lobby the time and ammunition to mount suburb-specific opposition campaigns. It is the nimby playbook dressed in the language of democratic process.

A libertarian would say: your neighbour has the right to build a townhouse on their property, and your aesthetic preferences don't override their property rights. A libertarian would say: the market should decide where density goes, not a council committee adjudicating competing claims about neighbourhood character. Seymour said none of these things.

This isn't a compromise with libertarian principles. Compromises preserve the core while yielding on the margins, the way Bishop yielded on the number while preserving the framework of broad upzoning. What Seymour has done is adopt a position that is the direct opposite of his party's founding philosophy. He has staked out his vision, and it isn't libertarian. It's conservative. It prioritises preserving existing arrangements over enabling change, that values the comfort of incumbents over the opportunities of newcomers.

And on the broader culture war front, the treaty principles bill and the identity politics skirmishes, Seymour finds himself in an even more uncomfortable position. He staked his brand on being the fearless voice against racial preferences, only to watch Winston Peters eat his lunch with louder, cruder, more effective populism on the same themes.

And then there's Christopher Luxon

Somewhere behind all of this sits the Prime Minister. The concession from two million to 1.6 million has Christopher Luxon's boardroom fingerprints all over it: identify the constituencies that matter, balance their competing demands, arrive at a decision that minimises friction. The leafy suburbs get their signal that neighbourhood character is safe. The housing reformers keep enough of the framework to claim progress. Everyone leaves the meeting without flipping the table.

In a corporate context, this is good management. In politics, it's a void where vision should be. Brown has a vision: build what Auckland needs and stop letting process be the enemy of progress. Bishop has a vision: a housing framework ambitious enough to outlast any single government.

Luxon alone is defined not by where he wants to go, but by how effectively he manages the people around him. Savvy boardroom management for more power isn't a vision, and it doesn't translate to voters. Voters need to know what you believe. Luxon leaves them to fill in the blanks, and voters have noticed there's nothing written on the page.

*Peter Drennan is Christchurch Manager at Waterstone Insolvency. This article first ran here and is used with permission.