CHA Hub Podcast

In this episode, we speak with Hema Sridhar, Deputy Director of Koi Tū, the Centre for Informed Futures, and former Chief Science Advisor to the New Zealand Ministry of Defence.

Hema comes to housing not as a housing expert but as someone whose career has spanned science, technology and public policy, and whose work now focuses on how technology reshapes society and how governments think – or fail to think – about the future. Her central challenge to us is that New Zealand has become very good at admiring the problem: we have the data, the analysis and decades of reports, and almost nothing new left to learn about what’s wrong.

What’s missing, she argues, is a theory of change – a clear sense of what good actually looks like – which is why the country keeps moving sideways instead of forward. We talk about her scepticism about the role of artificial intelligence in democracy, her concern that the country has no capability of its own in that space, and why she describes a stable home as part of the connective tissue of a healthy society, rather than just bricks and mortar.

We’d like to thank Hema for taking the time to speak with us for this episode.

And don't forget to subscribe to the CHA Hub Podcast – wherever you get your podcasts from.

The CHA Hub Podcast is sponsored by our Founding Partner, Westpac New Zealand.

In this episode, we speak with Tamatha Paul, the Green Party’s spokesperson for housing, the Member of Parliament for Wellington Central, and a former Wellington city councillor who wrote her Master’s dissertation on the provision of public housing.

Tamatha does something you might not expect from her side of the House – she makes the case that agreement across party lines on housing is not only possible but already exists, pointing to the broad support in Parliament for greater density as proof that consensus can be built.

We talk about why she'd class housing not just as national but as critical infrastructure, alongside water and power; why she thinks leaving it to the market produces something close to random; and how she comes at the limits of the market from an angle no one else does – through accessibility, and constituents who simply cannot find a home they can live in with dignity. She's also the one politician we spoke to who has actually run a citizens' assembly, and she's refreshingly honest about the deep divide the country still has to bridge – between seeing a home as a right, and seeing it as a commodity.

We'd like to thank Tamatha Paul for taking the time to speak with us for this episode.

And don't forget to subscribe to the CHA Hub Podcast – wherever you get your podcasts from.

The CHA Hub Podcast is sponsored by our Founding Partner, Westpac New Zealand.

In this episode, we speak with Yves Dejaeghere, executive director of the Federation for Innovation in Democracy in Europe, and one of the architects of what may be the world's most advanced permanent citizens' council, in the German-speaking region of Belgium.

Yves is a realist rather than an evangelist, and that is what makes this such a clear-eyed conversation. He is candid that a citizens' assembly cannot, on its own, solve housing – because housing, in his view, is not a knowledge problem but a political one, where existing owners will not vote to reduce the value of their own homes.

What these processes can do, he argues, is drag arguments that usually happen behind closed doors out into the open, and give politicians the cover to do what they quietly know is right. We talk about why doing the sensible thing is so often politically irrational, how a small and determined minority can hold an entire reform hostage even when most people quietly agree, and why he is wary of handing too much of democracy over to artificial intelligence.

We'd like to thank Yves for taking the time to speak with us for this episode.

And don't forget to subscribe to the CHA Hub Podcast – wherever you get your podcasts from.

The CHA Hub Podcast is sponsored by our Founding Partner, Westpac New Zealand.

In this episode, we speak with Dr Kay Saville-Smith, Research Director of CRESA, the Centre for Research, Evaluation and Social Assessment, and one of New Zealand’s leading housing-systems researchers.

Kay studies not housing problems but the housing system itself – how its players relate, how the rules shape their behaviour, and why the tools we reach for to fix affordability so often make it worse. Kay gives us a phrase that echoes right across this edition – market limitation, not market failure – and she takes us back to the reforms of the early 1990s, which she says stripped out a rich toolbox that once let the country build good, low-cost housing at scale.

We talk about her verdict that the system used to work well for most people and now works well for only about a fifth of them; her sharp critique of the Accommodation Supplement as a housing subsidy dressed up as welfare; and her precise idea for what should replace it. She’s also candid about the risks those reforms created for the community housing sector itself.

We’d like to thank Kay for taking the time to speak with us for this episode.

And don't forget to subscribe to the CHA Hub Podcast – wherever you get your podcasts from.

The CHA Hub Podcast is sponsored by our Founding Partner, Westpac New Zealand.

In this episode, we speak with Jane Wrightson, the Retirement Commissioner, as she concludes her six-year term as the country’s independent voice on retirement income.

Jane arrives at the edition’s themes from a completely different direction – retirement – and lands squarely on many of the same conclusions. Her most arresting figure is a projected doubling in the number of older New Zealanders renting by the late 2040s: our pension system assumes a country where people reach retirement owning their home outright, and that assumption is quietly failing.

We talk about why she sees the retirement system and the housing system as two halves of one problem being run in isolation from each other; the gap between men’s and women’s retirement savings that begins surprisingly early in life; and why the market keeps building three-storey townhouses that older people can’t actually live in. Her answer echoes the rest of the edition: a long-term, cross-party plan that outlasts any single government.

We’d like to thank Jane for taking the time to speak with us for this episode.

And don't forget to subscribe to the CHA Hub Podcast – wherever you get your podcasts from.

The CHA Hub Podcast is sponsored by our Founding Partner, Westpac New Zealand.

In this episode, we speak with Professor Jane Suiter of Dublin City University, one of the architects of Ireland's citizens' assembly model and a recipient of the Brown Democracy Medal for that work.

Ireland used citizens' assemblies to work through some of its most difficult and divisive questions, and Jane has spent years in the room watching what makes them succeed – and where even the best designs fall short.

We talk about the careful choices that stop these processes being captured by lobbyists and vested interests, why politicians so rarely hear what ordinary citizens actually think, and the story of a cabinet minister of twenty years who said an assembly gave him his first real policy conversation with the people he represents. We also explore her measured caution about the place of artificial intelligence in this kind of deliberation, and why she believes New Zealand – with its scale and its mixed-member system – is unusually well suited to giving it a go, with housing a textbook candidate.

We'd like to thank Jane for taking the time to speak with us for this episode.

And don't forget to subscribe to the CHA Hub Podcast – wherever you get your podcasts from.

The CHA Hub Podcast is sponsored by our Founding Partner, Westpac New Zealand.

In this episode, we speak with Professor David Farrell of University College Dublin, a political scientist and one of the principal architects of Ireland’s citizens’ assembly model, whose work on deliberative democracy has had influence far beyond Ireland.

David is our comparative expert, whose work gives him a view across many of the international examples this edition draws on, and who can say what actually travels from one country to another. His answer to the central question is bracingly simple: whether a citizens’ assembly works comes down to one thing – whether politicians actually act on what it produces.

We talk about the design idea he considers a genuine game-changer – putting politicians in the room alongside citizens, and letting the experience win the sceptics over – and why he thinks a first assembly here should tackle housing head-on rather than warming up on something safe. He’s also honest about watching his own country gradually blunt the very model it pioneered, and draws his practical advice directly from seeing where it went wrong.

We’d like to thank David for taking the time to speak with us for this episode.

And don't forget to subscribe to the CHA Hub Podcast – wherever you get your podcasts from.

The CHA Hub Podcast is sponsored by our Founding Partner, Westpac New Zealand.

In this episode, we speak with Rob Campbell – company director, economic historian, and former chair of some of New Zealand’s largest companies and public organisations – who thinks about housing from further outside the policy mainstream than almost anyone else we spoke to.

Rob’s organising idea is the enclosure of the commons – a centuries-long process, as he tells it, of taking things that were once shared and turning them into private property, from farmland in seventeenth-century England to state houses being absorbed into private rentals today.

We talk about why, on this reading, the housing crisis isn’t an accident but the predictable result of that process; why he warns that people sold small apartments as a first step “onto the ladder” may in fact be buying a shrinking slice of a depreciating asset; and why he believes holding land collectively, in community ownership, makes hard economic sense and not just moral sense. He also turns a sharp eye on his own generation and argues for some honest truth-telling before the country can build something better.

We’d like to thank Rob for taking the time to speak with us for this episode.

And don’t forget to subscribe to the CHA Hub Podcast – wherever you get your podcasts from.

The CHA Hub Podcast is sponsored by our Founding Partner, Westpac New Zealand.

In this episode, we speak with Qiulae Wong – known to many simply as Q – the leader of The Opportunity Party.

Q sits deliberately between left and right, and makes the case that lasting housing reform needs exactly that kind of stabilising force in the middle. We talk about her party's central housing idea – a tax on the value of urban land, designed to discourage land banking and gently bring house prices down over time – and she's candid that, as a property owner herself, she would personally lose out.

She connects that to a bigger picture in which a guaranteed basic income becomes its own kind of housing security as automation reshapes work, and argues for independent, long-horizon planning that outlasts any single government. And drawing on three hard-fought election campaigns, she offers a lesson about political courage that has nothing to do with policy at all: that people connect with people, not with policy.

We'd like to thank Q for taking the time to speak with us for this episode.

And don't forget to subscribe to the CHA Hub Podcast – wherever you get your podcasts from.

The CHA Hub Podcast is sponsored by our Founding Partner, Westpac New Zealand.

In this episode, we speak with Max Rashbrooke, a journalist and author based at Victoria University of Wellington and research director at the IDEA think tank, whose work sits where economic inequality and democracy meet.

Max brings one of the edition's hardest numbers: on his calculation, if New Zealand had simply kept building state housing in step with its population since the early 1990s, there would be tens of thousands more state homes today – roughly enough to house everyone now in severe housing need. We talk about why he sees today's crisis as, to a striking degree, the direct result of decades of not building; why he calls the recent overhaul of the state housing agency one of the most economically illiterate things he's seen; and why he insists that leaving housing mainly to the market is a choice, not a law of nature, pointing to cities overseas where the state houses a large share of the population extremely well. We also explore his enthusiasm for citizens' assemblies as a way through the moments when ordinary politics gets completely stuck.

We'd like to thank Max for taking the time to speak with us for this episode.

And don't forget to subscribe to the CHA Hub Podcast – wherever you get your podcasts from.

The CHA Hub Podcast is sponsored by our Founding Partner, Westpac New Zealand.