Are the days of construction policy ‘flip flops’ over?
Thursday, 16 July 2026
Uncertainty and “flip-flops between regimes” remain a huge concern for the construction sector, but there’s now cross-party recognition of the issue, and a more bipartisan era could be on the way.
Election-year campaigning is underway, and this week the BuildNZ conference in Auckland hosted a panel of politicians from across the spectrum for a discussion on their parties housing and construction policies.
It featured representatives from four of the parties currently in Parliament, and from the Opportunity Party. And one of its most striking features was the degree of consensus that was evident at the big picture level.
New Zealand needs to build more homes, and more quickly, it was agreed. There was alignment on the need to simplify frameworks, modernise systems, and continue with planning reforms.
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Labour’s building and construction spokesperson, Arena Williams, said one of the things she wanted those attending to take away was how an emerging consensus was to be found in infrastructure building, housing, and construction policy.
But the devil is in the detail, and some fundamental differences and flashpoints in the parties priorities and policies emerged. “It is a contest of ideas,” ACT MP Simon Court said.
Here’s The Post’s three key takeaways from the panel.
The standards vs affordability tension
The drive for warmer, drier and more energy efficient homes is not going away, with audience questions acting as reinforcement of that.
Williams said New Zealand’s built environment was lagging in terms of air quality, warmth, and new build standards should be up to a much higher standard to achieve better health and living outcomes.
She and the Green Party’s spokesperson, Lawrence Xu-Nan, backed tools such as Green Star and passive home standards, along with incentives to help achieve better quality buildings.
National’s Chris Penk, the Minister for Building and Construction, said everyone would agree that good installation and other standards were important, and they were represented in the Building Code.
“But there’s also the long-term economics. We want to build wealth, but there's a balance, and we don’t want to make it prohibitive in terms of cost for people to be able to build, or to afford a warm, dry home of their own to live in the first place.”
While the Opportunity Party’s Daniel Eb said it was about making a choice of whether to pay now to elevate housing stock to pay later in health bills, Court said it was not a good idea to keep imposing new green and new red tape on builders.
That gave councils more weapons and reasons to say no and force cost on developers, he said. “What we need to do instead is focus on affordability, and speed.”
The spectre of the leaky homes crisis
Penk talked about the work underway to reform the Building Act - including liability rules, streamline the consenting process, and improve building performance and efficiency.
Uncertainty bred instability, so to avoid uncertainty that things might change again at any given moment, a cycle where the building code would be reviewed every three years had been introduced, he said.
But talk of regulatory reform led to the raising of concerns about what all the changes might mean for consumers.
Williams was concerned about reforming the joint and several liability system as the country had stepped away from doing it before because it did not have a durable solution to fairly apportion that risk.
“It is a risk for all of us when little old ladies, when first home buyers are faced with work that has gone wrong at some point in the chain, and their council cannot stand behind them.”
If a failure like the leaky building crisis occurred again there had to be a fair way to spread the risk forward, so that needed to be a critical part of any reforms, she said.
For Court, work was being done to solve this across Parliament, and William’s contribution to it was a good example of bipartisanship.
But casting forward, the delivery of the RMA reform would change the way people saw land use planning and consenting, and one aim was to reduce the scope of what councils did, he said.
The spectre of the leaky homes crisis was inescapable, emerging again in a discussion of safety concerns about overseas building products.
“What we don't want is a repeat of the leaky buildings that we saw in the early 2000s, which affected a significant number of New Zealanders in a really profound way,” Xu said.
It’s not just about buildings, it’s about people too
When it came to the sector itself, Labour’s focus would always start with the workforce side, and there were critical skill shortages that needed to be planned for, Williams said.
“We need to build into the emerging consensus on the infrastructure pipeline another consensus around our training of young workers in all the critical skills that we need to build houses.
“Everyone in this room wants to train young New Zealanders, but at the moment you aren't getting the incentives that you need to attract and hang on to those apprentices.”
Penk agreed the sector needed young Kiwis coming into it, and that it was important for the health of the sector as well as the opportunities for those young lives.
“But only by having a good pipeline of work, and making it as easy, quick and affordable as possible will we make it competitive and attractive for people to be doing that work here, as opposed to the east coast of Australia or further field.”
Meanwhile, Eb said an important philosophical question sat at the core of discussions around the sector, and it related to social infrastructure.
“RMA reform, making consenting simpler - that's a part of the puzzle, but a free market cannot design a society. Only a government can do that. So the way our communities are designed matters.”
That would always be a point of tension between different parts of the political spectrum, but it was necessary to give credence to both pieces, and find consensus in the middle, he said.