An interesting idea crossed our path last week – actually twice, within days. It’s that to get political cut through and win popular appeal in this climate you need to drop the positive complex story such as how sustainability is full of benefits and worthwhile. Instead say something stupidly simple and preferably scary, with a sting in the tail. Such as if we don’t stop what we’re doing now you won’t have a home to live in; your kids won’t eat.
Goodbye positive vibes, hello new political agenda.
It works, said the ideas people.
Take a look at the evidence.
Like: They will come and take your land (the No campaign in the Referendum on the Voice.)
Or that the problem (with everything) is immigration: Vote for me before they take over.
Or that planning is destroying housing supply and making it too expensive.
Simple. Every Joe and Jane can understand this. It makes sense, like a cliché wrapping its little fangs around our overloaded brains and refusing to let go.
But anyone who’s read Freakonomics knows that if something looks and feels too simple to be true, it usually is.
Like that crime was reduced in US cities because the authorities got super tough on criminals. False. Crime fell because they took lead out of petrol and babies brains started to develop normally. Also, young women were offered birth control which meant those caught at the bottom of drug infested heap took up the option.
New influences might be more relevant nowadays, but you get the gist. Clichés work when the world is complicated and you’re struggling to make ends meet.
Right now, politicians are leaping into the void left behind by hope and vision, with their ears pinned back. They’re grasping at the opportunity to use any number of clichés to win the hearts and minds of the desperate. For whatever reason they have in mind.
Because let’s be kind here, this is what is at stake: the exploitation and deception of people who are too busy and too desperate to scratch themselves. Who live in cars or make the best of “Van Life” when they lose their homes, and who sign up to a gym so they can still get hot showers.
With the Voice Referendum the truth was nuanced and subtle. An extremely difficult concept to get across to a populace which then was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and now is just about ready to be sectioned.
Just look at the votes One Nation is pulling to get a sense of the raw emotions that have led great swathes of people to – almost overnight – fall in with the drum beat of the Trumps bombing their way around the world. And next, check out the money that’s pouring into its coffers, spurred you have to guess by the shining example of example of Gina Rinehart donating a million dollar plane to the cause.
What’s shocking is the speed at which the switch came. Like most political or social landslides, starting slow, almost imperceptible, until they’re not.
Then look at the stories they tell.
In complete alignment with the mad beasts let out of the closet by the Trumps and the Pauline Hansons of the world, landing on our doorstep this week was from the bright yellow beast himself – none other than Clive Palmer whose whiskers have twitched to life in anticipation of yet another run in the hustings.
We took a close look at all Palmer’s policies and lo and behold they looked a lot like Hanson’s.
Right up front, like each of his exclusive and increasingly well funded cohorts, is the call to get rid of net zero.
Then came a confusing and contradictory set of policies that coupled ending homelessness, hunger, lack of fast trains and land with lower taxes and smaller government. Not sure how the sums add up here, but a quick sample follows: $1 trillion for housing, so everyone can own a home, a 100 per cent increase in the health budget, better education, repaying the national debt.
Don’t ask how those bounteous gifts are meant to be funded, but we’re pretty sure they’re not out of his pocket nor that of Gina Rinehart.
Then the Auckland story landed.
Nicole Bennetts national head of national head of policy and advocacy at Planning Institute of Australia gave us the deep nuanced truth behind what happened in the New Zealand capital and is so often portrayed as an example of a “blanket rezone of a city and they will come. And they will build. And it will be affordable.”
But it’s not so simple.
As Bennetts puts it the clichéd story goes: “Upzone everywhere, sweep away planning controls, and the market will deliver the housing supply we need.
“Before Auckland expanded housing capacity at scale, it fundamentally restructured how the city governed growth. Councils were consolidated into a single metropolitan authority. A long-term spatial plan, developed through significant community
The piece caused quite a stir on social media channels when we posted it.
Jonathan O’Brien who leads the YIMBYs in Melbourne who are the beneficiaries of around $750,000 from tech lords in the US (who are well on the way getting rid of any green or red tape standing in the way of AI), said the news was “fantastic” and that the Planning Institute of Australia had “finally accepted the evidence on Auckland. Broad upzoning works, and it’s great to see our nation’s peak planning body more instep with the evidence.”
Then added
The Fifth Estate headline is right: Auckland “isn’t a simple story of blanket upzoning”. That’s true—but only because Auckland’s council planning process systematically worked to avoid upzoning Auckland’s wealthy middle-suburbs.
Only to have Matt Collins, CEO of the PIA jump in to say:
You’ve cited Auckland for years as evidence that planning should get out of the way. Now that attention is being drawn to the role of strategic planning, infrastructure coordination and governance reform, your argument appears to be that Auckland worked despite those things. In other words, “Auckland was a success except for the parts that were planned”. At some point that stops being an evidence-based argument and starts looking like an ideological commitment in search of supporting evidence.
Elsewhere Collins said:
The upzoning itself was the product of strategic planning (no matter how much you seem to be denying it). Decisions were made about where growth should occur, infrastructure was coordinated, trade-offs were considered, and not every location received the same zoning outcome.
You might disagree with some of those decisions. That’s fine.
What you can’t do is simultaneously hold Auckland up as the model and then dismiss the parts of Auckland that involved planning.
There’s more. Worth reading. But gee you need to pay a bit of attention and concentrate. The easy cliché is not available in this piece.
