Cross-party consensus emerge

For years, construction firms have built around a moving political target. Consenting rules, building standards and housing settings swung with each change of government, and builders, developers and subcontractors absorbed the cost of the uncertainty. The coalition Government is now betting that its overhaul of the planning and consenting system can end that, and at this year’s BuildNZ conference there were signs the rest of the spectrum is prepared to let it.

The pitch from the top is unapologetically about productivity and cost. Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk, who is driving an overhaul of the consent system, has argued its delays are “driving up costs, making the average standalone house here 50% more expensive to build than in Australia.” As BuildNZ opened in Auckland, National set out fresh building plans, with Penk noting the sector “employs around 10% of New Zealand’s workforce and makes up at least 6% of GDP.” The consent process, he says, too often adds “extra checks, extra paperwork, extra cost and extra uncertainty, without making buildings any safer or better quality.” For an industry of that size, the prize from getting it right is large.

What made BuildNZ notable was how little the politicians fought over the goal. Representatives of Labour, ACT and the Greens, along with The Opportunity Party, shared a stage and agreed on the big-picture problem even as they split on the detail.

Labour’s building and construction spokesperson Arena Williams said she wanted people to leave sensing a consensus was forming around infrastructure, housing and construction policy. ACT’s Simon Court, who as an under-secretary helps drive the Government’s resource management work, called it “a contest of ideas” but agreed cross-party work was already under way to steady a sector long whipsawed by changing rules.

That instability has a name on site. Flip-flopping. Priorities change with each government, and projects consented under one regime can be reconsented, redesigned or shelved under the next. The volatility is expensive. It shows up in higher build costs, in firms folding between projects, and in skilled trades leaving the industry when the pipeline stalls.

The Government’s answer is the biggest change to the planning system in a generation. The Resource Management Act reform now before Parliament, led by RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop, is designed to pare back what councils control, replacing more than a hundred regional plans with a single plan per region and one national direction, and cutting a tangle of consent categories down to a handful.

Its stated aim is to make infrastructure quicker to deliver while giving councils, investors and communities more certainty about what can be built and where. Certainty, more than any single rule change, is what the sector says it is after.

The industry has been pushing the same way. Civil Contractors New Zealand launched its 2026 Election Manifesto in July, built from twelve member workshops and addressed to every party.

Its central demand is blunt. Stop starting and stopping the work. Citing the Cost of Stopping report alongside the National Infrastructure Plan, it puts the cost of stop-start investment at $11.8 billion over the past 25 years. Chief executive Alan Pollard says an uncertain pipeline is his members’ single biggest challenge, and his asks track the reform direction, a stable, depoliticised pipeline with independent accountability, nationally consistent procurement with early contractor involvement, a risk-based approach to compliance, and workforce settings that back apprenticeships and fix immigration for the civil trades.

Not everyone wanted the brakes off entirely. Green MP Lawrence Xu-Nan warned that cutting corners on imported building products risked repeating the leaky homes era, a reminder that speed cannot come at the expense of quality. The Government’s answer is that simpler, clearer rules are not the same as weaker ones, and that a faster system can still be a rigorous one.

Workforce was the other common thread, and the clearest patch of genuine agreement. Williams warned of skill shortages that need fixing before the next upturn hits. The same concern runs through the CCNZ manifesto and the Government’s own push on trades training and immigration settings, one area where the political noise largely falls away.

There are early signs the ground is firming. Stats NZ figures released this month show close to 39,800 new dwellings consented in the year to May, up 19% and the first annual rise after three years of decline in which activity slid and firms closed their doors.

Attached housing, rather than the standalone home, is leading the recovery, and more consents generally mean more work on site and more orders for timber, concrete and fit-out materials over the following year or two. For a government that has staked its credibility on getting building moving, it is an early number in its favour.

The recovery is real but not yet secure, and the sector knows how fast confidence can drain if the rules shift again. That is why stability, more than any one policy, is what builders say they want from whoever governs next, and why the tone at BuildNZ this year felt different from previous election cycles.

None of this means the parties agree on everything. Warmer, drier, more energy-efficient homes remain a flashpoint, with Labour and the Greens favouring standards such as Green Star and passive design while the Government prefers a lighter regulatory touch. Liability settings, and how far to go in trimming council powers, are still contested.

But for an industry that has spent years bracing for the next reversal, a reform agenda with a clear direction, and opponents willing to work within it rather than tear it up, is the closest thing to certainty the sector has had in years. As CCNZ puts it, agreement on a conference stage only counts once it becomes work that does not stop when the government changes.