Providing continual knowledge, deep insights, wisdom and resources to help create safe, affordable, long-term homes for everyone in Aotearoa New Zealand.
#78 - Tamatha Paul: Green Party - The courage to choose
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.
23 Sept 2026
#77 - Yves Dejaeghere - The courage to choose
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.
22 Sept 2026
#76 - Kay Saville-Smith - The courage to choose
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.
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James Palmer
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