Join New Zealand’s own Stuart Donovan for an in-depth chat about the Auckland upzoning, the housing crisis, and what it takes to get good policy over the line.

Read the article: https://inflectionpoints.work/articles/against-affordable-housing

On Tuesday night, he stood up in the House and ate chocolate.

He scrapped the fifty per cent capital gains tax discount. He quarantined negative gearing on existing homes. He cut the growth of the NDIS from ten per cent to two. He pulled the private health insurance rebate off the over-65s and shovelled the money into aged care. He put two billion dollars on the table for states and councils brave enough to reform planning.

It's the most interesting Budget since the Howard-Costello era.

It’s not quite a whole block of chocolate. But it’s a start.

Matt Bowes — Senior Associate at the Grattan Institute. Matt will take the reigns on infrastructure and housing.

Jessy Wu — Founder and Managing Director at Encour, a comms agency for the AI era. Jessy leads us through productivity and innovation.

Manning Clifford — Founding Editor-at-Large here at Inflection Points. Manning will steer us through state capacity and human flourishing.

In 2018, he synthesised sixty years of field work into a book: Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities, published by MIT Press. It became, quickly, one of the most important books in the canon of housing and land use reform, providing the most robust framework available for combining urban economics with urban planning.

In two hours of conversation, we cover the functioning of cities as labour markets, what communist cities taught him about what markets actually do, and how to diagnose a city the way a doctor diagnoses a patient — with specific numbers, rather than adjectives. 

We also got, at the very end, an admission from Bertaud: that leaving the importance of urban design out of Order Without Design was a mistake, and Australia, of all places, is the one that convinced him this was so.

Purchase Order Without Design: https://yimby-melbourne.square.site/product/order-without-design-how-markets-shape-cities-alain-bertaud/PQ5DV6J7VMNTEI3SC7W5XEDE

Ryan Ginard (Fundraise for Australia) argues that without fixing the infrastructure, the $5.4 trillion intergenerational wealth transfer will pass the charitable sector by.

Clare Ozich (Justice Connect) explains exactly what the system is, why it fails, and what the Productivity Commission's solution would do.

Grace Adams (Effective Altruism Australia) shows how DGR rules actively distort giving away from some of the most important causes of our time.

Myriam Robin of the Australian Financial Review moderates the panel.

Read Ryan Ginard's essay “The Generous Country” in Inflection Points: https://inflectionpoints.work/articles/the-generous-country

Support Justice Connect’s Unlock DGR campaign: https://justiceconnect.org.au/campaigns/unlock-dgr/ 

He won the seat in 2022 by unseating a thirty-year conservative incumbent at preselection. Three years later, he lost that same seat as the Liberal party’s metropolitan vote collapsed beneath his feet.

In his essay for Inflection Points, Keith argues that the Liberal Party’s failure is structural, not cyclical, and driven by three forces: migration, education, and home ownership.

The party has lost the multicultural suburbs. It has lost university-educated professionals, particularly women. And it has lost a generation locked out of the housing market—people who, as Keith writes, are “not hostile to Liberal values; they simply do not believe the party is serious about the one thing that would make those values real.”

This is a podcast about the seriousness required to bring a political party back from the brink.

Read Keith Wolahan’s essay, Liberal Foundations, in Inflection Points.

In this episode of the Inflection Points Podcast, Matthew Maltman, Senior Research Economist at the e61 Institute, joins Jonathan O’Brien to discuss his landmark essay, “Best Practice for Supply Side Reform”. Drawing on the empirical evidence from Auckland’s 2016 Unitary Plan, Maltman explains how broad-based upzoning successfully lowered rents and boosted construction productivity where other measures failed.

Matthew and Jonathan unpack Maltman’s three principles for effective reform: focusing on removing “bans” (prohibitions on density) rather than just reducing “burdens” (red tape), prioritising market health over the specific concerns of incumbent firms, and controlling policy inputs while monitoring outputs. Matt argues that while cutting paperwork is popular, it is ultimately ineffective if policies that ban the things we need remain in effect.

Read Matthew Maltman’s essay “Best Practice for Supply-Side Reform” here.

Listen to the podcast on:

* Apple Podcasts

* Spotify

Matthew is a Research Economist at e61 Institute and runs One Final Effort, a supply-side economics blog.

In this episode, Brendan Coates, the Housing and Economic Security Program Director at the Grattan Institute, outlines the findings of their latest report, “More homes, better cities”, arguing that the root cause of the crisis isn’t immigration, tax settings, or banking—it’s that our planning systems say “no” by default.

Brendan and Jonathan discuss how 80% of residential land near Sydney’s CBD is restricted to three stories or less, and how removing these bans could unlock hundreds of thousands of new homes. Brendan explains why “gentle density”—allowing three-story townhouses as-of-right—is the key to affordability, better streetscapes, and economic productivity.

Read Brendan Coates’ “Planning is the Bottleneck to New Housing” here.

Read Grattan Institute’s full report here.

Brendan is the Housing and Economic Security Program Director at Grattan Institute.

The secret to Australian tech success is to treat it like an export industry.

Brandon Sheppard is the COO at Instant and has been in Australian tech since 2012—back when major VC funds didn’t exist here and Canva was just being founded. He’s lived the reality of building products in Brisbane while competing for talent against companies offering three times the salary in San Francisco.

Brandon is the COO of Instant. He has over a decade’s experience working in Australia’s tech sector.

And then she left. Not for another fund, not for a bigger partnership, but to build the kind of company that would never be in the mandate of a VC fund—a professional services company in the AI era. Because after years of evaluating whether founders were pursuing their life’s work, she realised she wasn’t pursuing hers.

What follows is a conversation about cognitive bias dressed up as intuition, about the $2 trillion professional services market that VCs typically ignore, about what it costs to speak truth in an industry built on relationships, and about why democratizing venture capital isn’t charity—it might just be the key to the next generation of Australian innovation.

Jessy is the Founder and Managing Director of Encour. She was previously a partner at AfterWork Ventures.

This is a conversation with Andrew Leigh about both personal and national productivity.

In the first half of this episode, we dive into Andrew’s personal systems and productivity trade-offs, from four-hour sleep experiments to the art of the strategic No. Then, we zoom out to the national challenge: how do we translate individual excellence into collective prosperity?

Andrew Leigh is the current Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury.

Michael Brennan (e61 Institute and former Productivity Commission chair) on how non-compete clauses got on the Commonwealth policy agenda.

Brendan Coates (Grattan Institute) on how Grattan shifted the dial on skilled migration policy.

Katie Roberts-Hull (Think Forward Educators) on how phonics was mandated in primary schools.

But when the conversation about our country's direction is either a one thousand-word op-ed or a 400-page report, the real work of changing Australia becomes inaccessible.

Welcome to the Inflection Points Podcast: the home of in-depth policy discussion for a bigger, better Australia.