CHA Hub Podcast

In this episode, we speak with Hema Sridhar, Deputy Director of Koi Tū, the Centre for Informed Futures, and former Chief Science Advisor to the New Zealand Ministry of Defence. Hema comes to housing not as a housing expert but as someone whose career has spanned science, technology and public policy, and whose work now focuses on how technology reshapes society and how governments think – or fail...

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 p...

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' ass...

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 wor...

In this episode, we speak with Jane Wrightson, the Retirement Commissioner, as she concludes her six-year term as the country’s independent voice on retirement income. Jane arrives at the edition’s themes from a completely different direction – retirement – and lands squarely on many of the same conclusions. Her most arresting figure is a projected doubling in the number of older New Zealanders re...

In this episode, we speak with Professor Jane Suiter of Dublin City University, one of the architects of Ireland's citizens' assembly model and a recipient of the Brown Democracy Medal for that work. Ireland used citizens' assemblies to work through some of its most difficult and divisive questions, and Jane has spent years in the room watching what makes them succeed – and where even...

In this episode, we speak with Professor David Farrell of University College Dublin, a political scientist and one of the principal architects of Ireland’s citizens’ assembly model, whose work on deliberative democracy has had influence far beyond Ireland. David is our comparative expert, whose work gives him a view across many of the international examples this edition draws on, and who can say w...

In this episode, we speak with Rob Campbell – company director, economic historian, and former chair of some of New Zealand’s largest companies and public organisations – who thinks about housing from further outside the policy mainstream than almost anyone else we spoke to. Rob’s organising idea is the enclosure of the commons – a centuries-long process, as he tells it, of taking things that were...

In this episode, we speak with Qiulae Wong – known to many simply as Q – the leader of The Opportunity Party. Q sits deliberately between left and right, and makes the case that lasting housing reform needs exactly that kind of stabilising force in the middle. We talk about her party's central housing idea – a tax on the value of urban land, designed to discourage land banking and gently bring...

In this episode, we speak with Max Rashbrooke, a journalist and author based at Victoria University of Wellington and research director at the IDEA think tank, whose work sits where economic inequality and democracy meet. Max brings one of the edition's hardest numbers: on his calculation, if New Zealand had simply kept building state housing in step with its population since the early 1990s,...

In this episode, we speak with Madeline Newman, Executive Director of AI Forum New Zealand, whose job is to help the country adopt artificial intelligence well. Madeline gives us the insider's view of what artificial intelligence could actually do for housing – and what it shouldn't. We talk about the potential to model genuinely complex problems, like homelessness, where all the moving pa...

In this episode, we speak with Len Cook, former Government Statistician of both New Zealand and the United Kingdom, with more than fifty years spent in official statistics. Few people understand what a country can and cannot know about itself better than Len – and his message is an urgent one. We talk about the decision to change how New Zealand runs its census, why he believes replacing a long-es...

In this episode, we speak with Kieran McAnulty, Labour's spokesperson for housing and a former Minister for Local Government and Emergency Management. This is, in many ways, the other side of our conversation with Chris Bishop. Kieran agrees that housing needs durable, cross-party commitment that survives a change of government – but he parts company on whether that continuity actually exists...

In this episode, we speak with Gareth Hughes – a former Member of Parliament who now leads the Wellbeing Economy Alliance Aotearoa, connecting ideas here in New Zealand to a global network rethinking how economies are designed. Gareth places housing inside the biggest possible frame. His guiding metaphor is that the country is running on an economic operating system last redesigned some forty year...

In this episode, we speak with David Hanna, director of Wesley Community Action, whose work is grounded in a Methodist social-justice tradition and years of community-led development. David is, by design, the most grounded voice in this edition – where others bring models and statistics, he brings the street and the community. He argues that real change almost never starts at the centre, with gove...

In this episode, we speak with Associate Professor Danny Osborne, a political psychologist at the University of Auckland and a researcher with the long-running New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study. If our other guests describe what needs to change, Danny helps explain why change is so hard to set in motion. We talk about the three ingredients he says any collective movement needs – a shared sens...

In this episode, we speak with Chris Bishop, Minister for Housing, Infrastructure and RMA Reform, and one of the central figures shaping the direction of housing policy in New Zealand today. Our conversation moves away from the day-to-day of announcements and into the machinery of how big, durable decisions actually get made. Chris makes the case that there is far more cross-party continuity on ho...

In this episode, we speak with economist and journalist Bernard Hickey, publisher of The Kākā and one of the most persistent voices in New Zealand public life on housing and the economy. Bernard has spent years arguing that New Zealand is, in effect, a housing market with an economy tacked on – and here he lays out why he believes housing failure sits beneath so many of the country's other problem...

In this episode, we speak with Charles Waldegrave, a social researcher who has spent decades researching poverty, housing and social policy from the Family Centre in Wellington. Charles brings the longest memory in this edition. He takes us back to a postwar era – now largely forgotten – when both major parties competed to help ordinary people, even those on benefits, into home ownership, and when...

In this episode, we speak with Cameron Luxton, an ACT member of Parliament and, by his own account, the only licensed builder in the House. Cameron is the only voice in this series speaking from inside the building trade, and it gives him a completely different vantage point from the economists and academics. He turns the usual argument on its head: rather than a failure of the market, he sees a f...

In this episode, we speak with Professor Padraic Kenna of the University of Galway, a specialist in European housing law and housing rights who has spent decades studying how different countries protect – or dismantle – their housing systems. Padraic is our legal authority: the guest who can explain not just why housing should be treated as national infrastructure, but what that actually takes in...

In this episode, we talk with the group behind Porirua’s groundbreaking climate assembly — the first climate assembly anywhere in the world designed around Te Tiriti o Waitangi. We talk about why they challenged the conventional citizens’ assembly model, bringing mana whenua, community and rangatahi together as equals. We explore what it took to build trust across Porirua, why young people were gi...

WARNING : This episode contains references to domestic violence and topics around drug and substance abuse. In this episode, we meet Mahera Maihi, founder and CEO of Mā Te Huruhuru, the first kaupapa Māori youth transitional housing provider in Aotearoa, and the Kiwibank Local Hero of the Year 2026. Mahera grew up in Ōtara, South Auckland, the child of two people caught in a collision of worlds —...

In this episode, we meet Aaron Hendry, co-founder of Kickback and the driving force behind The Front Door — a single point of entry for rangatahi experiencing homelessness on K Road in Tāmaki Makaurau. Aaron came to this work as a young youth worker in West Auckland, sitting with a sixteen-year-old who had been sleeping at a bus stop. Confident there would be a system for this, he rang Work and In...

In this episode, we meet Rami Alrudaini, Programme Manager at Housing First Auckland — the backbone organisation coordinating collective impact across Housing First providers in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland Rami's family fled war in Iraq before he was born. Social justice was instilled in him before he had a word for it. He came into the homelessness sector from mental health, where he first witne...