Can Chris Bishop pull a housing rabbit out of his hat?
The housing minister says he wants tens of thousands more homes built to fix our housing crisis. But this will mean taking on councils, his coalition partners and the entrenched interests of homeowners. Henry Cooke takes a look at the potentially impossib
Chris Bishop is a very busy man. He’s a newish father, a local MP in a marginal seat, the coalition Government’s main legislative planner, and also the minister for infrastructure, sport, RMA reform and, most importantly of all: housing.
Housing was the issue most responsible for sending National to the Opposition benches in 2017, and had a big part to play in the shine coming off Labour, too.
It is a gaping sore in New Zealand’s body politic, one that creates sick kids and poor families, and holds back our economy. Bishop knows this and professes a deep desire to enable tens of thousands of homes to be built – so many that we stop showing up on the top of international comparisons lists for “least affordable housing”.
And yet the only actual policy Bishop has committed to so far is a reversal of a widely praised bipartisan move from the last government – one which forced councils to allow for densely-packed townhouses in every major city in the country.
Independent analysis suggested the policy would add up to 105,000 dwellings to our housing stock.
This reversal was made under serious political pressure from existing homeowners and the Government’s coalition partner, ACT.
He’s currently very busy at work with a replacement. Indeed, an OIA request
Stuff made revealed there had been 2100 emails between his office and the Housing and Urban Development Ministry on this specific replacement in his first three months of power – 24 emails a day.
If this replacement manages to make housing affordable while keeping the coalition and wary councils onside it will be one of the great political tightrope walks of our time. If it fails it could be his very own KiwiBuild.
In other words, he doesn’t just need luck or political nous. He needs what spammy headline writers have been promising us for decades: One weird trick. Or maybe quite a few.
Stuff spoke to economists, local government and campaigners to get an idea of how he might try to wriggle out of this bind. But first, we need to understand how he got here.
New Zealand’s housing crisis didn’t happen overnight, but it did happen over about one generation.
From the 50s through the late-80s we had reasonably abundant and affordable housing, with a median house usually costing under three times the median annual income. But prices then started rocketing up, particularly from the turn of the century: Between 2000 and 2021 New Zealand house prices rose by about 256% after inflation – faster than in any other country in the OECD. Rents rose significantly, too.
In 2021, 60% of low-income renters in New Zealand spent more than 40% of their income on rent – the highest rate in the entire OECD – and 45% of all renting households spent more than 25% of their income on rent.
There has been some cooling as interest rates have risen, and it is clear that part of that story of high growth has been low interest rates, which have allowed people to borrow astronomical sums to buy damp villas in nice streets.
But another huge part of the story has been New Zealand’s restrictive planning laws, which make it illegal or extremely hard to build housing where people actually want it.
One usually blamed 1991’s Resource Management Act (RMA) at this point but research from the Infrastructure Commission shows the problem actually started a few decades earlier, when councils stopped actively encouraging population growth and started trying to limit it.
“Planning began to focus less on facilitating growth and planning infrastructure, and more on maintaining the character of existing neighbourhoods by stopping the construction of blocks of flats and apartments,” the commission wrote.
Councils did this through a thing called “zoning” – the methods they use to decide what you can legally do on different bits of land.
“Zoned” land isn’t the same as an actual house. It’s just a place where a house can legally be built. This makes it hard to be exact about how much zoned land one should have. You could technically zone just enough land for the number of houses you think the city needs – but people might not want to build or buy houses on that land.
It would be like if you went to the supermarket and it said it had exactly enough food for everyone to go home with a meal – but no more. The desirable food would immediately be bought and you would be left trying to make a nice meal out of a turnip.
This is essentially what happened as we started to zone for less housing in the 1970s.
We can see this by looking at Auckland: In 1961, the council had zoned enough land for new housing for the population to treble. Obviously, people wouldn’t actually build on every bit of that zoned land, but there was enough of it that the market could respond when populations did grow – there were a lot of options at the supermarket.
In the 1970 district scheme, the volume of zoned land roughly halved, even as the population grew, and it stayed very low for decades, while house prices and rents took off. Councils did this for a variety of reasons. New housing is typically unpopular with existing homeowners, who view it as a threat to their way of life – whether by removing sunshine, adding cars to their streets, or from the dampening effect on their home’s skyrocketing price.
The RMA made extensive consultation with existing communities mandatory, and councils generally listened to those residents, who were also their most reliable vote. It didn’t help that councils themselves were generally strapped for cash and thus incentivised to stop new housing – which came with big costs for them in terms of new infrastructure.
Central governments became increasingly aware of this issue. Voters started to complain about being locked out of home ownership. Schemes like the Accommodation Supplement and temporary motel stays started to cost billions every year.
At first, government measures focused on what economists call the “demand” side – basically trying to help those who wanted to buy or rent with the money to do so. But eventually there started to be serious talk about addressing “supply” too – the overall
number of houses. This happened both nationally and locally. Over three years from 2013 to 2016 Auckland developed a new “unitary plan” which enabled a lot more housing. Research suggests this lowered rents by about 22% from the baseline growth you would see without it.
But central government wanted to do more – not just in Auckland but across all urban areas. National’s Nick Smith tried and failed to seriously reform the RMA. His successor as housing minister, Labour’s Phil Twyford, failed with “KiwiBuild” but developed a new policy that forced councils to enable a lot more housing, particularly high-density housing around transport links.
At first this took the shape of a 2020 directive to councils under the RMA, mandating that they could not set ‘‘height limits” lower than six storeys in innercity areas or near rapid-transit stops, and could not force new developments to require car parks.
The response to this initial salvo was politically interesting. Stuff broke the story of this policy change and contacted National’s then-housing spokesperson Jacqui Dean, who said the policy was “madness”. But very soon the infrastructure spokesman – a guy named Chris Bishop – got in touch to say the party actually supported the policy.
This confusing response foreshadowed serious issues with the political support for what is called “upzoning” – the active push for more land to be made available for housing and especially dense housing.
It scrambles normal left/right divides. On the one hand, upzoning is everything the political right usually likes and the political left usually hates – it’s the government deregulating housing supply, allowing the market itself to pick where it makes the most sense to build houses, rather than a Government planner.
On the other hand, it goes against a kind of small-c conservatism, where you try to protect existing neighbourhoods, and hurts people more likely to vote right (existing homeowners) while helping people more likely to vote left (renters).
Furthering this scramble is the fact that several councillors who would generally describe themselves as left wing see upzoning as a private sector plot to increase profits for developers, not actually help people.
This scramble would become incredibly important in the next part of our story.
Twyford’s new response earned praise from those who wanted to see New Zealand allow more housing, but it was happening at a snail’s pace. Councils had years to implement the new direction into their district plans, and during those years prices were going through the roof, as the Reserve Bank bottomed out interest rates to keep the economy pumping through the pandemic.
In 2021, National started to talk seriously about the government going even further, saying it should introduce emergency measures to allow far more housing to be built, as the former National government had done in Christchurch after the earthquakes.
That didn’t happen – but eventually a deal was hammered out between thenhousing spokesman Nicola Willis and the Labour government which caught the eyes of upzoning advocates around the world – the Medium Density Residential Standards, or MDRS.
This tool was far more radical than anything in the Auckland Unitary Plan or even Twyford’s earlier direction. It forced most larger city councils to zone all of their residential land for medium density – specifically for every parcel of land to allow for three dwellings instead of one, and to three storeys, as the default. There were small carveouts a council could get away with, but the default was shifting in a very big way. And what’s more, since it was bipartisan, developers could rely on it not being ripped up from under them a few years down the track.
This was a certified big deal. Sense Partners/PwC analysis suggested the new law could add 105,500 new dwellings in five to eight years, a number KiwiBuild didn’t even aim for.
The prestigious Brookings Institute in the US said this move provided a “model to other countries”. The Centre for Cities said the UK needed to copy it to end its own housing crisis.
The Infrastructure Commission noted that, since building infrastructure for medium-density housing on existing residential land was so much cheaper than it would be for building at the edge of cities, the bill could go further and allow five houses on each section.
National’s leading lights, particularly among the “urban liberal” wing that counts Bishop as a member, were among the biggest supporters. Willis called it “a win-win” which “enhances the rights of property owners today” and “cuts red tape” by “creating a default right to build”. Erica Stanford spoke effusively about how it got the government out of the way and allowed people to build more homes.
But among this cavalcade of praise was a large note of dissent from ACT. Leader David Seymour has given a speech about “why property rights matter” and the party has a stated desire to “build like the boomers” – but he thought the MDRS gave individual property owners too much power to build things that interfered with their neighbours’ enjoyment of their party.
He said this would create “division and resentment in the community” and not solve the actual issue of infrastructure funding for new housing.
ACT obviously didn’t have the votes to stop the bill going forward, but it campaigned very hard on the issue, and National MPs started hearing a lot about it from their voters.
Half a century ago, before MMP, if the major two parties agreed on something then debate was essentially finished. But that simply wasn’t the world of the early 2020s, and the pushback from councils and residents’ associations keen to protect their local areas was very strong.
Years went by. ACT continued to build pressure. National changed leaders. Bishop became housing spokesman and wedded himself to the bipartisan deal on live TV, saying it represented, “The government coming around to National’s point of view” and that the deal “enhanced property rights”.
Then, just a month later, National’s leader, Christopher Luxon, told a group of residents in Birkenhead he was going to kill the policy. He said the party had “got it wrong” but didn’t provide any more detail, prompting days of media speculation.
Bishop, until this point a proponent of the MDRS and of upzoning, went on Q+A that weekend to eat humble pie and explain the new policy. Councils would be able to opt out of the MDRS – provided they zoned for 30 years of growth immediately. ACT naturally celebrated – and when the two parties made it into power, they wrote making the MDRS “opt in” rather than opt out into the coalition agreement. Which brings us, finally, to the present day.
“Delivering more houses is complex and removing planning constraints on development, without addressing things like the unaffordability of essential infrastructure, will not deliver the right outcomes.”
LGNZ chief executive Susan Freeman-Greene
The big choices for Bishop: What does 30 years of growth mean?
Bishop has talked a big talk on enabling more housing since coming to power.
“Our collective failure to build enough houses has trapped people in poverty, it has increased inequality, it has made us poorer rather than wealthier, and it has shattered the Kiwi dream of a propertyowning democracy,” he said in a February speech.
“Most of my friends live offshore. The lure of London, New York and Sydney will always be attractive to young Kiwis. But our housing market is practically standing at the departure lounge at Auckland Airport and in big neon writing telling them to just get on the plane.”
But the Cabinet paper he put out on the same day as the speech did nothing to enable more housing, it simply confirmed the reversal on the MDRS and promised more detail in the coming months.
Stuff asked Bishop a series of questions about his replacement policy, including whether he could guarantee that it would allow as much housing as the MDRS did. He declined to comment while the policy design process was under way.
One of the first problems he faces will be what exactly “30 years of growth” means. Remember, Bishop said councils would be able to get out of the MDRS only if they could show they were zoning for 30 years of growth. And yet Auckland and Christchurch councils believe they have already managed this.
Housing advocates Marko Garlick and Eleanor West, who organised a proupzoning campaign in Wellington, argued that this target would be incredibly difficult to nail down.
“The target of ‘30 years of growth’ will be fiendishly difficult to define and enforce. Forecasting demand and modelling uptake of new zoning is tricky and the inputs used for these assessments will always be contestable,” they said.
Projections are just informed guesses, and Bishop could introduce a higher standard than is currently being used by those councils.
The Infrastructure Commission, whom Bishop loves to quote, has noted that historic projections have been deeply wrong quite often. Our actual population has already reached a point that the projections from 2004-2006 did not think would come until close to 2030.
And even if we could perfectly predict 30 years of growth, zoning for that much might not be enough – because the areas zoned might not be the right fit for housing.
Setting a number doesn’t solve another problem raised by some people Stuff talked to – councils gaming the system by zoning for 30 years of growth in places people don’t actually want to live.
Eric Crampton from the New Zealand Initiative presented the idea of a “cube”.
“In principle, the world’s entire population could fit into a cubic kilometre– though none of us would have much spare room around us. If a city zoned The Cube, it could claim that it had made room for centuries of growth while disclaiming responsibility if no developer actually wanted to build The Cube,” he said.
“They could do other silly things – like zone to high density under the governorgeneral’s residence and claim that it represents a lot of potential capacity.”
Motu senior fellow Stuart Donovan said one option for designing the 30-year target to make sure councils did not wriggle out of it would be setting it at a ward-by-ward level, not citywide.
That meant councils couldn’t just pretend that everyone wanted to live in “greenfield” areas with low demand, well away from the central city.
“The key challenge will be where is the supply enabled. If the councils try to zone for all of the growth in greenfields it’s just not going to meet demand,” Donovan said.
Bishop has been talking up greenfield growth a lot since his backdown. It is generally seen as more politically acceptable than intensification of existing neighbourhoods, because the new suburbs don’t change anything other than farmland.
But it is also far more expensive to develop as you need to build new infrastructure, not just upgrade what already is there – and it embeds carbon emissions from people having to drive a long way to work.
Donovan argues that most of the demand is for inner-city or close to inner-city living anyway, and whatever Bishop creates will have to recognise that. “There is genuine demand for greenfields land, it’s just for most people it’s not an attractive substitute for being in the city.”
Economists like prices. In an idealised market, they are the pure signals that actually show how the world works, not how a government or politician would like it to work.
Crampton suggests that building prices into the MDRS replacement would be a good mechanism to make sure councils enact upzoning that works. After all, if they do so, the price of land should drop.
He points to work from the Infrastructure Commission showing land on the “rural/urban boundary” zoned for housing is currently worth three to four times what land just outside the boundary is.
“If zoned land were not very scarce, it would not sell for three to four times as much as the adjacent paddock,’’ Crampton says. ‘‘Similarly, if land where a developer is allowed to build to at least six storeys sells at a substantial premium as compared to land where only lowerrise buildings are allowed, council ought to zone more land for taller buildings.
“Prices tell you more about actual scarcity than any council planner’s projections.”
He suggests you could fix this by setting a threshold so that if, say, housing land was two times as expensive as similar non-zoned land, councils would have to zone for more houses.
“Requiring councils to authorise private plan changes at zoning boundaries when price discrepancies get too high provides an escape valve or a failsafe. It only happens if councils have zoned too little capacity, and they’d generally prefer to avoid development going that way so might try to zone enough land to avoid that happening.”
Everyone Stuff spoke to agreed that councils had something of a point around needing more funding to pay for the infrastructure of new development.
Local Government NZ chief executive Susan Freeman-Greene said it was essential to get anything good out of planning reform.
“Delivering more houses is complex and removing planning constraints on development, without addressing things like the unaffordability of essential infrastructure, will not deliver the right outcomes,” she said.
Bishop has delighted LGNZ by openly discussing the possibility of taking up ACT’s idea of sharing the GST revenue from new houses with councils, giving those councils another reason to back housing.
Crampton said that ultimately central government should not have to “bludgeon” councils into wanting new housing. And Donovan thought the GST idea had merit, but perhaps a simpler payment for every new dwelling would be even easier.
But central government money is quite scarce now, with much talk of fiscal holes in the billions. It is unlikely Bishop will have serious fiscal firepower to play with – at least any time soon.
And Garlick argues that the funding issue is often used as a smokescreen to hide political motives for stopping new housing.
“Councils already have tools to raise revenue that they’ve been under-utilising for decades. Local politicians say funding shortfalls are the reason they’re blocking new housing, but I think it is often a convenient excuse. Who’s to say they wouldn’t find another?”
Councils are at the mercy of homeowners, who are more likely to vote in local elections and who appear to be motivated by aesthetic reasons to block new housing, rather than financial reasons.
Which brings us to Bishop’s hardest challenge: Politics.
Politics killed the MDRS. Blindsided councils and residents used their political power, in alliance with ACT, to stop a measure that would force new housing on them.
If Bishop’s new tool feels like another imposition from on high, will it just die again? Even if he sorts out the funding mechanism, will councils just find another way to obey their existing voters and frustrate plans for new housing?
This might seem unsolveable – but Wellington just managed it. The council voted to upzone the city to a massive degree in recent weeks, a result achieved after years of campaigning by so-called “Yimbys” – those who say “Yes In My Backyard”. Wellington has particularly bad housing prices – and it seemed that eventually the population started to back radical change over the protection of existing streetscapes.
But it is hard to see this result being copied around the country, particularly as Wellington’s council sits dramatically to the left of most others.
Garlick said the political pressure of angry existing homeowners needed some release valve smaller than city-wide and nation-wide politics.
“Rather than making the entire MDRS optional, National could copy Houston, which implemented something similar to the MDRS but avoided homeowner backlash by allowing small street-level areas to vote to ‘opt out’ of the new medium density rules,” he suggests.
“That way, the small pockets of people who strongly prefer things to stay the same can have their wish (missing out on possible property value uplift that comes with upzoning) without forcing their preference on everyone.”
Crampton saw that new funding for councils as key to getting the politics right. “If you get the incentives right, so growing population and thriving businesses are strongly to the benefit of a council’s budget, councils will want that outcome without having to be strongarmed.”
Donovan said the Government should work with councils, but might ultimately still have to force action if they continued to make attempts to avoid more housing.
“We need to keep turning the screws a little bit.”
But that’s just the councils. Before Bishop can get any plan through Parliament he will need to convince his coalition colleagues in ACT and NZ First, as well as his own party. He’s going to need one hell of a trick.
Lianne’s life rested on a slip of paper, she just didn’t know it. The Auckland woman was 60 when she went to her long-time GP complaining of post-menopausal bleeding.
He physically examined her and everything looked fine, then her medical notes say she was given a “voucher” for an ultrasound. She argues it was never this official.
“It was a scrap of paper off his desk where he wrote the name of a radiology place,” says Lianne, who asked that her last name be withheld because of ongoing litigation about her care.
She had never had an irregular smear test, so never got the scan, and her GP never asked if she had done so.
Fourteen months later stomach pain identified the cause of the bleeding. Lianne had cancer in her uterus, discovered at stage 4B – terminal.
“It was horrifying and completely unexpected. I kept working full-time, but would get in the bath every night for hours as a way to deal with the stress.
“The critical failure in my care is that I felt I was being placated and that if investigation was necessary [the doctor] would have said something, but he said nothing.”
She says she was never told postmenopausal bleeding was not normal. There is a 10% chance this type of bleeding is due to cancer in the uterus.
“I only needed to be told this and I would have booked the scan immediately,” Lianne told the health and disability commissioner (HDC), when she complained about her care.
This single GP appointment was the moment Lianne fell through the treatment cracks.
She should have been referred for a pelvic ultrasound with high priority – which should lead to a scan within two to four weeks, clinical advice to the HDC said.
Deputy Commissioner Deborah James found the GP in breach of the code in place to protect patients, saying he failed to provide care of an appropriate standard.
James found the GP followed guidelines by referring her for further investigation, but should have followed up to make sure it happened.
In an interview with The Post, Lianne said had the GP acted appropriately at the time, the cancer would have been contained.
She had a hysterectomy and was planning to initially undergo more surgery, but the cancer had already spread to her lymph nodes and lungs.
Lianne’s last appointment at the hospital was in August. “They don’t want to see me. The doctor actually said to me, ‘I hope you don’t feel abandoned’.”
In a quest to extend her life, Lianne turned to a Texas-based oncologist, who has her on a list of “high dose, high quality” supplements, as well as medications which are normally used to treat the likes of type 2 diabetes, opioid disorder and epilepsy.
“I take 120 pills a day. We have to pay for them all.”
Lianne estimates she has spent between $200,000 and $300,000 on her care, “and it will carry on”.
If it were not for this care, she says she would be completely on her own.
She also takes Provera, a hormone therapy drug prescribed by her GP, which is commonly used to treat cancers that have spread.
Leading GP Dr Luke Bradford, who wrote an opinion for the HDC in relation to Lianne’s case, expects Provera is what is keeping her alive.
Bradford said the failures in Lianne’s care came down to “a communication issue, and a pathways issue”. The GP thought he was clear in urging the patient to go for a scan, but Lianne clearly did not take that message from the conversation.
“Often, we don’t want to say to patients, ‘I’m worried that this is cancer’, because they shut down, and actually, nine times out of 10 it is not cancer. But what should be said is, ‘it’s really important we check this out and find out what it is’.”
Best practice standards set through the Royal NZ College of GPs were clear that important investigations should be tracked to ensure they happened, Bradford said.
“And so there was some kind of breakdown there.”
Lianne wants people to know a cervical smear test doesn’t rule out everything. “Most women think if you go and have a smear test, then you’ve got it all covered … but of course a smear test doesn’t indicate ovarian cancer, it doesn’t indicate endometrial cancer.
“Any instance of even the minutest post-menopausal bleeding needs to be addressed immediately and if the GP doesn’t take it seriously then you must demand that it is.”
After his second surgery Brian Findlay got fit enough to complete the Lake Taupō Cycle Challenge once again.
Findlay, now in his 50s, had ridden the round-the-lake race before he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, but post-surgery he went in hoping to shave two hours off his previous time.
“Towards the end of the ride, there‘s a point where you turn and head up towards the finish line. And, literally, I was so emotional. It was just like, holy shit. It really hit me, this is actually a pretty cool achievement.
“It was like, anything else that I wanted to do may have been taken away.”
Findlay is an exception to the rule of pancreatic cancer patients, 87% of whom are dead within five years of being diagnosed.
The Hawke’s Bay-based banker’s cancer was discovered in August 2013, by chance. His partner is a nurse and when he developed fairly severe stomach pains, she urged him to get it checked out.
When he had a 12-hour surgery to remove a third of his pancreas, a secondary tumour was found in his liver.
“The good news is it was caught early ... I was fortunate that I had someone who knew about medicine, and insisted that I follow up on that.
“A little bit of background knowledge, and we were able to get an early diagnosis.”
He still has cancer, inoperable neuroendocrine tumours just outside his liver. They will grow, but slowly, so he tries to put it out of his mind.
Dr Luke Bradford, GP
“My oncologist has said he’s had more patients die with neuroendocrine tumours than from them. That gives you a bit of peace of mind.”
But he’s clear “without that early intervention, who know what would have happened, especially because the initial tumours had metastasised into the liver”.
Findlay felt some of the problems came down to busyness – of both patients and the whole health system.
“People have very busy lives and things which could be sinister just aren’t investigated. GPs who are overwhelmed ... they’re looking for quick solutions rather than investigating.
“It’s a system that’s overwhelmed.” Pancreatic cancer is known as a “quiet” cancer, the head of te Aho o Te Kahu-Cancer Control Agency, Dr Rami Rahal, says. That’s why more than 71% of cases are found only because the patient has gone to an emergency department.
By then, it’s often too late. Of the patients who are told they have pancreatic cancer in ED, 83% are dead within a year.
“Then there are the loud cancers like lung cancer, bladder cancer and colon and rectal cancer, that do come with symptoms that can be identified earlier.”
Despite this collective knowledge, more than half (56.5%) of all lung cancers are only detected because of an emergency department visit, a rate dramatically worse for Pasifika (72.6%) and Māori (67.5%).
The figures, provided in a new report from the Cancer Control Agency, also detail that about half of all liver, stomach and ovarian cancers are picked up in EDs and more than a third of oesophageal and colon cancers.
Barring liver cancer, New Zealand’s numbers are the highest next to comparable countries like Denmark, the UK, Canada and Australia.
The Post asked Health Minister Dr Shane Reti for an interview on the Cancer Control Agency’s report but was told he didn’t have time.
He provided a statement saying he had met the agency to discuss this report and how the Government’s work could make a difference.
“We are towards the bottom of the countries we like to compare with and that’s unacceptable.
“We can do better, and we will. The key message from this report is that the earlier the diagnosis, the better.”
Rahal and oncologists spoken to for this series are clear that the speed of diagnosis, surgery and treatment are the largest barriers to improving survival rates.
National screening programmes, which exist for breast, bowel and cervical cancer, provide an early indication that people may be at risk, Reti says.
He cites the recent expansion of PETCT scanning in the South Island, which is particularly aimed at increasing early diagnosis and management of prostate cancer.
“Screening is an important tool to detect cancers at an early stage. We’ve already started on our promise to extend free breast screening to women aged 70-74.”
This was part of the Government’s 100-day plan, but standing in the way is a workforce crisis, which Reti has described as “our biggest deficit toward the ambitions we have”.
In Auckland, a trial to introduce lung cancer screening through low-dose CT scans aims to find lung cancers early enough to intervene.
So far the trial has completed 504 CT and found 13 lung cancers, Health NZTe Whatu Ora confirms.
“We’re hoping to be able to start moving to implementing that in New Zealand in the next two years, it does take a while to stand up a programme like that as resource implications,” Rahal says.
Again, workforce and infrastructure constraints are the main barriers to rolling it out sooner, he says.
The pilot is led by Otago University Professor Sue Crengle through funding from the Health Research Council (HRC), the Cancer Control Agency and the Ministry of Health.
A risk-prediction study is the next phase, scanning 1200 people across the Northern region, including rural and remote areas, then a business case is expected later this year.
Health NZ’s health equity director, Dr Karen Bartholomew, says screening will target those most at risk of lung cancer, which includes current and ex-smokers. The business case will refine, including age eligibility.
Rahal says major clinical trials typically focus on people with “30pack years”: those who have smoked a pack of cigarettes every day for at least 30 years, but this could change.
But before the workforce and infrastructure barriers can be worked out, the Government will need to write the cheque, believed to be in the tens of millions.
“If it is agreed that lung cancer screening will be the next national screening programme, new funding will be needed,’’ Bartholomew says.
“All of these steps will have to be completed before a timeline can be finalised. We are working hard to progress these steps as quickly as possible.”
Meanwhile, the Prostate Cancer Foundation met Reti this week, asking him to commit $6.5m to pilot a prostate cancer screening pilot programme.
The foundation says Reti responded that he would consider the request but made no promises, so it would continue campaigning for a pilot.
Asked for this series about screening for prostate cancer, Reti said “show me a country in the world that’s got a national screening programme” – a comment the foundation labelled “deflating”.
Reti says the concept of a national screening programme “still suffers from: what are you going to screen with, as other countries have found”.
In the same interview, he said: “We know that if you get cancers early, we get a better outcome.
“If you have any concerning symptoms, it’s best you talk to your GP. The earlier cancer is detected, the better it will be for you and your whānau.”
Lianne got an apology from her GP for what happened during and after that fateful appointment, and the practice was told it should create an automatic reminder to follow up vouchers referrals.
But because the GP retired in 2022, Lianne took little comfort from the HDC’s decision.
Close to four years since her terminal diagnosis, she still works two days a week, gardens and walks the dog – with a philosophy to get outside and move as much as she can.
“They say it will kill me and there’s nothing to be done about it, but I’m not complying with that. I’m doing everything possible to keep living my life as well as I can.”
When thespian and actor Michael Hurst turned 60 he resolved to spend the next decade doing what he loved the most – performing live theatre.
Widely celebrated as one of the country’s leading actors and directors, the boomer was directing a TV work when he had this epiphany. It was towards the end of a long day of filming. His feet were tired. He was tired and they’d had to cram three hours of filming into a one-hour slot.
“I thought: ‘God, am I going to be doing this for the rest of my life?’ And then I thought: ‘Come on, Michael, you love this.’ And I do love it. I was just tired. He wasn’t worried about getting old, “but I asked myself honestly, hand on heart, what do I love the most? What I love most is standing on stage, doing live theatre acting. I love it. The theatre is what I was made for, really’’. It’s a rainy Auckland day and the now 66-year-old Hurst has not long returned from Perth, where he filmed a role as a boomer father in an intense family comedy-drama. Birthright is the debut feature by West Australian film-maker Zoe Pepper which will screen later this year.
The Arts Laureate has now turned his attention to rehearsing his solo theatre work, The Golden Ass, coming to Wellington in April. Hurst has ‘’freely adapted’’ from a very old story, nearly 2000 years old, The Golden Ass being The Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius, written by Apuleius approx 160AD.
Hurst has always been drawn to classical works and fables, and believes we can learn from them. In 2012 his play No Holds Bard showed the actor at his finest, acting out four Shakespearean icons – Macbeth, Othello, King Lear and Hamlet – in a piece which initially toured to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and which he has staged most years since in theatres and at art festivals around the country.
Over his multi-faceted career, he has made his mark for his innovative and compelling productions of Shakespeare, and is known for delivering riveting performances. In 1981, he made his Shakespeare debut in As You Like It; last year, he played a dazzling King Lear in the Auckland Theatre Company’s self-titled production, which he also directed.
Despite his theatre presence, the general public might know Hurst best for his screen work, for his portrayal of Iolaus in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and its sister TV show Xena: Warrior Princess.
Why The Golden Ass?
Hurst has been an avid devourer of the classics since he could read and says: “I remember being affected by this fable and I thought, shit that’s a good title, isn’t it? Michael Hurst is the Golden Ass.’’ In 2021, he pitched the idea to Arts on Tour and it was quickly sold to about 30 venues.
The latest version at Circa Theatre next month has been altered slightly thanks to the help of the playwright, Fiona Samuel, who has “given it a female touch’’, he says.
Hurst sounds part philosopher as he reflects: “I am keen to show that the ancient world is a powerful force for us today. Human foibles and characteristics are written in our genes. History lives within us and looking at ancient and classical works links us to our past and enriches the human experience.
“It is easy to put a modern twist on the classical world since they were struggling with exactly the same things we are – religion, politics, the rights of the individual, geo-politics, wars, plagues, famines, volcanic eruptions. Not only were they struggling, they were making the same stupid mistakes born out of greed, lust for power and self-preservation. And there were people watching and writing all about it.’’
The plot hovers around the narrator and primary protagonist Lucius, who is 20 and recently graduated from university with “a useless degree’’. He’s confident and arrogant, and wants to write a book about witchcraft. He goes to a special place where witches inhabit.
Just like the fable, Lucius is turned into a donkey but still thinks like a human. Hurst delights in making people laugh, which is part of the appeal of the play.
“I’ve made it so modern people just go ‘what the hell’. Suddenly they’re getting told this 2000-year-old story and it might as well be yesterday.’’
The Golden Ass is “a plea for empathy’’. “Because 2000 years ago or now, it’s all the same. We need empathy in a world that’s going absolutely f...ing bonkers.’’
The playwright wanted to explore themes like the exploitation of women, and to make the audience think about the abuse and mistreatment of slaves and animals. Lucius gets captured by a bunch of priests – Hurst is not religious but he wanted to expose the hypocrisies of cults – think Brian Tamaki.
When he performed it in Nelson in 2022, the reviewer raved: “This is a bawdy piece of theatre, a laugh out loud, outrageous exploration of the human condition. Certainly nothing is sacred and yet there is no denigration of these character types in Hurst’s renditions.
“Thinking he is a young man in control of his world, he does of course follow his desires and is pulled inexorably down through various experiences into what could be described as a Jungian underworld.’’
Along with confirming his passion for theatre, Hurst also understands that his type is currently out of fashion in the arts world: he’s a white, ageing male. For that reason, he won’t get arts funding for anything.
Not that he cares – along with acting and directing, he gives a lot back to the creative sector as a patron and board member of not-for-profits like the Young Auckland Shakespeare Company, Q Theatre, The Auckland Performing Arts Centre and as chair of the AUSA Outdoor Shakespeare Trust. (In 2005, he was given an OZNM for services to theatre.)
Hurst does think it is overdue for a diverse range of actors and writers to get backing. But what he can offer is more than four decades of experience and to try to create powerful works which draw a wider audience.
Like his wife, actor and director Jennifer Ward-Lealand, he says: “I’ve done this since I was 18, starting out in the 1980s when we still had (theatre) companies. I’'ve actually got the craft.’’
The Golden Ass, Circa Theatre, April 20-May 11. Tickets: circa.co.nz