iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 15/06/2026

🚨🎙️ Live Podcast Announcement! Join me and Stuart Donovan in Canberra next week to record a live @inflectionpoint.work Podcast on the history of the Auckland upzoning and the Auckland Unitary Plan.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 09/06/2026

Look at the charts below. There is more low-density zoning within 5km of Auckland’s CBD—and within wealthy suburbs—than anywhere else in the city. Does this really pass the “Good Strategic Planning” sniff test?

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 09/06/2026

The Fifth Estate headline is right: Auckland “isn’t a simple story of blanket upzoning”. But that’s only because the council planning process systematically worked to avoid upzoning Auckland’s wealthy middle-suburbs.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 09/06/2026

Fantastic news that the Planning Institute of Australia has finally accepted the evidence on Auckland. Broad upzoning works, and it’s great to see PIA get instep with the evidence. But the strategic planning process made Auckland’s reforms worse: the process locked up wealthy inner-city areas.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 19/05/2026

wake up babe new brattan report just dropped

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 12/05/2026

The changes to CGT and Negative Gearing are good tax policy—but they’re not a meaningful housing policy. All available research tells us these policies explain less than 5% of house prices. But the new Local Infrastructure Fund is a juicy $2 billion carrot.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 10/05/2026

This would see the end of our nation’s most arbitrary and restrictive anti-housing policies, such as Victoria’s two-storey Neighbourhood Residential Zone, South Australia’s absurd one-storey overlays, and the many regional towns with minimum lot sizes in the 1000s of sqm.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 10/05/2026

The precise planning reform details are not yet available, but we know what we’d like to see most: a National Townhouse Code, setting a minimum density of three-storeys, Australia-wide. This would unlock new homes across inner-city and regional areas alike.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 10/05/2026

By tying the new infrastructure fund to meaningful statewide planning and construction reform, the Feds are upping the stakes for states to do what’s right and make housing legal and easy to build where people want to live. This is the first real piece of Commonwealth housing leadership.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 04/05/2026

Very excited to be hosting the Birthright film Premier and Q&A next Monday 11th at the brand new Brunswick Picture House. This is a brand new Australian film about struggling with the housing crisis. It’s dark, funny, and—most of all—it’s fun.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 12/04/2026

For more on why a National Settlement Strategy is at best a waste of time, and at worst a national disaster, you can read the @abundanthna submission to the Federal Productivity Inquiry: pbs.twimg.com/media/HCwZr4... abundanthousing.org.au/docs/2603-Pr...

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 12/04/2026

So what is the National Plan for Australia’s Growth? Well, as of this submission, I can tell you one thing: the PIA has shied away from calling it a National Settlement Strategy. Because it’s definitely not about telling people where they should live.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 12/04/2026

The only time where things get dicey is in reference to an “alignment of migration” with regional development policy. But since this document is not about telling people where they should live (remembering that migrants are people), we should not read into this.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 12/04/2026

There is a mention of how population growth in “constrained urban systems” places pressure on housing supply. The good news, as mentioned up top, is that the majority of these constraints are artificial! The PIA can work with local councils to remove these planning constraints.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 12/04/2026

In one or two places the document expresses a subtle distaste for how settlement patterns “emerge” rather than occurring “by design”. But as they have reassured us over and over again, the National Settlement Strategy is not about designing settlement patterns. So no worries!

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 12/04/2026

In the meantime we have the PIA’s submission to the Productivity Inquiry, calling for a National Settlement Strategy. The submission is, of course, toothless. It mainly does what the PIA does best, which is call for the creation of even more documents.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 12/04/2026

The Planning Institute’s call for a National Settlement Strategy is finally live. They provide four indicators of success. The good news for the PIA is that there is one clear way to improve all of these indicators: broad-based upzoning of all Australian inner-cities.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 11/03/2026

Absolutely delighted to publish Ryan Ginard on Australia’s urgent need for charitable giving reform. Ryan’s article appears in the fourth edition of Inflection Points, alongside Allegra Spender, Tim Nelson and team, and Keith Wolahan.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 01/03/2026

Australia faces three major crises: housing, energy, and productivity. Boundless is a book about how we might confront these great problems of our time, and it’s coming out in 2027. Co-written with the excellent @howardfmaclean.bsky.social and published by also-excellent Pantera Press.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 15/02/2026

We cannot wait to read your ideas!

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 15/02/2026

If you want to enter the Prize, but aren’t sure if your topic is a precise fit—great news, for a one-month window we will be accepting pitches:

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 15/02/2026

After more than a decade of entering writing prizes, I am absolutely honoured to find myself on the other side. Introducing the $5,000 Inflection Points Writing Prize—for the best new piece of writing about the problems Australia faces, and the solutions within our grasp.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 02/02/2026

I’m very excited to be announcing that Alain will be touring Sydney, Canberra, and Melbourne in March of this year. We’ve lined up a wonderful set of guests including Lucy Turnbull, Howard Maclean, and Brendan Coates across our cities.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 02/02/2026

In September of last year, I was lucky enough to have dinner with Alain Bertaud—author of Order without Design, one of the best books ever written about cities—in a restaurant in Midtown Manhattan. Now, he’s coming to Australia.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 09/12/2025

Last night, the Planning Amendment Bill 2025 passed the Legislative Council. This is an astronomically impactful reform. Congratulations to @australianlabor.bsky.social, @greens.org.au, @davidlimbrick.bsky.social, and @animaljusticeparty.bsky.social for forming a cross-partisan, pro-housing bloc.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 26/11/2025

I buy, of course, that a beautiful building is better than an ugly building. @yimbymelbourne’s biggest and best event to date was titled “Unbanning Beauty”. But time and time again beautiful buildings are opposed:

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 26/11/2025

I really like a lot of @dbroockman.bsky.social’s work, but I also don’t think we can ask people “would you rather the best building in the world or the worst building in the world” and get findings we can treat as instructive.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 05/11/2025

This new work from @grattaninstitute.bsky.social is nothing short of seminal. For too long we have let our cities be locked up by bad, unjustifiable land use and housing policy. But the tide is turning on bad policy—and that is for the better. bsky.app/profile/grat...

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 30/09/2025

Why? Because different states have different rules around cooling-off periods. Where auctions and private treaty are subject to the same rules, auctions are far less popular, as they offer fewer net benefits for either the buyer or the seller.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 30/09/2025

Almost 200 years later, more than 25% of properties in Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra sell at auction, while Perth and Hobart barely use them.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 30/09/2025

Auction popularity can be traced back to colonial land auctions, which were mandated in 1831 when the British Colonial Secretary ended free land grants due to a concern that settlers were spreading themselves too thin across vast territories.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 30/09/2025

Why does Australia have so many live house auctions? On my recent trip around the US, I learned that the Saturday morning pastime of house auctions are mostly unique to Australia. So I set out to investigate.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 25/09/2025

Still, we should enable industries—especially those which are land-intensive—to take advantage of our smaller cities. That means making planning rules much less restrictive, and enabling firms and individuals to move without friction in cases where it is advantageous to do so.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 25/09/2025

Moving down the line, sizes of Australian cities as a proportion of our largest city don’t stand out particularly from peer countries, showing that our concentration is not worth writing home about.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 25/09/2025

It’s worth noting, as per Jonathan Nolan, Australia is not particularly concentrated in our capitals. Sydney and Melbourne are two very big cities, but together they don’t meaningfully stand out from other top-two city pairs globally.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 25/09/2025

No, Australia does not need new cities. My new essay sets the record straight: we have a lot of cities, but we aren’t using them as well as we could be. To make our cities more successful, we have to open up a lot more land for commercial uses to enable agglomeration.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 10/09/2025

The concept of an “urban village” is a falsehood, and a linguistic sleight of hand. There are cities and there are villages, but there are no urban villages.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 10/09/2025

The YIMBY movement’s crowning cultural achievement is making it abundantly clear that to live in a city is to live in a place that changes and grows and evolves—over and over and over again. Despite what the NIMBYs might believe—a city is never finished. A city is never done.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 10/09/2025

A flagrant violation of what it means to live in a city.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 03/09/2025

It is fantastic to see Clare O’Neil and the Federal Government increasingly on-message about the housing crisis. The Minns and Allen governments are undertaking some of the most meaningful and ambitious housing reforms in decades. Federal Government backing is crucial— 🧵

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 31/08/2025

Consultation should be done proactively: harnessing the power of broad representative polling, or representative deliberative bodies. But I cannot emphasise enough that more consultation will rarely make thing better. True leadership requires just making a decision to build.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 31/08/2025

I wrote about this in The Problem with Urban Planning for @inflectionpoints.work:

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 31/08/2025

The biggest sin of opt-in consultation is that it gathers low-quality information. Everyone who shows up is motivated to be there because they want to create a given outcome. You don’t get information about the world as it is—but about the world as a small no. want it to be.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 31/08/2025

Today we @yimby.melbourne drop our new research note, demonstrating the bias of opt-in community consultation. It will shock no one who’s paying attention, but our sample of 15 consults across six councils found a massive overrepresentation of homeowners and older folk.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 28/07/2025

The conservative stalwarts over at Charter 29 have put out a new report on Victorian planning reform. It reveals a complete lack of understanding. They think the 'missing middle' is a set of suburbs—but no, it's the medium density housing that they'd like to see remain banned.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 24/07/2025

A few years back, Siang and I collaborated on a project called The Beige Index. As an attempt at viral marketing for Siang's first novel, The Whitewash, we built a database of diversity in the IMDb Top 250. It got some good coverage, including a writeup in the Financial Review.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 24/07/2025

Absolutely awesome to see my dear friend and collaborator Siang Lu take home the Miles Franklin Award for his excellent novel Ghost Cities. The devil works hard. Siang Lu works harder.

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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 24/07/2025

The @inflectionpoints.work launch made an enormous splash. I could not be more proud of what we have already achieved. Our Melbourne launch event is next week, free, and getting booked out fast. Get yours at the link below!

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