When Abundance landed in March 2025, it arrived at a charged moment. The book was published in the middle of a federal election campaign, with Australians headed to the polls on 3 May. A centre-left was searching for a narrative, a returning Labor government was looking for a framework for its second term, and the book seemed to offer exactly what the moment needed: a new progressive argument for building things. Albanese won that election with an increased majority, which gave the abundance narrative even more oxygen, and for a brief period, it felt like one of those rare policy books that actually shifts something.
I binged the audiobook — it was not yet available in hardcopy in Australia — and found myself drawn in. The sections on housing, renewable energy, research and infrastructure resonated and the diagnosis was on the surface right: we have built systems that are brilliant at slowing things down and terrible at making things happen. The “everything bagel” of regulation where every approval has additional requirements, and often dealt with in sequence, not in parallel, until the project itself becomes impossible — was a genuine insight, recognisable from Tasmanian project experience as much as from California.
But even then, something felt incomplete. Abundance is largely a “permitting” story. In the United States context, it was held out as a plausible leading problem. In Australia planning approvals can be a constraint, but they sit inside a much more complex cost stack. Financing costs, construction cost escalation, workforce capacity, land availability, viability gaps, and the absence of patient capital for long-cycle urban renewal projects are the other rungs on the ladder, and you do not get to the top by fixing the bottom one alone.
To their credit, Klein and Thompson have been willing to revisit the book publicly. Their recent podcast, released around the first anniversary, was notable for its candour. The admission that matters most is also the most uncomfortable: where the abundance movement has been loudest (e.g. California) the outcomes in housing have simply not materialised even following new legislation, reformed permitting processes, gubernatorial enthusiasm.
"The very fair criticism of our movement right now is: where are the outcomes? Especially in states like California, where the volume of abundance has been the loudest" - Derek Thompson
Thompson acknowledged this directly. The book’s housing chapter, he now concedes, did a strong job explaining the fifty-year accumulation of restrictive rules that slowed construction — but it underweighted the twenty-year story of what the Global Financial Crisis did to the construction industry, and the five-year story of the post-pandemic cost shock. High interest rates, labour shortages, tariff-driven materials costs and decimated trade pipelines are not permitting problems. They are structural problems that sit in a completely different part of the system, and clearing planning queues does not touch them.
California is the cautionary case: a state that passed significant legislation, reduced barriers, and has genuine political will — yet is still not building. The lesson is not that reform is wrong but that process reform without addressing the other variables in the cost stack is a necessary but insufficient condition for actual delivery.
There is a second, more political problem with where Abundance ended up, and it is one the authors are, perhaps inevitably, still navigating. The book was written as a centrist-left critique of progressive governance, which meant it was always going to be appropriated, and it was, enthusiastically, by people with very different agendas.
Landing in the middle of an election campaign accelerated both its uptake and its distortion. It became a bestseller in Canberra airport lounges at exactly the moment everyone was looking for frameworks, and that meant it got read through whichever lens was most convenient. Labor absorbed it as validation for a pro-delivery second term. The right picked it up as a convenient justification for deregulation, “even the progressives admit regulations are the problem”, stripping away the book’s commitment to capable, outcomes-oriented government and leaving only the anti-red-tape rhetoric. The same ideas that were meant to reinvigorate public capacity got turned into an argument against public capacity.
Klein and Thompson are not endorsing that reading. But the political spiral that started when the book landed has made the distinction harder to defend in practice, and there is a risk, (which their recent commentary has not fully resolved)of implying that process is the enemy of outcomes, when the more accurate framing is that bad process is. The reality is that we need both. The question is not whether to have process but whether the processes we have are well-designed, properly resourced, and oriented toward delivery. Getting there requires clearing the sludge from the system and creating better pathways for capital, capacity, and community to move together, rather than dismantling the guardrails that make delivery legitimate and durable.
The Trump tariff experience is an instructive counter-example, and one Klein and Thompson have themselves acknowledged. A government that bulldozed through process in pursuit of the outcomes it wanted is now being forced to unwind those decisions, repaying millions in illegally collected duties and facing court-ordered reversals, precisely because it treated legal and procedural frameworks as pure obstacle rather than as the foundation that makes policy stick. The most important thing Klein and Thompson have said in recent months is the simplest: outcomes are what matter: dwellings built and occupied, capacity installed, and lives improved. The path to those outcomes runs through well-designed process, not around it.
Which brings us home. In his 2026 State of the State address in March, Premier Rockliff announced the abolition of the Department of State Growth and its replacement with a new entity: the Department of Building Tasmania, with a mandate to supercharge delivery of housing, roads and infrastructure. Homes Tasmania, established in 2022 with a target of 10,000 new homes by 2032, and routinely criticised for moving too slowly, would be absorbed into it.
It was a significant announcement and the Premier’s framing was unambiguous: it will get things built; it will get things done. The opposition called it an admission that Homes Tasmania had failed, noting that the public housing waitlist had grown to more than 5,000 primary applicants on its watch.
The Committee for Greater Hobart responded to the Building Tasmania announcement shortly after it was made, welcoming the acknowledgment that existing systems were not delivering the outcomes Tasmania needs, but raised substantive questions about whether the structural conditions for genuine delivery improvement were being established, or whether this was primarily a rebranding of existing machinery.
The announcement is correct in its diagnosis: Tasmania’s existing systems and processes have not been delivering the housing outcomes the state needs. The housing waitlist, construction approvals data, and the pace of urban renewal in Greater Hobart all confirm that. The risk is that we fall into exactly the trap of reorganising the deck chairs, tinker on the edges of process, give the reorganisation a new name, pass it through parliament, and then discover that the underlying determinants of outcome have not changed.
There is also a language problem worth naming. The phrase “red tape” — deployed liberally in the State of the State and in much of the surrounding commentary, is a simplistic reduction of genuine complexity. Some of what gets called red tape is certainly unnecessary process that has accumulated without purpose. But much of it represents real things: environmental protections, heritage considerations, neighbour rights, building safety standards, worker conditions. The abundance agenda at its worst flattens this distinction entirely, treating all friction as “waste”. The result is that legitimate reform gets bundled with cuts that cause harm, and when the harm becomes visible, the whole agenda loses credibility.
This is where Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein’s concept of “sludge”, developed in his book of the same name, and earlier as co-author of the influential Nudge, is more useful than the red tape metaphor. Sludge, in Sunstein’s framing, is the administrative friction that imposes costs without producing any corresponding benefit: unnecessary forms, duplicated processes, waiting periods that serve no purpose, requirements that exist because they were never removed rather than because they were ever needed. Sludge is worth eliminating aggressively but sludge is not the same as regulation, and the conflation of the two is where the abundance agenda most frequently loses its footing. Klein has made this point himself, that the goal is not deregulation but government that is fast, capable, and unencumbered by its own accumulated friction, precisely so it can do more, not less. Genuine delivery acceleration requires more than a restructured department. It requires governance architecture that can sustain a different way of operating, resource levels adequate to the ambition rather than trimmed by the budget pressure that accompanied the same announcement, an incentive structure that rewards delivery rather than defensible process, and accountability frameworks that hold over the medium term rather than just the political cycle. It also requires an honest reckoning with the parts of the problem that sit outside Building Tasmania’s remit entirely: construction cost escalation, workforce capacity, financing viability, and the feasibility gap that makes great mixed use urban renewal projects unbuildable at current cost structures.
None of that is delivered by a machinery-of-government change alone. The announcement is the beginning of a possibility, not the delivery of an outcome.
What would it mean to take the best of the abundance thinking: the urgency, the refusal to accept that scarcity is inevitable, the insistence that good process and fast delivery are not opposites, and apply it here, in a place-based way, to an actual precinct in Greater Hobart?
Moonah is the obvious candidate. It has most of the ingredients: proximity to services, jobs, the CBD, existing main street infrastructure, a creative ecosystem built around Moonah Arts Centre, a diverse and growing population, potential demand for medium-density housing, and a planning framework may support infill and renewal in the area. It also has most of the problems: a fragmented land ownership pattern, potential infrastructure challenges, a construction industry that finds the economics of apartment development in this market genuinely difficult, and a community that has experienced enough announcements-without-delivery to be reasonably sceptical of new ones.
A genuine abundance agenda for Moonah would not start with another master plan, nor with a public consultation process designed to surface concerns that then get addressed with additional requirements that make the economics worse. It would start with a delivery question: what does it take to get the first exemplar project built, and what are the barriers that have prevented that from happening already?
In most cases, the answer looks something like this. The headline planning approval is generally not the hard constraint. The hard constraints are the feasibility gap between construction costs and achievable end values, the absence of a patient capital vehicle willing to absorb first-loss risk in the early stages of precinct activation, the coordination failure between multiple land owners who individually cannot achieve the density that makes the economics work, and the infrastructure provision sequencing that requires significant upfront investment with returns spread across a project lifetime that no private developer will fund alone.
01 — DELIVERY MANDATE: Designate Moonah as a priority precinct with a genuine time-bound delivery target — not dwellings in pipeline but dwellings completed and occupied — with public accountability attached.
02 — FIRST-LOSS CAPITAL: Deploy patient, first-loss public capital to bridge the feasibility gap in the early stages — structured through the proposed Greater Hobart Renewal Trust model, not as grants but as returnable investment with downside protection.
03 — LAND COORDINATION: Actively intervene on site aggregation, using the full range of available instruments — voluntary acquisition, public land consolidation, and structured coordination between fragmented owners — to create sites of viable density rather than waiting for the market to do it.
04 — INFRASTRUCTURE SEQUENCING: Commit to the infrastructure investment that unlocks density ahead of the private development cycle, not in response to it — and structure that investment so it can be partially recovered from value uplift over time.
05 — OUTCOME ACCOUNTABILITY: Measure success by dwellings built and occupied, not applications processed or reforms passed. Assign a responsible person with authority, not a committee with a mandate to consult.
06 — COST STACK HONESTY: Engage directly with construction costs, workforce pipeline and financing terms — not as background conditions to lament but as system variables that active government can influence through procurement design, skills investment, and capital structure.
This is not an anti-process agenda. It is a pro-outcome agenda, and those are not the same thing. The distinction is between making it easier in principle to build and actually getting great places delivered — between desludging the system so capital and community can move, and dismantling the frameworks that make what gets built worth having.
One of the more important points in the recent Abundance anniversary discussion was a shift in emphasis from process reform to something harder to legislate: the culture inside delivery institutions. This is where the abstract policy conversation meets something more tangible.
There is a recognisable difference between working in an environment where the default question is “how do we make this happen” and one where it is “what might go wrong if we try”. The first operates with a shared sense of purpose and momentum — people understand the guardrails of process, but they are oriented toward the outcome rather than protected by the procedure. The second accumulates caution in layers, each one defensible in isolation, until the combined weight makes forward movement nearly impossible. Both can be operating within exactly the same legislative framework. The difference is not the rules. It is the culture those rules are administered through, and the governance that either rewards delivery or rewards compliance.
This matters enormously for Building Tasmania. A new name and a restructured organisational chart does not change the culture of the people and systems absorbed into it, nor the governance signals they receive about what success looks like. Getting this right means being deliberate about governance design from the outset: clear delivery mandates with named accountabilities, performance frameworks oriented around outcomes rather than outputs, and leadership with both the authority to make calls and the institutional backing to take considered risk. It means building an organisation that understands the difference between sludge and safeguard, with the confidence to remove the former without touching the latter. That is a cultural proposition as much as a structural one, and it cannot be legislated into existence. It has to be modelled, resourced, and sustained.
In the absence of that deliberateness, Building Tasmania risks being an admission that the old system was not working, dressed up as a solution, without the conditions needed to produce different results.
The Committee for Greater Hobart is an independent, member-funded civic organisation focused on the long-term development and liveability of Greater Hobart. This piece reflects the views of the Committee’s CEO and does not represent the positions of individual members.
