The Human Rights Foundation says there has been "almost no progress" on the right to a decent home in New Zealand since 2023, and that several government initiatives have actively made things worse across affordability, tenure security, accessibility and cultural adequacy.

The report, "The Right to a Decent Home in Aotearoa New Zealand: Review 2023-2026", is the Foundation's first since it was re-established under new chairperson Aaron Packard, with patron Dame Silvia Cartwright. The Foundation was originally founded in 2001 by former human rights commissioners.

It measures government housing decisions against New Zealand's obligations to progress the right to a decent home, covering decisions made by ministers and agencies across the review period.

The Foundation said its findings show New Zealand is "running backwards" on both housing rights and Te Tiriti commitments. Packard said the government needed to put human rights and Te Tiriti obligations at the centre of housing policy, and that recent policy had moved in the opposite direction, reinforcing the treatment of housing as a speculative asset — a commodity bought and sold for profit rather than treated as a basic right.

The report found the way housing is experienced in New Zealand was "deeply unequal". It acknowledged modest improvements in specific measures such as reductions in dampness and mould, but found persistent housing inequality remained largely unchanged, particularly for Māori, Pacific peoples, disabled people and renters. Household crowding had increased and remained especially high for Pacific and Māori families with children.

The report singled out specific government initiatives. It said initiatives under the 2025 Government Policy Statement on Housing and Urban Design "prioritise market-led supply, speed and cost efficiency without embedding habitability or other right-to-housing standards in funding or delivery". Budget 2026, the report found, increases social housing rents and encourages reliance on private rentals without measures to address affordability in the private market.

Housing Minister Chris Bishop acknowledged there was more work to do but said the government was making progress in its plan to address New Zealand's housing crisis, according to RNZ.

The report's findings carry the weight of an international human rights framework. Te Kāhui Tika Tangata, the Human Rights Commission, identifies seven housing principles drawn from the United Nations: habitability, affordability, accessibility, security of tenure (the legal right to stay in your home without fear of arbitrary eviction), cultural adequacy, location and availability of services. The Foundation's report measures government performance against these standards.

The backdrop is a longer arc of concern. In 2020, UN special rapporteur on housing Leilani Farha found that in some New Zealand areas there were enough houses and apartments to buy or rent, but supply only catered to the few who could afford them. In 2023, the Chief Human Rights Commissioner called for the government to establish a housing watchdog, citing the number of people still living in cold, damp housing.

The broader context is the relationship between housing policy settings and the human rights instruments New Zealand has signed up to. The Human Rights Act protects against racial discrimination in access to housing, among other areas of public life. The Commission has also published a shadow report — an independent assessment submitted alongside the government's own report — for Aotearoa New Zealand's 23rd and 24th periodic review under the UN Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), covering 2018 to 2025, and has identified housing as a key theme in its disability rights monitoring.

What the Foundation's report does is tie those strands together. The finding that government initiatives have contributed to declines across multiple right-to-housing dimensions is not framed as a single policy failure but as a pattern: market-led supply prioritised over habitability standards in funding and delivery, social housing rents rising in Budget 2026, and private rental reliance encouraged without affordability safeguards.

Packard's framing of housing as a speculative asset connects to a wider body of critique. The Commission's own materials note that racial discrimination in housing is prohibited under the Human Rights Act, and the Foundation's report highlights that the burden of housing inequality falls disproportionately on Māori, Pacific peoples and disabled people.

The government's position, as conveyed by Bishop, is that progress is being made. The Foundation's assessment is that whatever progress exists at the margin on specific measures like dampness and mould, it is being offset by policy settings that erode affordability, tenure security and cultural adequacy.

The report is the first output of the reconstituted Foundation, and it puts the organisation squarely in the housing policy debate. Whether it shifts ministerial thinking is another matter. The government's Housing and Urban Design GPS and Budget 2026 settings are already in train, and the political signal from Bishop was acknowledgment without concession.