Genter Julie AnneHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green—Rongotai): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker. Affordable secure housing is one of the single biggest investments that we could make—Hon Shane Jones: What did the Greens do?Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: —in Aotearoa New Zealand. Madam Speaker I'll just wait for Matua Jones there to calm down before I continue with my speech.Affordable stable healthy housing is one of the single biggest investments we can make in our society that will address so many other problems. There's been research even recently undertaken in New Zealand in 2023 by Motu which found surprisingly that tenants in public housing have higher levels of wellbeing than those in private rental housing. That's despite New Zealand over the last 20 to 30 years having an inadequate poorly managed public housing supply. Michael Joseph Savage completely transformed Aotearoa New Zealand when he started the State house programme back in the 1940s. It made a huge positive difference until about the 1980s or 1990s when we stopped building public housing to keep up with our population growth. That has correlated with an increasing level of homelessness. Those who are concerned about crime should be much more interested in the amount that we invest in housing and public housing—affordable safe housing for people—than what we put into prisons and the length of sentences we give people. That's just evidence-based planning. Rather than short-term populist blaming the bad people let's focus on solutions that we can work on together.It is not possible to take seriously this Government's commitment to increasing the—Hon Member: It's not possible to take seriously the Green Party.Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: —supply of—I'll wait. Madam Speaker can I speak?ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): You haven't been stopped.Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: The way to get affordable stable housing in New Zealand is by enabling more State housing more public housing—that is the way to do it—and to improve our tenancy laws. At the very same time that this Government is saying that they supposedly want to make it more affordable for people to rent and more secure they're going to change the tenancy laws to make it possible for people to get evicted for no cause at all—no-cause evictions. It's the exact opposite of what the evidence tells us we need. If we do want to enable more affordable reliable stable housing the way to do it is through the programme that Kāinga Ora was building up under which now 3000 homes have been paused—hundreds of tradie jobs lost thanks to National and their coalition partners stopping a build of housing that was actually going to increase the supply of homes. Then they say that the problem—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Can I interrupt the member and ask her to come back to this bill.Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: Madam Speaker the bill is the Overseas Investment (Build-to-rent and Similar Rental Developments) Amendment Bill and the Minister spoke at length about how it's not the silver bullet but there are many issues affecting housing. The Minister spoke to those not just this bill and I will too because the argument for this bill is that supposedly we need overseas investors to own more large-scale build-to-rent things when the Minister is cancelling the 3000 homes that were going to be delivered under Kāinga Ora. So we have the ability as a country to invest in public housing and build-to-rent. We don't need to open it up to overseas owners. What this Government's real agenda is is making it possible for the overseas capitalists to profit off housing in New Zealand—Hon Member: Yeah foreign landlords.Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: —foreign landlords—while they're changing the tenancy laws to take away rights from renters and they cancelled the one thing that we know is the baseline that we need more than anything else which is public housing because we know it's directly related to levels of homelessness. The Green Party will not support this foreign-ownership bill.