Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): An issue that I hear about frequently in the Epsom electorate in Auckland and up and down New Zealand is not oddly enough the Saudi sheep deal. What I do hear about from people with increasing frequency is that they are anxious about inequality and anxious about the levels of immigration and they tie the two issues together at one nexus which is the housing market particularly in Auckland and particularly in the Epsom electorate. I am just interested in why that is and whether these issues really do go together. Is the problem with inequality the housing market and immigration really a problem caused by excessive immigration as some would have it or is it a problem with a dysfunctional market in housing alone? One way to answer the question yourself is to ask how some other markets have been impacted by record levels of immigration. Well we might ask ourselves: What has happened to the market for jobs?". Just today at a time of record immigration we have the lowest unemployment in 8 years and it is kind of interesting. People like to claim—what is known as the lump of labour fallacy—that there are only so many jobs in a particular place and if more people come somebody will be unemployed. The reality of this is that when people come to a country when they earn money and when spend it they create demand which leads to jobs or Say's Law which is that demand creates its own supply. You might ask yourself about the electricity market another market that is free and flexible in New Zealand. What has happened in the past decade to the price of electricity? Well it has actually gone down—partly because some generators overbuilt in the middle of the last decade—but we have not seen an increase in the price of electricity because there are too many immigrants. We have not seen an increase in the price of food cars electronics or clothes. In fact all of those things have stayed relatively static. The Ministry of Social Development tells us and Statistics New Zealand tells us that the increase in inequality based on consumption over the last 30 years is practically negligible. Why then is there so much anxiety about equality immigration and housing? It is simply because the housing market—and the Auckland housing market in particular—is highly dysfunctional. It is extraordinary that New Zealand reached its peak in home building in 1974. People should just think about that for a moment. In 1974 there were more homes built in New Zealand than in any year since and they did not have nail guns and they were not built by the State—a couple of thousand of the 39000 were built by the State. Something has gone seriously wrong and if you want to ask what that is well it is simply this: the price of available land that people are allowed to build upon has gone through the roof because of dysfunctional regulation of planning and dysfunctional funding of infrastructure. Those are the problems that we need to solve. It also tells you something else which is that there are two worlds in New Zealand when it comes to concern about inequality and poverty. There is the world that works. All of those markets I mentioned—electricity clothing transport food and electronics—are free and open markets exposed to competition from the world or at least very well regulated within New Zealand where prices go down and people have plenty. Then there is the market where the Government regulates the supply of land where the Government regulates the standards of building and where the Government has almost a monopoly on the way that infrastructure is funded and the price of housing has gone up. It is the only commodity that has gone up in price in real terms in the last 30 years and it is the one that is the key contributor to inequality and poverty. So what I say to this House—and what I say to people in Epsom in Auckland and up and down New Zealand and overseas if they will listen—is that we do not have a crisis of immigration; what we have is a crisis in the Government regulation of our housing market. That is what this Government and any other Government need to fix."