Bennett Paula: Address in ReplyText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBennett Paula: Address in Reply[Sitting date: 29 October 2014. Volume:701;Page:354. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PAULA BENNETT (Minister of Local Government):It is an honour to be standing here today as an MP and as a Minister in the 51st Parliament of New Zealand. Can I congratulate you Mr Assistant Speaker on your role. I must say it is slightly freaking me out your sitting there. It is the first time I have seen it—I was away last week—so it is kind of odd but a good kind of odd. I must say—and it might be reflective of my own personality—that I am kind of tempted to be a bit naughty just to see what you would do but of course I will not because that is not the way to start a parliamentary term. I respect that and I certainly respect your being there. So good on you. You wanted it you got it and you look like you are enjoying it. [Interruption] Well he did. He really wanted to be the Assistant Speaker so I think that is pretty cool.I was just finding it quite interesting to sort of think about where we are at now and there is no doubt about it that we have just been given a mandate to be in Government. But with that mandate comes a huge responsibility and it is a huge responsibility to serve the people of New Zealand. The Prime Minister stated categorically that we would govern for all New Zealanders and I have to say that when I woke up on the Sunday morning after the election there was obviously that relief and that joy of winning but equally there was the weight of responsibility that comes with that. And the weight of responsibility was in acknowledging the faith that many New Zealanders have put in us and what we have to do to actually live up to that. I think that all Ministers in this House all members of Parliament in this House—certainly National and our coalition partners—take that incredibly seriously. The Prime Minister has made it quite categorical what his expectations are of us and he has been quite clear what his expectations are of me. He has mentioned some of them in his Address in Reply speech and I would like to go into them a little bit further.But I do get to have a quick moment to say that I am kind of thrilled to be the first member of Parliament for Upper Harbour. It is a new electorate formed of course because of the boundary changes with 50 percent in west Auckland and 50 percent on the North Shore and in Greenhithe. It was exciting to run there. I am absolutely thrilled to be the member of Parliament for Upper Harbour. I cannot find an electorate office which is always a challenge but I am really looking forward to serving the community and being the best member of Parliament that I can be. I feel like a new MP in many respects because I have got to prove to the voters that I was worthy of their vote and that is certainly my intention.I want to talk a bit about our most vulnerable New Zealanders in the context of social housing and the new role and I know there are many questions about what that new role of Minister for Social Housing means. I also thought I would talk a little bit about the role the Prime Minister has given me in regard to State services and the cross-agency work what that kind of means and how we can do that.Social housing ultimately for me has got kind of three parts in the role that I am playing in it. One is operational. We passed legislation that means that now within the Ministry of Social Development we have the housing assessments being done. We are managing that social housing wait list. We are calculating and reviewing income-related rents or “IRR” as I will refer to them. We are paying them to the housing providers. We are doing tenancy reviews which I mentioned today in question time. We are offering those additional housing support products which are taking off and proving to be quite interesting. We are purchasing that sort of social housing.We did this for a number of reasons. One is that it made no sense that more often than not it was the same people having to go to Housing New Zealand and having to go to Work and Income to sort out the money and then having to try to find a house. The two agencies did not always talk well to each other even though I think they are fantastic people doing the best they can on the front line. It made sense logistically to move that in but more important to be client-focused and people-focused and for the person to have one door to go through. So that is kind of where it lay to start with.Then if we want to open up social housing which means extending income-related rents to more than just State houses you could not have Housing New Zealand being in charge of that because ultimately it is the biggest player. I think Housing New Zealand will always be the biggest player no matter what happens in the next 3 years. Even if we sold off some of that stock you are still going to see it being far far more dominant in the market which I think is a good thing and that is where it should be. But you could not have Housing New Zealand deciding who the community housing providers were—effectively who its competition was. Housing New Zealand needs a bit of competition quite frankly. It can up its game. It can do better which I am really proud to say that it is. But we could see it all being quite different if we have a tenant and we are thinking about that person not just in respect of their housing as many of them need wraparound services. They need the support longer term and we invest a lot of money through community organisations but we can do better. I think there have been marked improvements in the role that Housing New Zealand plays. I want to say I am really proud of the work it does.Ultimately what Housing New Zealand did was house someone and then pop in occasionally to make sure the asset was OK. Well these people need more help than that and community housing providers or our community groups can often do that better than certainly the Government can. So that is one of the reasons why you would open it up to community housing providers. We see many models of it overseas—many of them in Australia where the Government plays a part but ultimately it is the community housing providers. Then the challenge gets to: how do you build their asset base to a level where they can then get further houses and further asset-building from it? So that is their problem. They just do not have the scale right now and that is a challenge in New Zealand.So we can sit back and say that it is too hard and see them get maybe five or 10 houses over a 2 or 3-year period or we can start thinking quite laterally. That is where I know I was made a bit of fun of. You know I love the language but it is exciting and how they can partner with developers can be kind of sexy—how they can partner with people who know property well. Actually it is our community housing providers that know people well. If you put those together with the interests of our vulnerable New Zealanders right smack in the middle there can be designs and things better than what we currently have now.Let me give you an example. There are around 15000 people over the age of 65 living in State houses right now. Most of those are houses with more than one bedroom and as we constantly hear—and it is the truth—there is a wait list of people who are desperate to get into those homes. Actually those homes are not fit for purpose for some of our elderly. They could live in better circumstances. They could live in village atmospheres. They could live in places where they have better support. It can actually be quite isolating and damn lonely. We can do better by them. These houses are not always fit for purpose for someone older and on their own. We have seen many great examples of community organisations and developers designing and building places that would fit them better. There is no way we are moving those people on unless there is somewhere better and more satisfactory for them to go. I have faith that community housing providers and others can do that and that is what we are backing them to do. That change may not happen overnight but there will be change and it will be in the interests of the person at the centre of it.Putting people into a State house and leaving them there for decades—decades—without the right support without the right kinds of aspirations for what else could suit them in many ways is negligent. That is the role of the new Minister for Social Housing alongside the Minister of Finance—who is now responsible for Housing New Zealand—and equally Nick Smith in the building area. If you think about it it needed a role of someone in the middle who has not bought in completely to the Housing New Zealand State house someone who can see it from the perspective of the New Zealander of the person and how we can address their needs through different housing options. I look forward to debating and discussing that further in the upcoming months.Lastly I want to talk about cross-agency work. This is our next step forward. We do data analytics better than we have ever done and we are becoming world leaders in it—in that and in the investment approach. It means that we can prove whom we should spend more on earlier and over a long period of time. It has been very successful if I might say so myself in Work and Income and in our work in that area. I congratulate Anne Tolley. You have got the best portfolio in the Government of course. We have seen the successes there. We can broaden that out much better across justice across education and across health. You can see who those people are who are most likely to rely on State support unless we change what we are currently doing and we can. That is why I was given the role of State services because we have to look at reform in the area of how we actually set up services around people and their families—not around what suits the Government. That is just the nature of being in the Westminster system. It is the nature of how the Government has been created. But I do not think it has been created in the interests of New Zealanders and that is what this Government will be about.