Hague Kevin: Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHague Kevin: Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 21 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3531. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KEVIN HAGUE (Green): Many New Zealanders look to the Nordic countries as a bit of a role model for how our country could be and typically look with some longing to countries that offer their citizens high standards of living and egalitarian societies that distribute wealth pretty evenly across their societies. It comes as a bit of surprise to many New Zealanders when they learn that the inspiration for those modern Nordic States was actually New Zealand in the 1930s. That is right—it was the Government of Michael Joseph Savage that provided the inspiration for the modern social democratic movements in Scandinavia. There is no image more evocative of that Savage Government than the picture of Savage himself and several other Cabinet Ministers moving furniture into the first State house at 12 Fife Lane. Savage of course talked about his programme not only of housing but also of social welfare and health care as applied Christianity. He said: “What is there more important in Christianity than to be our brothers’ keepers in reality?”. He saw the Government as the expression of our collective responsibility to care for each other.If the Government is not that then what is it? What is it for? It seems to me that those basic needs that must be met if we are indeed to care for each other must include warmth and shelter and they must include a right to housing. It is not just some matter that the Government of the day might choose to make a matter of policy but it is actually something that our Governments have collectively signed up to as part of the United Nations International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights. New Zealanders have a right to housing. New Zealand Governments have an obligation to ensure that everybody is well housed.In some ways this bill may appear on the surface to be somewhat innocuous. There is a particular exception to that which I will come to a little later in this intervention. But the issue here is what this bill stands for—what it is emblematic of. I have to agree with the contributions made by Phil Twyford and Annette King to date that this bill is emblematic of this Government’s wider housing agenda. A flag is a kind of an emblem. We have got a referendum coming up on the New Zealand flag and the Government right now is running a consultation under the banner of “What do you stand for?”. Well the emblem that this bill provides for this Government—what it says this Government stands for—is a return to the neoliberal agenda of the 1980s and 1990s. It is a return to the economic philosophies of Hayek and Nozick. It is a return to an agenda of small government and of public choice theory. It is a return to the idea of core functions of the State being stripped away and devolved to the private sector. That is what is at stake in this bill.What we have seen from this Government in housing is it shuffling the ownership of State houses ahead of actually providing more houses at a time of crisis—at a time when people are living in garages in their thousands. What we have seen from this Government is the sale of State houses to private developers who inevitably will have a different agenda—an agenda that incorporates their own profit motive. We have seen no guarantee from this Government of the proceeds from those house sales going into building any more houses. Indeed we have seen no guarantee whatsoever of any more houses being built at any time. In relation to the income-related rentals scheme what we have seen is that the changes that the Government has made to that scheme have been driven by ideology—an ideological belief that exposing Housing New Zealand to competition from the private sector will somehow increase its efficiency. That is what sits underneath this reform. It is an ideological belief.In the advice that the officials gave to Cabinet before Cabinet signed off on that particular policy the officials pointed out that one of the likely consequences of that policy change would be that State houses would sit empty. That is right—at a time when we have what 6000 on the waiting list for State houses some of those State houses would sit empty because of the ideological need to spread income-related rent subsidies across both State provision and private sector provision. We have seen in a particularly despicable development tenancy reviews being expanded so that families that are just starting to recover from the chaos of lives without secure homes are being thrust right back into that same chaos. That is an agenda that services only the ideology of the Government. It does not put tenants and it does not put families in need at the heart of the agenda in any way.Part 2 of this bill contains three measures. Two of those are relatively innocuous and a third actually continues the agenda of the early 1990s—the separation of provider funder and policy maker. Just as a reminder to the House of what that separation was all about it was a policy that was driven by public choice theory and driven by an assumption that the public servants who were involved in those functions would be motivated by their own self-interest. It was policy driven by a culture of distrust in the Public Service a policy driven by the need to create the panopticon in Bentham’s ideas where everybody in the Public Service being observed and monitored would somehow result in better outcomes. The counter approach is for Government to instead create a culture of public service a culture of trust and to acknowledge that the experience of funding planning and providing housing might just be a pretty useful start when giving Government advice on policy around housing. It is an asset not a liability.I asked earlier what this Government stands for and this bill and its housing programme say it pretty plainly. What the Green Party stands for is a return to those ideas of the Savage Government—a return to the idea that everybody is entitled to security and everybody is entitled to a safe warm affordable and secure home. It is a return to the idea that we can trust our public servants. It is a return to the idea that the community housing sector has an important role to play. It deserves support it deserves capital to assist in building housing and it deserves regulatory reform to enable it to contribute more fully but the role that the community housing sector can provide should occur in addition to the role that the State itself provides not as an alternative to it. It is only in the zero-sum game philosophy of this current Government that those two have to be alternatives and not joint solutions to a problem that besets this country.