Twyford Phil: Third Readings —Text is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTwyford Phil: Third Readings —[Sitting date: 21 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3680. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): I will give this to the Government: this Budget is an example of clever politics. There has been a lot of giving with one hand and taking away with the other. But for all those New Zealanders who are looking for more than sleight of hand who want a plan for New Zealand—some kind of idea about how we can create a better future for our children—this Budget has been a big disappointment. It has offered nothing for the regions nothing to diversify our economy and grow our prosperity and nothing to fix the housing crisis. It is a Budget of squandered opportunities and that theme applies pretty much to the Government’s entire housing policy.Let me say for the record that pushing through this legislation under Budget urgency is a cynical abuse of this Parliament and its processes. There is no reason that we have heard last night or today from the Ministers in the chair from Jo Goodhew who just spoke or any of the Government members as to why this legislation has to be rammed through the House under urgency. There is nothing in the bill or in anything that any Government members have said that explains why this legislation should be denied the proper scrutiny of a select committee process and the chance for members of the public to come along and make submissions.This legislation and the Government’s social housing policy show how absolutely bankrupt of ideas the National Government is when it comes to fixing the housing crisis. It will not build the vast numbers of affordable houses that are desperately needed to relieve the housing shortage in Auckland. Instead we get these silly little special housing areas which are basically lines on a map creating little zones for fast-tracked consenting and what have they achieved? In 1½ years they have seen the building of 170 houses in Auckland when the city needs 13000 every year just to stand still. Every day the shortage of houses in Auckland is getting bigger. It is currently 20000 and it is getting bigger all the time.The Government refuses to crack down on speculators—speculators both local and foreign who are driving house prices higher and higher and beyond the reach of ordinary people. Instead what do we get? We get some half-hearted rushed panicked measure to tighten up the taxation rules. The result of that is that Treasury’s own analysis indicates that that policy will not catch more than 1000 speculators a year.Social housing and the intent of this legislation should be designed to help the most vulnerable people in our society: the people who under their own steam in the current economy will never be able to own a home of their own. That is the point of social housing in modern New Zealand. It is there to be part of the modern safety net.The intent of this bill is to make it easier for the Minister—in fact it gives the Minister extraordinary wide-ranging powers—to do sweetheart deals with the property developers that this Government is pinning all its hopes on to buy the houses that no one else wants. The Government has tried for the last 6 months to convince New Zealand that the thousands and billions of dollars’ worth of State houses it wants to sell were going to go to charities and to NGOs in the community sector. That was a front. It was a fig leaf designed to give a veneer of respectability to a policy that is deeply unpopular with New Zealanders—that is the hocking off of billions of dollars of publicly owned State houses to the National Party’s property developer mates.This Government refuses to change the planning rules to allow us to build more and better houses and it has been talking about it since 2006 blaming the Resource Management Act. Bill English still gets up in this House and blames the Resource Management Act but National has done nothing. In 7 years in Government it has not yet brought a proposal to this House to reform the Resource Management Act to make housing more affordable. It has no credibility in that area. It is not doing the very thing that is the most logical simple obvious thing to do in the middle of a housing crisis when there is a shortage of houses. The obvious thing to do is to build more houses—to build houses for young Kiwi families good decent hard-working New Zealanders who only want to own a home of their own. They need a Government that will stand up on their side and build more houses. National refuses to do that.The people in New Zealand who are most vulnerable who are struggling on household incomes that barely allow them to survive who struggle to get a decent roof over their heads they need more and better State housing. What is this Government’s answer? To sell off the houses that it already owns as if by changing the ownership it is going to make the slightest difference to the shortage of housing. It is as Annette King memorably described it an ideological burp a bit of ideological reflux from the 1990s by Bill English who back then introduced market rents for State housing and sold off 13000 houses that ended up in the hands of private landlords and property speculators. This is simply a continuation of that policy. The difference is that this National Government has tried to dress it up by saying the Salvation Army was going to buy the houses in order to try to reassure New Zealanders about this deeply unpopular policy.This legislation gives the Minister the flexibility and the wide-ranging powers to do sweetheart deals with property developers to get rid of the houses. Bill English who is the architect of this policy simply wants to get State houses off the Government books. He does not care whom they go to. He will give them away. This is a fire sale of State houses on a massive scale. Billions of dollars of public assets that were paid for by State house tenants and taxpayers over generations are being flicked off by this National Government because Bill English has an ideological agenda. He does not want the State owning these houses. He does not want the State to have an active role in the delivery of decent housing for the most vulnerable New Zealanders. He would much rather replace that system with a taxpayer subsidy that goes direct into the pockets of landlords. That is what Bill English wants to do. At least he is being candid about it. Forget the mealy-mouthed platitudes that we hear from the mouth of Paula Bennett.Let us look at how the Government has tried to justify this con job it calls social housing reform. The first thing it says is that one-third of the houses are in the wrong place and are the wrong size. Well in spite of the fact that that was flatly contradicted by Housing New Zealand in its recent annual report it begs the question of how selling the houses to someone else will magically ensure that those houses are the right size and in the right place. It is a fallacy.Paula Bennett repeatedly makes the claim that community organisations can do a better job than Housing New Zealand. As Phil Goff pointed out the Government has no evidential basis for making that claim. We asked Paula Bennett under the Official Information Act to provide the evidence to provide the data. She said that no such document exists.Simon Bridges got up from the chair during the Committee stage of this debate and said: “We want to build more warm dry homes and build lovely modern homes for people. That’s why we’re passing this bill.” Well to be honest that is brainless. There is no need to sell billions of dollars of State houses to your property developer mates. Just insulate the houses. Just redevelop them. Build more houses. That is what New Zealanders want.This is an ideological agenda by the National Party. It is withdrawing the Government from the provision of decent housing for New Zealanders. It wants a market-based approach. It simply wants the houses off the Government’s books and Labour will not support that.We are not against building up a stronger community housing sector. In fact as members will know I have given some very good speeches in the House and elsewhere making the case for that. But we will not stand by and allow the community housing sector and many fine organisations to have their good reputations cynically used and manipulated by this Government in order to lend a veneer of respectability to its policy. The answer to the housing crisis is simple. We have a shortage of houses; just build more houses.