Twyford PhilPHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): Nick Smith has tried to sell this bill as a way to fix the housing crisis but the claim just does not stack up. It is so typical of much of what the Minister brings to the House in that it is overcooked and the bill does not deliver on any of the promises that the Minister made when he so fancifully organised a press conference in front of a 3-metre-high pile of what were allegedly Resource Management Act (RMA) planning documents. So although Nick Smith has continually tinkered with the RMA over the last 8 years—and absolutely this bill that we are debating today is more tinkering although I would characterise it as harmful tinkering because it has many negative consequences—in that 8 years in Government and after 10 years of blaming the RMA and blaming councils for expensive housing he has done nothing substantive to tackle the real causes of expensive housing that lie within the planning system and the land-use system. He has done nothing about those things and I am going to talk about those in detail.Let us consider the claim that Nick Smith continually makes: that the RMA is to blame for expensive housing. We only have to look at the numbers. Between 2004—the last big peak in terms of consenting rates and build rates—and 2016 the number of consents fell by 18 percent. There was an 18 percent reduction in the number of consents between 2004 and 2016. The same RMA was in place but the value of consents over that period almost doubled. So the cost of building increased by 94 percent; the average cost per square metre increased by 96 percent. It was the same RMA in 2004 as in 2016 but during that time the number of consents between the 2004 peak and the current level of building that the Minister constantly likes to brag about in this House actually fell by 18 percent even though build costs doubled. In that time the RMA has stayed the same. So it is obvious that Nick Smith's love of blaming the RMA and blaming councils for being the overwhelming problem behind the housing crisis is just pure spin.What does this bill do to fix the housing crisis? What does it actually do? Let us have a look. There are three main things that the bill does that Nick Smith claims will reduce the cost of housing. The first is that it gives Draconian ministerial regulatory powers to override council plans control consents and limit the rights of people communities and their elected representatives to have a say in the planning process. Secondly it gives the Minister the power to set standardised plan formats and definitions—which we do not have a problem with but it goes much further and that is the problem. It gives Nick Smith the power to dictate the content and the substance of the plans that are developed by local councils. It is Draconian it is Muldoonist and we oppose it for those reasons. It also gives the Minister rule-making powers that are far far too broad and David Parker spoke eloquently about that earlier today.Nick Smith's impulse—his whole instinct—in trying to deal with this issue is to take powers away from councils and local communities and give them to himself. It is all about the centralisation of regulatory power in the executive arm of Government and in particular in the hands of that Minister. But this is the thing about this bill: it undermines and adds complexity to the RMA and it takes power away from citizens and their communities and their elected representatives to have a say in the planning and land-use decisions in their local communities. To dress this up as some kind of solution to the housing crisis and the failure of our biggest city to properly manage its growth is audacious in its spin even for Nick Smith.The really crazy thing about the incessant tinkering by this Minister with the RMA—and after a decade of Nick Smith and Bill English blaming councils and blaming the RMA for the problems of expensive housing and the failure to properly manage urban growth—is that all of his tinkering up until now and this bill do nothing to tackle the actual root causes of expensive urban land and expensive housing that lie within the planning system. The core problem is that we have a highly restrictive planning system that stops cities making room for growth. It stops them growing up and it stops them growing out and when you do that only one thing happens: the prices go up.Now there are three parts to the problem. One is the excessive restrictions on height and density that stop cities from growing up. The second is an urban growth boundary where even the poorest urban growth boundary that can sometimes change and expand like the one in the Auckland Unitary Plan still rations the supply of new land for development. It drip-feeds new land into a speculative land market which ensures that urban land prices are always very high. That is the core problem that we have in the urban land markets which are so much of a problem particularly in Auckland. That is a factor of the urban growth boundary being so restrictive.The third issue is that the system that we have in this country for financing new infrastructure for development is broken. Central government does not want to fund it councils cannot fund it because they are up against their debt ceilings and developers struggle to be the middle man for the finance that is needed to lay the infrastructure down for new developments. The system is broken. Those three issues desperately need reform but this Minister has done nothing about it and this bill contributes nothing to fixing those three problems. All it does is tinker with the planning process and put more power in the hands of the Minister and take it away from local councils and local communities.In 8 years what has the Government done about this? It likes to claim responsibility for the Auckland Unitary Plan but that is not its work; that is Auckland Council's work and at best that is a small incremental improvement in the problems that I have been outlining. The Minister published a national policy statement that was a wasted opportunity to fix these problems. It has simply put in place a bureaucratic mechanism that tells councils to introduce to drip-feed incrementally bits of new land into a highly speculative land market. It does nothing to solve the core problem. In terms of the infrastructure logjam the best that the National Government could come up with was a $1 billion line of credit—cheap credit—for councils that are already up against their debt ceiling. They are already too indebted. It is like offering a bottle of water to a drowning man. That is Nick Smith's response to the infrastructure logjam. So this does nothing to fix those problems.By contrast Labour has put on the table bold and creative solutions to break the logjam for infrastructure financing. We have proposed bond financing paid back by a targeted rate which is supported by the Productivity Commission. It draws on international models of best practice that would cut councils out of the picture and give developers access to the cheapest possible credit through international bond finance that would be paid back by the landowners in that development over the lifetime of the asset. Our policy is to replace the urban growth boundary completely with more intensive spatial planning that will allow cities to grow and that will allow the market in land and the construction industry to be responsive to demand to build houses when people want them because the planning regime that this Minister defends does not allow that to happen and that is at the core of the problem we have got. This bill is Draconian. It does nothing to solve the core problems that we face. It is just more tinkering by this Minister.