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:3538. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KEVIN HAGUE (Green): It is a second reading debate and ordinarily in a second reading I would be looking for the departmental report summarising the submissions. I would be looking for the select committee’s report on what the New Zealand public had had to say about the bill we were considering and looking for the revision-tracked version of the bill because there always is a revision-tracked version is there not? Invariably the bill that is introduced to this House is considered for its first reading goes away to a select committee and comes back changed. It comes back changed because actually scrutinising the bill for a little bit longer results in improvements to it. That is why unnecessary urgency is a bad practice for democracy and a bad practice for lawmaking. There is no conceivable reason for urgency for this bill. The bill itself would have been the better for going to a select committee.I am going to start instead of quoting from the select committee report by just quoting from the problem definition in the regulatory impact statement. What that says at paragraph 25 is: “In December 2014 Cabinet agreed a direction for reform of the social housing sector which creates a fair effective and efficient social housing market.”—market. Yet the reason that the Government needs to be involved in providing social housing at all is that experience in the real world has shown that social housing is a service that is not well matched to need by markets at all. A market is the very last thing that we need in social housing. Instead this bill is not about providing for need; it is about providing for the Government’s ideological beliefs—in particular this ideology of the smaller State. I thank Mr Doocey for his very witty joke in his contribution in this debate.On 1 November last year the Minister Paula Bennett admitted that in fact this was a State asset sale. She said so on national television continuing that ideological programme of State asset sales and winnowing down the size of the State that was commenced by the Government in the last couple of terms. She also went on to say and Bill English later on in this House confirmed that there was no guarantee whatsoever that any of the proceeds from selling off those State assets would be used to build any new houses. In other words it was just about shuffling around the ownership arrangements of the houses not about housing anyone extra at all. Simply shifting responsibility for the housing of vulnerable New Zealanders on to charities or to the private sector and then banking the cash from a fire sale of those assets will not solve anything at all.Almost 5000 families were on the waiting list for a State home in December. The census showed over 200000 people in Auckland including around 63000 children were now living in a crowded household because of the shortage of housing. Those children as Annette King has said are at growing risk of diseases of overcrowding diseases of poverty: skin infections respiratory conditions and rheumatic fever. Rheumatic fever prevention as Annette King has said was the programme that the Government introduced with all the fanfare in the last term of Parliament. It has lowered the axe on it in the Budget today with no fanfare whatsoever. Those kids do not need to be made the responsibility of a charity. They need a real tangible place to call home. New Zealand’s housing crisis is caused fundamentally by a lack of affordable homes. Selling off State houses so that developers can make money by sitting on the land or building more expensive homes which is precisely what is going on under this Government cannot possibly be the answer.This bill also serves the ideological belief of this Government that its role is only to be a provider of a small amount of help as a last resort rather than as the guarantor of those basic rights that New Zealanders hold. Bill English again in a meeting that he held with the editorial staff of the New Zealand Heraldsaid that Housing New Zealand has “become a pool of long-term dependency. You get in and you stay in so you don’t move out. So it’s creating large future liabilities having them in here.” If you go back to the original report—he refers to a report from the Department of Building and Housing. Its big thing was about mobility—how you meet serious housing needs but enable people to keep moving back up the ladder to independence which is a somewhat cynical way of saying that actually the Government’s agenda here is about minimising the cost of providing services for people. That ladder towards independence is the very ladder that the Government proposes whisking out from more and more State house tenants under the reviewable tenancies scheme.This bill is also about the ideology of separating out policy advice from the basic grounding that the policy advice could benefit from by being co-located with the planning funding and provision functions that exist in Housing New Zealand.I can almost conjure up that early 1990s environment. I can imagine the hairstyles. I can think of the shoulder pads the chrome the pink and grey stripes and probably I imagine that that is the environment in the rarefied atmosphere of the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment the Government department that this Cabinet this Government can trust to give it the ideologically pure advice on policy around housing that it so desperately craves. Thank you.