Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's my pleasure to stand to indicate the Opposition's support for the first reading of this Infrastructure Funding and Financing Bill and to make the obvious point that housing impacts the standard of living for New Zealanders immensely.What we've seen over the past few decades is a relative increase in the cost of housing both rents and buying houses and the drivers of that in recent times have been the incredibly low interest rates that we've seen all around the world and you've seen asset price inflation all around the world. But combined with that has been a shortage of supply of houses in New Zealand—building new houses—and the cost of building those houses and the land upon which they sit.So we've had pressure building in the last little while. Particularly in the last two years since this Government came in we've seen significant pressure on the rental market where rents have gone up significantly. That's been driven primarily by the many regulations passed by this Government making it fundamentally more expensive and difficult for landlords to rent out houses. It's not compulsory for people to rent out their houses and if enough people conclude that it's all too difficult and expensive and they pull out of the market and there's a shortage of rental properties available then the price goes up.The other side is on housing generally and in the spirit of bipartisanship that Minister Twyford referred to earlier on I do acknowledge this is an area where the Government is making some progress. But we do need to hold them to account in Opposition for the failure to deliver on many other parts of housing policy and so we can't talk about housing and this Government without referring to KiwiBuild and the missed opportunity and the overpromising and under-delivering there.Secondly the reform that's required of the Resource Management Act (RMA)—and we're going to hear no doubt from my colleague Judith Collins on the importance of the reform of RMA legislation and the building and construction legislation which is so much a part of the cost structure. This Labour Government—right at the end of nine years of Opposition having opposed every effort that the previous National Government brought forward to do something about the RMA and to make real differences—alongside New Zealand First and the Greens have woken up to the need to do something in that area but two years into Government they still haven't made much progress at all. We hope they will but that certainly hasn't been happening particularly quickly.The third area of course that impacts on housing aside from the failure of KiwiBuild and the slow progress on the RMA is in the transport space because transport is intimately linked with the cost of housing. If you could live quite comfortably out the back of Meremere and actually still get into town then you possibly could and things would be cheaper. But you can't because it takes you three hours to get in in the morning because of the clogged Southern Motorway. So making progress on transport infrastructure is critical and we've all shared the frustration that after two years the primary achievement of this Government has been to turn off the major transport projects and talk about a slow tram down Dominion Road. So that collectively all adds to the broader pressure.But having said all that this bill is one area where we do agree that what is being proposed makes sense. It builds on the work that Steven Joyce and Anne Tolley did in 2017 which is to say that if you want to build more houses one of the things that is holding back the development of new subdivisions in part—particularly of our big cities but all around the country—has been the debt limits that many councils have and their inability to fund the road and particularly the stormwater and water infrastructure that's required for those subdivisions. Because they haven't had the money available and they've been up against their debt limits the reaction of councils has been to slow those developments. So we in the previous Government and this Government also were keen to see more development happening and more subdivisions opened up sooner and faster.So the idea that the previous National Government came up with was allowing a different levy model which was pioneered up in Milldale north of Auckland whereby a private developer or owner of the land would be able to levy the owners of the new properties in order for that work to be done sooner than it would have been otherwise. That is helpful to our overall affordability by delivering more houses sooner and increasing the supply. What's being proposed by this legislation is to bring through some rules that will enable this to happen more widely because the example up in Milldale was essentially one primary owner of all the land and that made it simple but where there are multiple owners it's more complicated.Now there are many questions that need to be resolved. The primary thing that the National Party insisted upon before supporting this bill to the first reading was that the Government would take this through a full select committee process because we've actually got to take the time to work out how this applies in many instances. While it might be quite simple to see if you're in a new greenfields development in a new subdivision on the edge of town and owners have come together—they've built this subdivision—and the people that buy the new house are going to pay a levy on their house and they know what it is over the next 30 years and that's enabled this thing to happen sooner then most people I think would agree with that. Where it gets a little bit murkier is if there is other situations envisaged potentially by this bill whereby say for example a major piece of transport infrastructure is put in and somebody living within 100 or 200 metres of a new railway station for example—whether some sort of levy arrangement might apply to them. That's nowhere near as straightforward and so how we design the system so that it is fair and equitable to people who have existing rights and have been in the place for a long while and might not be interested in whatever's being built in their neighbourhood—how we design that system is actually very complicated.So our simple message is that the broad proposal is one that we support and we want to encourage and to enable the financing of more development and we want to go through it in a careful and considered manner to make sure that we bring the broader community along with us and we don't create any quirks and kinks in the system that make people worse off. So on that basis I commend this bill and look forward to working constructively with the Government on it. Thank you very much.