Turei Metiria: Social Housing Reform (Transaction Mandate) Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTurei Metiria: Social Housing Reform (Transaction Mandate) Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 18 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:5903. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green): Tēnā koe Mr Deputy Speaker. Tēnā koutou katoa o te Whare. This bill has two very simple purposes. The first is to help with Nick Smith’s ridiculous bungling over his attempts to sell public land to private interests land that should be offered back to Māori first. The bill does try to find some way of fixing that big mistake. The second—more important I think—purpose is that it is designed to make two Government Ministers the sole ownersin effect of an $18 billion asset that has been built by generations of New Zealanders for the many generations to follow. Under this bill these two Ministers can sell off any amount of that asset that they choose to anyone they like for any price that they decide is OK with zero oversight from the rest of New Zealand.This second and primary purpose of the bill—the selling off of an $18 billion State asset—makes it the largest State asset sale that this country has ever seen. Not only is this bill designed to facilitate the sale of this multibillion-dollar asset; it is a sale to anyone from anywhere. There are no constraints on these two Ministers as to how they choose to flog it off. It is a massive transfer of New Zealand’s housing wealth potentially sold off for a song to Australia to the UK to America to Canada—to whomever the two property-owning Ministers decide it is in their best interest to sell it to—and there is no mandate for this. There is no mandate for this asset sale. In the latest poll as we have heard New Zealanders are overwhelmingly opposed to the sale of State housing to an Australian entity. They want this State housing kept in New Zealand hands but this Government wants to be able to sell it off to anybody it likes.The problem for the Ministers is that John Key at the beginning of this year very grandly announced that he was going to sell 2000 State houses in 2015 and sell 8000 State houses before the election in 2017 but he failed to tell that to agencies like the Salvation Army which he had then expected to just front up with the cash to buy them. The Salvation Army did the economic analysis after being sprung on by this announcement and found that actually the cost of maintaining the housing—housing that has been neglected and degraded because of years of deferred and poor maintenance—made the whole concept of these thousands of houses being sold ludicrous. The cost of buying the homes and then restoring them to any degree of safe use for the tenants is simply beyond New Zealand’s community organisations no matter how motivated they are by compassion for the tenants in these homes.Now with this grandiose announcement by John Key about selling all these thousands of houses that are in total tatters because there is nobody to buy them the Government is now legislating to let two Ministers—just two—treat New Zealand State housing as if it is their own personal property. They can override the Housing New Zealand board and sell off these homes to whomever they want to for whatever price. We may well hear the Minister for Social Housing and others from National claim that they are bound by the social housing reform objectives but I can assure the country that those objectives do not provide any protection for the retention of State housing nor do they increase State housing in this country. The Ministers have to consider only one of those objectives not all of them and if the Housing New Zealand board which is supposed to be responsible for this work strongly disagrees with the Ministers’ plan to sell off the housing it has absolutely no authority to stop the Ministers acting as if they are the personal landlord of State houses.This bill makes two Ministers the landlord for 60000 families—60000 families will now have what Paula Bennett and Bill English as their personal landlord a landlord who will not fix the leaks who will not improve the ventilation who will not fix the dampness in these homes and who will not fix the broken windows or replace the missing doors or deal with the poor heating in those homes. They are landlords who are hell-bent on selling the properties and kicking out the tenants. And this is at a time when last week’s household income survey showed that 45000 more children are living in poverty than there were in 2013 for the most part because their parents’ incomes have stagnated and the housing costs for those families have skyrocketed—75 percent of families who are getting the accommodation supplement are paying more than 40 percent of their income in housing costs.That is a massive burden on low-income families. Fifty percent of these people are paying more than 50 percent of their income on housing. They simply cannot afford to be in the private market and they certainly cannot afford to buy their own homes. They are locked out of decent housing and they are locked out of homeownership but this Government has this pathological aversion to increasing the State housing stock to help to curb the massive rent increases and the massive price increases that we see fuelling the housing crisis.On top of that we know that 75 percent of the children in poverty have parents who rely on a benefit. That shows that this Government is deliberately keeping those families in poverty—75 percent of the poorest kids live in families that are dependent on a benefit—and benefits are so low that these families have no escape. Do not listen to any of the rhetoric around the $25 increase in benefits. We know that most families will not see even $20 of that if they are lucky.Seven out of 10 children living in poverty live in rental housing—seven out of 10 who live in poverty live in rentals. Rental housing is predominantly cold damp and unsafe. Poor-quality housing contributes to 1600 deaths each winter in New Zealand and rental housing is in many cases responsible for that and in some very clear cases State rental housing is responsible for that. We all remember Emma-Lita do we not? We all remember Emma-Lita.So the question is whether the two Ministers will take their new landlord responsibilities seriously. Will they make sure that all of the homes that they are responsible for are warm and dry and safe for the children who live in them? Will they fix the broken windows install the insulation and put in the safe heating devices? The answer of course is that they will not. Of course they are not going to go anywhere near that because their only objective under this bill is to be the auctioneer. They want to sell the property; they do not want to invest any more in the maintenance. There is no value for them in doing that. There has not been any up until now and there is not any impetus now under this legislation for them to fix those homes.The only objective under this bill is the asset stripping from New Zealanders of this $18 billion asset. In the process of throwing out thousands of New Zealand families who we know from the report on the household income survey are stuck in a poverty trap the Government is making that situation for those families so much worse by its inaction and neglect and by an ideology that says that the State should not be involved with housing no matter how desperately New Zealand families need the State to provide that very basic safety net.It will come as no surprise to you Mr Deputy Speaker or I expect the Government that we are opposing this bill. We are deeply disappointed in the face of all of the evidence that shows the desperate need for the improved quality of this housing the desperate need for more of it for the families who are living in garages and their cars as we know they are now—we are disappointed with the failure of Government to take seriously the 1600 deaths which includes many hundreds of children that happen every winter because of poor-quality housing. The only solution that this Government presents—the only solution—is to flog off one of the last remaining safety nets that our families and their kids so desperately need. It is the last remaining safety net which our grandparents built in order to protect our grandchildren and their children too. Thank you.