Eagle PaulPAUL EAGLE (Labour—Rongotai): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's a pleasure to be here to talk about the Infrastructure Funding and Financing Bill a long-overdue bill. I want to acknowledge the Minister for Urban Development for his leadership here and also those from across the House who have done some work on it in previous years. In essence this had come to a grinding halt in terms of local government wanting a solution to move forward around saying Hey how do we finance infrastructure for housing roads and other core community infrastructure?" I know that coming from local government this is a solution that would've transformed parts of the city I represent a long time ago because what this gives now is some hope and some new tools which had not been there previously.So what local government did was work within its boundaries what developers did was get frustrated and what partners did was really hang around and hope like hell that they could do something within the current framework settings but what this does is simply give a range of new settings which allows them now to move forward. I think that the example or the pilot that's being worked on now in Milldale north of Auckland over the last few years—that what that has allowed is to I guess smooth out some of the kinks and ensure that this legislation goes through and irons things out and allows all partners all stakeholders from across New Zealand to get on with the job and that's to create housing options.I know when you look at the housing continuum this actually gives hope to the full spectrum be it building housing for the homeless looking for transitional and emergency housing through into social housing when you're looking at affordable rental accommodation right through to private accommodation of those sorts. I know in my wee patch and coming from local government we were involved in a 20-year Crown-council partnership a $400 million piece of work that is still rolling out and what the arrangement was is it allowed houses to be built without the sort of political struggle and that's what I sense from this legislation. What this allows now is the developers partners and stakeholders to get on with the job of building houses. So there won't be the general thrashing of the different aspects of the housing spectrum the cheap political shots. What this will allow is for homes to be built for Kiwis who want to live in warm dry decent homes anywhere in New Zealand. There are some priority cities that have been identified but I know a city like Wellington will certainly look closely at this with our transport projects currently under way to say "How can a special purpose vehicle be utilised in a way to fulfil the housing needs of the capital city for example?"So this gives great hope. It allows developers now—and I attended a fund-raiser recently where two developers were expressing their fury at this. I don't know if it was alcohol-related but I gave them the benefit of the doubt because what they showed was a long-term frustration at not being able to reach their full potential. I said "Look something is coming and when you see this bill I believe that you will look at the componentry of it and say 'That's where we now play a part.' " What I like most is that everyone's got skin in the game: local government central government the private sector NGOs even those community housing providers per se who will pick up a role along that housing continuum and allow them to get more Kiwis housed.This is a great piece of work. It's coming to the Transport and Infrastructure Committee. I'm looking forward to seeing it next year. I commend this bill to the House."