Seymour David: Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2) — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSeymour David: Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2) — First Reading[Sitting date: 04 May 2016. Volume:713;Page:10817. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): I rise on behalf of the ACT Party in opposition to the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2). I would normally like to start by acknowledging the Leader of the Opposition’s good motives—or at least acknowledge the motives that he would like people to think he has when he brings a bill such as this to the House. It is a parade of faux compassion by bringing a bill that is supposed to help vulnerable children in cold and damp homes but has none of the mechanisms required to actually do that. You only have to start to ask a few basic questions of Mr Little’s bill to see why that is the case. We might ask Mr Little whether he thinks that people particularly people with very limited incomes do not know what proportion of their income to spend on housing. Are they spending too little on housing and not enough on things such as food transport clothing and other necessaries of life?If he thinks that people have that basic budgeting wrong then perhaps one thing that would be helpful to them would be to have more income. That might very well be the answer. But there is nothing in this bill that will increase the incomes of the poorest New Zealanders whom he purports to help. So then you might say that it would be helpful to them if the cost of warm dry housing became more affordable but of course there is nothing in this bill that will make warm dry housing more affordable. So if it is not going to increase the proportion of people’s income that is spent on housing if it is not going to increase the amount of income that people have overall and if it is not going to make housing more affordable then who is going to pay the costs involved in increasing the quality of housing the temperatures the heating facilities and the amount of insulation that these houses have?The answer is that Mr Little has no answer because unfortunately this is a bit of vainglorious political showboating and all the worse for the faux compassion involved in his bringing this bill to the House. But ultimately it comes down to confusion between the intentions of the policy and the outcomes. Everybody in this House actually agrees with the intentions—agrees with the idea that people should have healthier environments in which to live. Everybody understands that there are health problems that come from being cold and being damp. But I have argued that there is no answer in Mr Little’s bill to how that will actually be achieved other than by imposing additional costs on the very people who cannot afford them.The real problem is that there is no problem definition in Mr Little’s bill. He cannot explain why it is that people are not already purchasing the best possible housing that they can afford and that landlords are not already providing the best housing that they are able to given the costs that they face and there is no explanation of why people who rent houses have their spending priorities wrong. Unless Mr Little can answer those basic questions then nobody in this House should be voting for this bill.The fact of the matter is that this is a very real problem facing New Zealand. The shortage of housing is a challenge for New Zealanders from all walks of life right across this country but unfortunately by bringing a bill that does nothing more than parade faux compassion offers no real solutions and leaves the very people whom it intends to help actually worse off then we end up in a situation where people lose faith in the political class and hopefully faith in the Labour Party for bringing such a poor solution to the House. I proudly oppose this bill. Thank you.