Twyford Phil: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTwyford Phil: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 03 May 2016. Volume:713;Page:10713. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): Last week in Tauranga I attended a public meeting and in the course of the meeting a woman in her 60s stood up and told about living in her car because the Golden Grove Holiday Park where she has been living for the last 6 months or so is being redeveloped. She has been on the emergency housing waiting list for 6 months and is simply unable to find an affordable place to live.Another woman a solo parent with two teenage children has been living in the Silverbirch Holiday Park for the last 6 months. She is a 42-year-old kindergarten teacher. She has put her name down with four letting agencies—no sign of anything she can afford. The Silverbirch Holiday Park owner Sharon Makai the next day told the Bay of Plenty Times that the holiday park was full with up to a dozen people living in its cabins and caravans. The majority of them she said were looking for an affordable place to live. This is John Key’s New Zealand.In Tauranga one of our most affluent cities the median rent is now $425 a week. The city is rated as severely unaffordable. The median house price is now more than eight times the median household income in that city. People are desperate. You only need to look at the pages of the Bay of Plenty Times every day of the week to know there is an acute housing shortage. So what is this Government doing with the 1200 State houses that it owns in Tauranga? It is selling them. Is it building more houses the obvious thing that you do when there is a housing crisis and a housing shortage? No it is selling them off. This Minister for Building and Housing Nick Smith and Paula Bennett the Minister for Social Housing are so out of touch. Nick Smith said yesterday that the housing crisis is a media beat-up. It is not a crisis apparently—it is a challenge.Well Tauranga is one of two areas to get its housing sold off and there are two short-listed consortia of groups. Remember these names. One consortia includes John Laing the United Kingdom - based public-private partnership investor; another British company Pinnacle Group; and a Canadian real estate investor Brookfield Real Estate Services. The second consortia includes local iwi and Trust House Charitable Trust but it also includes the investment firm Morrison and Co. two Australian property management companies and investors. So for all of the talk about selling State houses to the Salvation Army and non-profit groups which were going to do such a great job of managing them this Government is selling off billions of dollars of land and housing to merchant bankers to foreign companies and to property investors.If that was not bad enough this National Government has already in this process of privatisation displayed the Wall Street ethics that are its trademark as it has gone about selling off State housing. Merchant banker Andrew Body was paid $2.3 million in contracts by this Government first to advise it on developing the policy to sell off State houses and secondly to advise it on how to actually go about selling them—$2.3 million over 5 years. One of his clients throughout that process was John Laing the UK private-public partnership investor who had expressed an interest in buying the houses and is now one of the short-listed parties to buy over a thousand State houses being sold in Tauranga. Is that a conflict of interest? Is that a conflict of interest? The Government said “No. There’s no conflict of interest.” and it took an investigation by the Office of the Auditor-General to show that the Government had broken its own procurement rules time and time again by not tendering that $2.3 million worth of contracts to Andrew Body the merchant banker. The Office of the Auditor-General said the Government had failed to follow proper procedures in relation to the conflict of interest and it was rapped over the knuckles.This is what makes it so disturbing that the National Government recently legislated to give the Ministers—in this case it is Bill English and Paula Bennett—extraordinary unfettered powers to sell off billions of dollars of State houses to whomever they like on whatever terms they like. It swept away all of the normal legislative safeguards for the sale of State assets in this kind of situation.