Goudie Sandra: Affordable Housing: Enabling Territorial Authorities Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Goudie Sandra: Affordable Housing: Enabling Territorial Authorities Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
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SANDRA GOUDIE (National—Coromandel) 
: 
 I am delighted to be able to take a call. I was appalled by the Minister’s previous speech to the Committee on this bill. It alarmed me in the sense that if councils can do this already—address the problems of housing affordability—then they should be left to it. We do not actually need legislation to say to councils that if they want to do this they can. That is just an absolute nonsense. 
The Minister then said in terms of the affordable housing scheme that if a council has a scheme then all the developers can be blackmailed by that scheme to participate. When we start looking further into this bill we see that it gets worse and worse. If developers thought things were bad now—and when I say “developers” I mean people who want to do the business of providing housing for our many many communities in their own way and that is a worthy endeavour—they can see that we are now putting in place yet another hurdle for them. 
I direct members to clause 34. You know if developers are scared they will be even more scared by all this. In the event of a dispute it will be the Environment Court that decides. Clause 34(1A) states: “This section applies to a person described in subsection (2) if the person considers that there is a conflict”. Subclause (2) is headed: “The persons are—” and the list includes the Minister for the Environment and the Minister of Housing. 
Well we know what it is like when a Minister suddenly gets pulled into a consent process dispute. We need only look at the Whangamata marina to see what a mess the Minister of Conservation made of that and here we have the potential for that same event to happen again with the Ministers not being able to help themselves and making matters worse by poking their noses in. The mere fact that the Environment Court will decide the outcome in the event of a conflict means that the affordable housing scheme just gets worse and worse. If a council has one and if people want to build houses for their communities they should look out because that will really bite them where it hurts. 
I refer members to the commentary on the bill. We talked about ifs—that is the fact that adopting a scheme is optional. The fact that the Minister says “if” makes it voluntary. If it is voluntary and councils can do it now if they want to why do we need legislation? It is absolutely dumb and the Minister just does not get it. The public gets it. Both Phil and I have received emails and texts from people saying: “We hear what you’re saying. Good on you. Go for it. How dumb can they be?” and we totally concur with those sentiments. We are getting those sorts of emails and texts now. 
When I was reading out some of the parts of the commentary on the bill earlier on we talked about the provisions with regard to GST. The Minister said that the bill “should” reduce compliance costs. Well hello—talk about hopeful and wishful thinking! It “should” or maybe it will but we do not think so. Quite frankly this bill will do nothing but increase compliance costs. When we look at the consultative processes that local authorities will have to go through just to provide an affordable housing scheme we see that the costs are absolutely huge. Local authorities have to do a full cost-benefit analysis apart from all the other things they have to do that are set out in the different parts of the bill. It will be another huge cost on local authorities to get that expertise in order to pull all that information together. 
Hon Clayton Cosgrove 
: Have you written this speech on your cast Sandra? 
SANDRA GOUDIE 
: Perhaps that Minister might like to take the opportunity to read the bill and maybe to develop a bit of an understanding of it because the Minister of Housing has absolutely no idea of the definition of a compliance cost. If she did she would know that all this bill will do is add compliance costs. 
This bill does not address the cost of a resource consent the cost of a building consent or the cost of development contribution fees and it does not address the fact that most of that has to be paid up front. The people who are contacting us are talking about their own experiences. Ordinary mums and dads as someone said might want to build a hen house a carport a garden shed or even a deck. It just gets worse and worse and here we have a Minister who is totally ignorant about what compliance costs actually mean. This is something that Minister Cosgrove might like to focus his mind on. He might like to take a bit of notice of the actual bill.