Williams Poto: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliams Poto: General Debate[Sitting date: 19 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:5954. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): I think I am listening to the Grimm brothers’ fables in the House when I hear about chickens with the sky falling on their heads. I thought that was question time actually. I just want to reflect on something that Todd McClay said in the House earlier about the Labour Party talking about all these crises. The one crisis that Todd McClay did not mention in the House was the house price inflation crisis in Auckland. That was a glaring hole in his debate today.Homeownership is important to New Zealanders. Homeownership speaks to the value that we place on our communities on our individuals and on society as a whole. Homeownership means having a base for your family. It means stability. It actually means building connections into communities and building relationships for when times are hard. It means building social capital and it means actually building a financial base that leverages off and gives you much better outcomes. If you have a home then your prospects in terms of your health your children’s health and your children’s education are going to be better.So let us have a look at the homeownership rates shall we? My colleague the Hon Phil Goff said that we have got the lowest homeownership rates in 64 years. Homeownership rates are declining. In 2006 homeownership was up over 50 percent. It was 53.2 percent. In 2013 it is down to under 49.8 percent and it is trending down year on year on year. Let us look at the age group that is most impacted by this drop in homeownership rates shall we? The age group in which homeownership has dropped the most are the people aged 30 to 39—just the people whom you would think have a little bit of capital behind them. They have done their education they are in good careers and they would be ready to buy their first home. They are also the people who are starting to have their families.So what is this saying? If we do some analysis of those numbers it means that we are going to have generation upon generation of families that do not know what homeownership looks like and that is a shame. I will tell you one further statistic. Who has the lowest homeownership rates in the country? It is Pacific people—18.5 percent—18.5 percent. That is a shame. Of that wider Pacific group the people most impacted are those from the Cook Islands and Tuvalu.What is this about? Let us have a look at a quote from the Prime Minister. He is worried about rising inequality but “said he did not believe homeownership was no longer possible for low-income families.” I have got to ask you: does the Prime Minister believe that middle-income families are finding it easy? Clearly they are not if more than half of New Zealanders cannot afford to get into their own home. The numbers speak for themselves. And then the three-headed housing monster over on that side of the House pulls its levers—the loan-to-value ratio the HomeStart incentive. What effect have they had? Virtually none—virtually none.Here we are. We collect all this data on every aspect of homeownership. Do we ever collect the data on non-resident ownership? Would it be so hard considering we have got so much information about everything else? We know that the reason that this Government does not collect data on non-resident ownership is that it will confirm what we have been saying all along. Then we get the Prime Minister transferring Andrew Little’s question in the House today about overseas ownership and the National Party MPs stand up and say that we are scared. Well where was the Prime Minister? He was scuttling off. He scuttled off. He did not want to answer that question and those members call us scared.So the question of non-resident overseas ownership of New Zealand land and homes—is that not important to the Prime Minister? I wonder about that. Or does the Prime Minister not want to be associated with the controversy? He cannot take the heat especially when we know that the sharks are circling on the other side of the House and that there are being pitches made for the new leader of the National Party. We all know that on this side of the House. We watch it every day. We watch the sharks circling; we watch the groups forming.I just want to say that this is a Government that takes no responsibility. It takes no responsibility for decreasing homeownership. It takes no responsibility for land sales. I cannot wait until 2017 when the public of New Zealand gets to answer the big question. It will be a big “F” for failure for this Government.