van Velden BrookeBROOKE van VELDEN (Deputy Leader—ACT): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's a pleasure to take this final call on my bill the Housing Infrastructure (GST-sharing) Bill.Everybody deserves the feeling of stability and security of having a home and everybody should feel that they could one day own their own home. Too often when I'm out in the community I hear people say I'm not sure I will ever have the opportunity to own my own home."—or even if they do have their own home hearing from people say "I can afford it but I'm afraid of what the future looks like for my children and for my grandchildren." and young people in their 20s and 30s saying "Maybe it would be better to move to Australia because I just cannot see a future for myself in this country." That is not good enough.There aren't enough homes for the people who want to live in them and that's why we have a housing crisis. This bill fixes that problem. It provides an incentive to councils to provide an environment for more housing development so that more people can have access to a home. It doesn't promise 100000 Government-built homes; it doesn't promise three three-storey homes on any section throughout all of our large cities. It actually asks the question "Why do we have a housing crisis?" and finds the solution.We have a housing crisis because we have an infrastructure crisis. Councils don't have the funds that they need to provide the vital infrastructure to connect new homes to the community. Currently councils have very poor incentives to allow for more building. Every new home that goes in involves cost to the existing ratepayers for water for sewerage for everything that's needed to connect that new home to the community. This bill will change that incentive.It works by allowing for 50 percent of the GST revenue on a new house to be shared with the local council that issues the consent. That provides a very good environment for approving more homes allowing for more consents and enabling builders to build without more delay. Our estimate is that it would be around $1 billion a year going back into the hands of local councils but a local council that issues more consents gets more money; it gets more funds. That's the beauty of this policy.The only time that you get a prompt service from a council is when they're issuing you a parking ticket. That's because they know that they get funds every time one of those tickets is issued. Imagine what we could do and imagine how much faster homes could get built if councils knew that there was an incentive in it for them that they got funding every time a new home got in. Builders that I talked to say that it takes longer sometimes to get the consent to build than just to build the home. We need to change those incentives.The other great part about this policy is that this transfer of funds will be a long-lasting solution to the infrastructure problem and the imbalance of costs and benefits with council. We've heard from Labour members today about the Housing Acceleration Fund. That's a slush fund that the Government gives for projects it likes where it gets councils to approach the Government cap in hand and beg for money. Imagine if councils actually had the ability to put infrastructure in their own communities where they knew it was needed rather than begging the Government for projects that the Government likes.We know that we need better infrastructure. We've seen this with the floods and with the cyclones we've seen it with the sewage on the beaches in Tāmaki. We know that councils don't have the funds so let's change that. Let's vote for this bill to go through Parliament and I urge my parliamentary colleagues to support this through the House.I think it's great that the National Party has come to the table with ACT to support this bill. It shows that we can work together on a good idea whose time has come. But I'm proud to belong to a party that has the guts to put forward good ideas. We actually look at defining the problem before standing up on a podium to make big grand announcements. This is a policy that will work. It identifies the real problem with the housing crisis which is an infrastructure crisis.So if we want young Kiwis to feel like they have a future in this country if we want more homes to be accessible and to be built in New Zealand and if we want our homes not to flood because we actually have good infrastructure we need a long-lasting enduring policy—and this bill provides that. Thank you Mr Speaker."