Street Maryan: Housing Corporation Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Street Maryan: Housing Corporation Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:671;Page:17925] 
Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour) 
: 
 I rise to speak with a great deal of interest on the Housing Corporation Amendment Bill. Housing New Zealanders is a complex business. It is a difficult area for any Government to come to terms with and I will not get into a whole lot of blaming in terms of when the need first arose. I will talk about the inaction of this Government and I will talk about some history on housing. 
We will support this bill at its first reading but I say to Mr Heatley that we are very very keen to hear the arguments that explain why policy should be taken out of the Housing New Zealand Corporation which after all deals with the praxis. Why should it be removed from the area where officials are most concerned and are at the pointy end of the provision of housing for the neediest in our community? 
I start with the fact that as my colleague Moana Mackey has alluded to in the 1990s when Tony Ryall was the Minister responsible for Housing New Zealand over 13000 State houses were hocked off. They were hocked off to private developers and to this Government’s mates. That is a story that we are seeing repeated now. It does not matter whether it is through overseas development assistance contracts to Mark Blumsky or the appointment of John Hayes to a panel; it is still doing favours for mates. That is what it is about. 
Over the 9 years that Labour was in Government we built or acquired 8600 more State houses. First of all we restored income-related rents which lifted the 68000 people who live in State houses out of poverty. By restricting the rent that they paid to 25 percent of income we could allow them to live in dignity again. 
We did not fix everything but we tried to get to grips with the biggest property bubble that this country had ever seen. Between 1997 and 2007 we saw the biggest property inflation bubble that this country had ever seen. What did we do about it? We instituted the Welcome Home Loan to assist people to get ownership of their first homes. We introduced KiwiSaver and the system that allowed a young family to capitalise on their KiwiSaver savings after 5 years so that they could have a deposit to put on a first home. 
We brought in a shared equity scheme where the buyer had a part interest and the Government had a part interest. We audited all Government property and we audited local government property to see which parts of it were suitable for residential housing and which were not. But all that Mr Heatley could do in Opposition was to say that the Labour Government wanted to build a house on the Auckland Zoo. He tried to score points in that fatuous little-boy way he does and tried to make the need of New Zealanders a joke—he tried to make the need of New Zealanders a joke. But housing is not a joke and I make no apology for getting a bit wound up about it while Mr Heatley still considers it a laughing matter. 
We had Maori housing initiatives that saw State houses being moved out of areas where they were no longer required into rural areas where they were required. I saw that process working well. I saw it working well in the Ureweras. I saw it working well with Tuhoe in charge of a housing project. 
We brought in legislation so that local authorities could ensure that 10 percent of any residential building development could be put aside for affordable housing. What has this Government done? It has scrapped it. It did not even look to see whether the legislation is now even more applicable than it was when I introduced it in 2008. We concentrated on urban renewal and on greater density of State houses on Crown land. We tried and tried to develop policy that would address the housing needs of the most disadvantaged in our society. 
Not only that; through all of the schemes I have mentioned we tried to address the issue of houses whose escalating price took them out of the range of first-home buyers. Now we have an average house price in Auckland of $580000—$580000. What is this Minister of Housing bringing to the House to answer the fact that there is not a young family alive in Auckland who can afford a $580000 house as their first home? It is this bill—this tiny flimsy little piece of legislation—which barely runs to 4 pages I tell the Minister. It is a pathetic gesture that says that the Government is going to take the policy-making function out of the Housing New Zealand Corporation and put it into the Department of Building and Housing. 
Let me give members just one example. Also tabled this afternoon was the regulatory impact statement which has been put together by the Department of Building and Housing. I feel sorry for its staff; they have a Minister who does not know what to do. They are really trying not to overreach him so they have given us a regulatory impact statement that has nothing to do with the bill. I tell Mr Heatley that the bill is meant to have a regulatory impact statement attached to it but I have here the regulatory impact statement and it has nothing to do with the bill. 
The statement is talking about the Housing Shareholders’ Advisory Group report called  
Home and Housed: a Vision for Social Housing in New Zealand 
. It talks about the group’s 19 recommendations. The Department of Building and Housing has done its best to provide a regulatory impact statement for the Minister but when the Minister coughs up pathetic offerings like this bill we know that this National Government has no interest in housing the needy. It either has no interest or has no wit or perhaps has neither interest nor wit. Perhaps it is lacking in intelligence but there are intelligent people amongst the officials who have the brains to put together some policies that could address this issue. 
This is a serious issue—this is a serious issue I tell the Minister and it deserves serious contemplation. From this Government we now have a Productivity Commission. Can members guess what its first item of business is? It is to find out why houses are so unaffordable as if it is a new problem! It is not a new problem; work has been done on it and policies have been put in place for it. This Government needs only to pick up the work that has already been done by very able officials instead of coming to the House with this pathetic piece of nonsense which may well take the policy-making function away from the praxis—in other words away from the people who know what they are doing in housing. 
Let us talk about whether policy ought to be vested in the Department of Building and Housing. I tell the Minister that that issue should be discussed at the select committee. Let us hope that members opposite engage with it because we have heard no evidence from the tiny little truncated speeches of half a dozen sentences at best offered up by that Government’s members. Those speeches are a poor apology for a statement in support of a pathetic piece of legislation that does nothing to address housing affordability. 
Housing affordability is a critical issue in this country. There are people who cannot afford to make ends meet; they cannot afford the rents out there in the private sector. The Minister cares not a jot about any of those people. If he cared about them he might think up something better than this completely inadequate legislation. Let us have the conversation about where the policy should be vested whether it should be in the Department of Building and Housing or in the Housing New Zealand Corporation. Let us have the discussion but let us not pretend that this bill is an answer to housing need in this country. This bill is no more an answer to housing need in this country than Mr Heatley is a competent Minister. It is completely ludicrous that we should be debating this bill in the context of State housing today. Thank you.