Cunliffe David: Social Housing Reform (Transaction Mandate) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCunliffe David: Social Housing Reform (Transaction Mandate) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 17 February 2016. Volume:711;Page:9133. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn): I take a short call here in this clauses 1 and 2 “Title” and “Commencement” debate on the Social Housing Reform (Transaction Mandate) Bill. Let us call it the “Social Housing Transaction to Treat People Like Commodities Bill” because that is what it does. I would like to acknowledge my colleagues who have spoken: Jacinda Ardern with her passionate plea about treating people as part of communities; Sue Moroney who talked about her community of Hamilton and how this will affect it; and my west Auckland colleagues Carmel Sepuloni and Phil Twyford who have spoken so eloquently and passionately about the way that this iniquitous bill will affect the real people of west Auckland our constituents.I want to take a couple of minutes to talk about my constituents. Housing is the No. 1 presenting case problem in my electorate and it is not hard to understand why. There are not enough places for people to live in and they simply cannot afford to pay the rent let alone buy a place to give security to their children and their families. It is that simple. At very best this bill which sets up draconian powers for Ministers to transfer at the stroke of a pen vast numbers of State houses to private hands—offshore hands at that—does nothing positive. It will not build one house. It will not home one west Auckland or New Zealand family. That is at the very best. At worst what it will do is it will strengthen the profit drivers for the new owners who will cut corners who will put on pressure who will put on rents and who will put people out of their homes and displace them out of their communities.The fact is the Government already makes a huge dividend off Housing New Zealand and that is shameful. Housing New Zealand used to be a social housing provider. It was there to provide a safety net for people who could not afford it themselves and for whom hard times or bad luck or sometimes bad decisions or ill health or incapacity meant that they were in trouble. It was a leg up and a way back. Now it is a profit-making body nominally owned by the State and the Government wants to go the whole hog treat people as possessions and turf them into the hands of foreign property developers. It is iniquitous but it lays bare the drivers of this Government. Somebody said charitably that Government members know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. They reduce people to commodities. They reduce people’s lives to saleable units. They take an asset that has taken generations to build up and propose through this bill to give two Ministers the power to transfer that public asset into private hands. It is the biggest privatisation we have seen in decades.New Zealanders need to wake up and understand that once it is done it will be extremely hard to undo because amongst other things under the Government’s Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement we will stand to be sued by those private investors if they can argue that they have been expropriated of the property rights that they are being gifted by the stroke of this pen. This bill is an outrage. That is why the Labour Opposition with a very full bench is here debating it for as long as the Committee will let us because another hour without this bill in force is another good hour. Another day without this bill in force is another good day for vulnerable New Zealanders.The people of New Lynn have housing very much on their minds. Over summer we had a group of people sleeping rough in the bush just behind the main street of our town centre. It has just taken place that we have been able to move those people on—move them into family homes; move them in some cases into temporary accommodation. We are now dealing with the aftermath which is a rise of related or unrelated street crime around that area because when you have homelessness other problems follow.You know what the Government’s solution has been? To trumpet the fact that it was voting a whole—wait for it—$2 million for the whole of Auckland for emergency housing. But it will not tell us what it is for yet and it will not tell us how much is going to west Auckland. What is it going to buy with $2 million? A shack in Ponsonby? Or will it give a quarter of it to west Auckland and buy one garage in Kelston? Or is it just going to bypass that and buy tents and hand out canvas? Maybe that is what the $2 million is for because it is nothing more than a public relations con. It is manipulating numbers to manipulate public opinion and when the Salvation Army has to call out that despicable Government for that kind of manipulation—