Robertson GrantGRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): Mr Assistant Chairman thank you very much indeed for giving me the call today. I want to address a couple of points that the Minister for Building and Housing raised in his contribution around the question of affordability of housing and the need for new Part 3 because he really was questioning whether or not there was a need for this and perhaps the Minister in the chair now the Hon Judith Collins might like to respond. He raised a couple of graphs with statistics up in front of the Committee that it was felt we needed to know about. Well I want to draw the Minister's attention to the fact that he has made international headlines today. It is a huge moment in Nick Smith's political career. He has made the headlines in the United Kingdom. I will just read you the first paragraph from an article in the Guardian today: New Zealand has the world's most frenetic property market with prices in Auckland now outstripping London and possibly dashing the hopes of British buyers hoping to escape Brexit." So Nick Smith is now causing a crisis and chaos not only in New Zealand but also in the United Kingdom. He has gone global with his chaotic ways. What the rest of this article goes on to tell us is that New Zealand has actually managed to be awarded a silver medal which has been upgraded to a gold medal by Knight Frank which has put together international house price rises around the world—a comparative graph. If you do it without looking at it in real terms Turkey tops the list with a 13.9 percent price increase New Zealand is second with 11.2 percent—Hon Gerry Brownlee: Get back to the part—relevance.GRANT ROBERTSON: —but if you put it into real terms it is a gold medal - winning performance from Gerry Brownlee and the National Government. The "relevance" from Gerry—the relevance question. This is about affordable housing and the world is telling Gerry Brownlee that New Zealand is getting to be the most unaffordable place in the world for housing. I do have to have a caveat. That was today's news when we got the gold medal. Yesterday we got the information from the OECD that New Zealand has the second most over-valued housing market compared with rents and the second most over-valued housing market compared with incomes. So it is silver medal winning there but gold medal winning in the latest numbers from Knight Frank which is why the Minister was wrong in his intervention when he said everything was fine and nothing needed to change because he has got a contradiction going on here. This is that on the one hand he is telling Newshub today that the Auckland housing situation is out of control but on the other he is saying that nothing needs to change. This is what needs to change: new Part 3 of the bill. Throughout this debate whenever we have managed to pry a National member or Minister off their seat to get up and talk to us they have told us that although they understand all these problems they do not need to do anything different. Well it is indeed the definition of madness to keep doing the same thing and expect the outcomes to change and that is the problem with this bill. We have just had a sigh from the Minister in the chair and I do feel sorry for her having to sit there now because Nick Smith's housing policy is so chaotic so out of control that the Government had to bring a bill here to correct various mistakes he has made and open up the opportunity to actually have a debate about things that will make a difference to the supply and affordability of housing. New Part 3 does that. The Minister who was in the chair Nick Smith came down to this Chamber and tried to deny the reason for this. It is plain to all of us on this side of the Chamber that new Part 3 fulfils that. I want to now go through new section 50U(2) to talk about the elements of what this kind of affordable housing development would look like. In particular I want to talk about the notion of the importance of houses being sold to first-home buyers and not used for speculation because that is the big difference between new Part 3 and Part 1 of this bill. Part 1 of this bill is the National Government's view on how one does this which is that you simply create these special housing areas and hope—hope for the best hope that some form of affordable housing might actually be delivered in there. You do not do anything to make that happen. You do not show any leadership. You do not recognise that there is market failure. You just hope and have faith in the great grand housing market to deliver affordable housing. It is not working it is not happening and that is why new Part 3 is necessary."