Dyson Ruth: Unit Titles Amendment Bill — In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDyson Ruth: Unit Titles Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 19 November 2013. Volume:695;Page:15051. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): I think that some people will probably be puzzled when listening to Parliament debating this morning. It is probably not an unusual situation actually that people would be puzzled listening to our debate but it is not common that we have a bill going through all stages under urgency when there is the complete agreement of every single member of Parliament on it. So just to explain that a little more to people this bill that we are debating the Unit Titles AmendmentBill originally came into Parliament as part of the Statutes Amendment Bill which is a vehicle for making technical changes to bills that do not change the policy but where there has clearly been an error in the original drafting or a lack of clarity about the intent and every member of Parliament has to agree to the provisions of a Statutes Amendment Bill.When our select committee the Government Administration Committee was given this bill to consider we looked at the provisions in Part 27 which covered the Unit Titles Act amendments and said that there were too many. None of them on their own constituted a breach of the statutes amendment regime in that none of them changed policy—they were just clarifications of the original intent—but there were so many of them that we considered that they should come out of the Statutes Amendment Bill and be considered as a stand-alone bill. We agreed that we would support its speedy progress because we understood the desire for better clarity in the unit titles legislation so we said that we would support it going through the House in you know a reasonable fashion. We did that in May of this year. Nothing was further from our imaginations than thinking that our commitment to having this bill progressed would then mean that it would be put through all its stages under urgency It is just incompetent House time management that this is where this bill has ended up. I just want to put on the record the fact that it is very expensive for taxpayers to have Parliament sitting under urgency. In my view the term “urgency” should have some relationship with the urgent need of the matter that is before Parliament and this clearly has no such need.The other point I want to make is that we have now been waiting—New Zealanders have now been waiting—for 5 years for the Government to take some substantive action in terms of the housing issues that we face. In Canterbury as a result of the considerable population movement because of the earthquakes and the damage and the influx of a large number of people from outside Canterbury—indeed from outside New Zealand—to help with the rebuild we have a housing crisis. People are literally not able to afford rental property in their own communities and that has caused a lot of anxiety. But the Government has not done a single thing towards addressing what I am sure the whole of Parliament would love to hear about: what the Government will do to address the serious and genuine housing needs that we have in our country. So we have silence from the Government on the substantive needs of New Zealanders and here a bill that is totally agreed on by every single member is being put through under urgency. It smacks of incompetence it smacks of arrogance and it smacks of a total dislocation of this Government from the real needs of New Zealanders.