Twyford PhilPHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): I want to thank Kelvin Davis for bringing this bill to the House. If the National Government had a scrap of sense it would grab Kelvin Davis' bill with both hands and run with it but it will not. I know it will not just like it will not tax speculators; it will not cut back on immigration to ease the demand pressures in the Auckland housing market; and it will not shut down negative gearing tax breaks that last year allowed property investors to write off $650 million in losses. It will not genuinely reform the planning rules or the way that infrastructure is financed even though people like Nick Smith and Bill English have been blaming the Resource Management Act for 10 years for expensive housing but have done nothing about it after 8 years in Government. It will not rewrite the rules for renting even though more than 50 percent of New Zealanders now rent but have no virtually no security of tenure. It will not apply decent modern minimum standards that would ensure that all rental properties are warm and dry even though 50000 kids go to hospital every year with preventable infectious and respiratory diseases that are caused by poverty overcrowding and cold damp homes. It will not stop the State house sell-off and instead build more State houses even though that Government is now spending millions of dollars every month housing thousands of homeless New Zealanders in motels.It will not do all of those sensible things and for that reason the National Government will not tonight vote for Kelvin Davis' bill which would implement Labour's policy—our KiwiBuild policy—of building 100000 affordable homes for first-home buyers. It will not even admit that there is a housing crisis when the census data tells us that there are 41000 New Zealanders who are homeless and living in severe housing deprivation and that our biggest city has the fourth-most unaffordable housing in the world. Apparently according to the Prime Minister Bill English when 40 Wellingtonians line up on the side of the street just to look at a rental property that is a problem of success. This bill Kelvin Davis' bill is based on the simple truth that when you have a housing shortage you build more houses and that is Labour's policy: to build more houses. And it is a policy that successive Governments in this country followed over decades. They did things like the State Advances loan policy the capitalisation of the family benefit that members actually I would bet on all sides of this House benefited from—their families their parents and their grandparents benefited from those policies that gave New Zealand the highest rate of homeownership in the Western World and housed generation after generation of Kiwi families and that is what Labour's KiwiBuild policy would do.When we change the Government we will build 100000 affordable homes—high-quality but modest affordable homes for first-time buyers. That will ease the housing shortage that is partly responsible for driving house prices sky-high and locking out a whole generation of young New Zealanders from the dream of affordable homeownership. Under this policy and under Kelvin Davis' bill we will set up a $2-billion revolving loan fund that will be spent approximately 20 times over a 10-year period and will be fiscally neutral at the end of it. The taxpayer will come out even but we will have added 100000 affordable homes to the housing supply.We are going to crank up the construction industry and run it at the top of the cycle for a decade. We are going to train thousands of young Kiwis in the construction trades. We are going to have an affordable housing authority that will cut through the red tape and provide master-planned communities with all the amenities that people need that will be full of high-quality affordable KiwiBuild homes. The National Government used to be ambitious for New Zealand but now it is tired. It has run out of steam. It has run out of ideas. It does not believe that it is the Government's job to ensure that all New Zealanders have a decent roof over their heads. They are so woefully lacking in ambition they do not even believe that a Government can build decent houses for New Zealanders to live in.