Curran Clare: Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCurran Clare: Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 03 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13194. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): Well it was pretty extraordinary listening to the debate this afternoon and before dinner particularly as more was being revealed about this bill that is called the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill which purports to be about affordable housing. We have got to the bit where there has been an extra clause added in right at the end which is trying to give a justification for and putting in a way of providing so-called affordable housing. This bit is going to be in clause 15. It was referred to by the Minister of Housing in his speech in this last part of this debate on Part 2. It is clause 15(2A) in Supplementary Order Paper 351 where an Order in Council gets to declare a special housing area and prescribes as one of the criteria for qualifying developments in the special housing area or part of it “the percentage of dwellings [in the development] that must be affordable dwellingsaccording to the affordability criteria specified in the Order in Council”. What does that mean? What does that mean? It is like a circular sentence. I have read that about five times. I think it was debated by Annette King before the break and before her the Green member Holly Walker debated it as well. It is actually an extraordinary sentence. It looks like a load of bunkum which is ultimately what this bill is.I would like the Minister if he is willing to take another call tonight to actually get up and tell us what an affordable house is what affordable housing is and what sort of percentages we are going to be looking at for this Order in Council that is going to prescribe the percentage of dwellings in a development. Are we going to be looking at the sorts of percentages that were called for by a number of submissions? For example I would like to refer to the submission by the University ofOtago’s department of public health which specifically asked for the bill to “direct decision-makers to grant consents for housing developments with a minimum of 20-30% social and/or affordable housing.” Well at least it mentions a percentage of dwellings in a development in this particular add-on Order in Council circular clause which has been a last-minute tack-on. But it would seem to me that if you are going to actually have a bill that is devoted to the principle of affordable housing then you would actually have a definition of affordable housing and you would have an explanation of how much affordable housing in the body of the bill. This seems to me to be an enormous gap.This whole bill is what you could describe as being a classic Orwellian bill because it is a bill that says it is about affordable housing but is not actually. It uses the term “accord” which in my book means partnership or more than one body working together in an equal manner. But when you actually read the bill and you debate the bill it is actually a power-grab by the Minister taking power and using that power in an inappropriate way with local authorities. We have heard earlier tonight the rather—and I hope you will excuse the Chaucerian reference—choleric contribution from the Minister. He really had a go at this side of the Chamber for what he saw was a discrepancy because we describe the bill on one hand as Draconian because it is around that power-grab and the local authorities really get to have very little say but on the other hand there is a tinkering around the edges of this so-called problem of affordable housing which this Government has not defined. It cannot define in the bill what is actually meant by “affordable housing” how many people will be able to get affordable housing or what percentage of an accord or special housing zone would actually need to have affordable housing.There have been numerous submissions as I understand it during the process—the very short process—of this bill going through the House. Submitters were not able to be given the time to properly consult and provide submissions and have the discussions that needed to be had. Instead there was a very short consultation period. During that time as I understand it most submitters asked for there to be an assurance that developments within this bill would be affordable or that there would at least be a percentage of affordable housing. Unfortunately what we have ended up with is this last-minute tack-on clause in Supplementary Order Paper 351 that says that a “percentage of dwellings [in the development] that must be affordable dwellings according to the affordability criteria specified in the Order in Council”. What are the affordability criteria? I think that probably one of the most important questions to be asked during the debate on this bill is what the affordability criteria are.The other issue that I just want to point to is the establishment of a procedure that gives some sort of cover: a dispute resolution process that must be followed before the housing accord may be terminated which is also specified in the bill. Again we go back to what this bill must do and what this bill may do. I think that it is really important that people listening to the debate tonight know again that many of thesubmitters argued very strongly that there needed to be some sort of mitigation between the power-grab of the Minister who is able to determine and make all these decisions and the ability of local authorities to have some sort of say in the process. Again it seems as if there has been a late change that institutes a dispute resolution process. But it is not something that must happen; it is something that may happen. It is very clear. People must realise that around these housing accords these so-called partnerships that in my mind should be equal because that is what the word “accord” means as far as I am aware. It is not an imbalance; it is actually more of a balance between parties. Instead of it saying that there must be a dispute resolution process what this bill does is say that there may be a dispute resolution process—so there only “may be”. As to who determines whether there is a dispute resolution process well it appears that under this bill that is really ultimately up to the Minister. Yes if there is a dispute resolution process then that must be followed before the housing accord may be terminated but the fact that there is one is not actually a true mitigation if there is a problem between the parties. I think what it highlights is that ultimately there is a true imbalance.There are many imbalances in this bill. The major thing that must be done tonight before the debate concludes on this is to determine just what the criteria of affordability are that have been inserted so late in this process. We have seen 5 years of inaction by this Government on housing affordability and the housing crisis in this country—5 years under this Government. What we have ended up with is a bill that tinkers around the edges in terms of addressing the real substantive issues and as we are seeing with so many other bills in this House—