Chadwick Steve: Infrastructure Bill — In Committee 
Chadwick Steve: Infrastructure Bill — In Committee 
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Hon STEVE CHADWICK (Labour) 
: 
 I am proud to take a call on Part 4 of the Infrastructure Bill. The Committee can see by the passion of the Opposition that we feel incredibly strongly about the mechanism that the Government is employing today in this Committee stage in bringing this housing measure through by stealth. It is absolutely being done by stealth. The Government is sticking it into an Infrastructure Bill that deals in Parts 1 2 and 3 with roads motorways rail corridors and the New Zealand Railways Corporation. Then we find that Part 4 is about housing. When we are look at what is in it for New Zealanders we should be seeing something about the Kiwi dream of affordable housing. But by stealth this part repeals the Affordable Housing: Enabling Territorial Authorities Act. Labour will definitely be voting against Part 4 of this bill. 
What we are really sad about is that when we were previously in Government the Opposition spokesperson on housing at the time Phil Heatley continually railed against us saying we were doing nothing about affordable housing for New Zealanders even though we were addressing that issue. Here today we have legislation that sits on the books as enabling legislation for local authorities and by stealth it is being repealed. 
Moana Mackey 
: It’s not compulsory. 
Hon STEVE CHADWICK 
: It is not compulsory; we did not say it was something that every territorial authority across the land had to do. We said that legislation was one mechanism that might be useful in some districts. 
If I recall the situation correctly Queenstown mayor Clive Geddes said there was an amazing tourism boom going on there—at that time under Labour—and Queenstown did not have accommodation for service workers. Service workers were staying in buses tents and camping grounds. Mayor Clive Geddes said that was an embarrassment and Queenstown was a community that understood that people who worked in the service sector needed to have a decent place to live. He said those people needed to be given a start in getting their own homes; otherwise they would have to be railed or bussed into Queenstown to work in the tourism boom that was going on. That request came from the mayor of a local authority who had a sense of decency and of pride about his community and today purely out of political pique a fantastic enabling tool for local authorities is simply being repealed. I think all Government members should hang their heads in shame today because we have not seen anything else that gives Kiwis the chance to have a decent start in life or that gives families a sense of pride about having a home—a place that is warm and secure for their families. 
My husband and I started with a Housing Corporation loan. We did not get enough money together to get a deposit and without some assistance from the Government with the right incentive we would never have had our first home when our children were little. We thank the Government of the time for that. When Maryan Street was the Minister of Housing she looked at what we could do and at the tools that we could put in place as a Government to encourage people to get into their first homes. 
I put it on the record that the Human Rights Commission says affordable housing is a critical component of having an adequate standard of living and it regrets this mechanism to repeal that Act today especially without there being anything else to replace it. Age Concern has registered its “disapproval about what appears to be a process of ‘repeal by stealth’.” That is becoming the modus operandi of this Government. If the Government does not want there to be a lot of exposure of something it does it by stealth in this way. This is definitely a mechanism that the Government hopes people will not notice. The National Council of Women of Aotearoa is concerned that a really laudable section on restrictive covenants is being watered down in the revisions to the Property Law Act made in this bill. These are organisations with sensible fair approaches to life and in their opinions about what people deserve when they live and participate as workers in New Zealand. Affordable housing is the first rung of the ladder and as Maryan Street said the Government has lifted it up.