Twyford PhilADDRESS IN REPLYDebate resumed from 8 November.Hon PHIL TWYFORD (Minister of Housing and Urban Development): It's morning in New Zealand. It's a new day and our great country has a new beginning. In the last nine years this country has changed a great deal and not all for the best. Ours is a great country still. There's a lot about New Zealand to be proud of but we on this side of the House know that it can be so much better. No one—no parent—in this country should have to raise their kids in a Skyline garage or in the back of a van. No one should have to give up the dream that has always been such a part of our heritage in this country—our legacy—that if you work hard and save then you will have the possibility of owning your own home. Nobody should have to beg for their next meal. That kind of inequality is degrading to us all. In her Speech from the Throne the Governor-General said that this will be a Government of inclusion and that everybody in this country is entitled to be treated with respect and dignity. Every child growing up in New Zealand should have the opportunity to live the best-possible life. The Governor-General said that this will be a Government of transformation. We will look for good ideas wherever we can find them. We will tackle the root causes of the housing crisis that plagues this country. Nine years of spin and denial are over. The Governor-General said that this will be a Government of aspiration. We want New Zealand to be—Hon Simon Bridges: Hey that's our word. You give my word back. Hon PHIL TWYFORD: We have no qualms about being ambitious for this country because those members campaigned on being ambitious for New Zealand nine years ago and what did they do? Tinkering and drift while the problems and the challenges got worse and worse and worse. Housing is a top priority for this Government. We are ambitious for this great country of ours and we make no apology for that. We are going to take immediate action to address the homelessness crisis. As housing and urban development Minister I do not want to be here in six months' time telling the House that we're spending $90000 a day on motels. That was not a housing policy; that was an apology note to the nation for those members' total failure to do anything meaningful about the housing crisis. We will tackle the systemic problems in the housing crisis we will stop the sell-off of State houses and we will pull all the stops out to provide decent emergency and transitional housing for the 40000-odd New Zealanders who find themselves homeless today. We campaigned on it. The New Zealand First Party the Green Party and the Labour Party are all opposed to the former National Government's sell-off—the bulk sell-off—of State houses in the middle of a housing crisis. We campaigned on it and in Government we are going to deliver that. And not only are we going to stop the sell-off; we are going to build thousands and thousands of extra State houses. Our KiwiBuild programme is our flagship initiative to address the falling rate of homeownership which under the past Government saw the rate of homeownership drop to the lowest point since 1951. This side of the House believes that homeownership is something that's worth defending. It is not acceptable for half of the population to be denied the opportunity through their lives to build an asset that would allow them to borrow against it to start up a small business to give their families the permanence the independence and the dignity of owning their own home and the stability to raise a family—to know that you're doing the best you can for your children to give them the start in life that they deserve. When housing goes wrong as it did woefully and dramatically under the last Government everything else goes wrong with health and education. When families are denied the stability that they need—when families are living in the rental market because they cannot afford to get a deposit together because they can't keep up with rising prices and they have to move out of that rental house every year and find somewhere else to live and move across town—what does that do for the education of those young people in that family? It is the seeds of social disaster. We are not content with the tinkering and the dribble of housing that we have seen in the last few years as this previous Government struggled to catch up with the problems that it had allowed to get so terribly out of control. We are going to change the game and in the next 12 months we will legislate to establish an urban development authority that will cut through the red tape and drive forward with at-scale master-planned new communities; not the splattering of poorly designed and planned houses that we saw under the special housing areas of the Hon Dr Nick Smith. Hon Dr Nick Smith: Like Hobsonville. Hon PHIL TWYFORD: We want to see well-planned—yes like Hobsonville. That was the brainchild of the Helen Clark Labour Government and it's the only decent housing development apart from Waimahia that we saw for nine years of the last Government. Hobsonville is a fantastic example. We will establish as per the coalition agreement with our partners the New Zealand First Party in this Government a housing commission to drive forward at-scale development and deliver the dream of affordable homeownership that young Kiwi families desperately need. We acknowledge that there are terrible constraints of land and workforce which is the legacy of the last nine years of this Government. We've inherited a crisis. We know that. We understand that. The first thing that jumped out at me from the briefing for the incoming Minister of Housing and Urban Development was that the shortfall of housing under that former Minister over there the Hon Dr Nick Smith has now got up to 45000 houses in our biggest city—45000. Is it any wonder that we see the worst overcrowding that this country has ever seen since the Great Depression? That is the legacy of the last National Government—worst overcrowding. A 45000 shortfall—that's why house prices have rocketed. They have rocketed to a million-dollar average in Auckland and that is why homeownership rates have been on the slide so dramatically. We know there are land constraints. That is why it is our policy to do the thing that the last National Government only ever talked about. We are going to genuinely free up the planning rules. Our policy is to get rid of the urban growth boundary and to usher in a smarter better planning system that does long-range spatial planning that protects areas of special value. We're going to do that—Hon Judith Collins: With the Greens? Hon PHIL TWYFORD: —not just talk about it for nine years. The Green Party voted for that policy twice in the last year when the National Party voted against that policy. So I suggest to the member opposite that she go back and check the National Party's policy on that and ask her colleagues why they talked about it but never did a damned thing about it.This party knows that as well as freeing up the planning rules we are going to fix the broken system for infrastructure financing and I want to acknowledge the tentative belated efforts of the Hon Steven Joyce to set up a special purpose vehicle to try to find a new way of financing urban infrastructure. It's just that having the Government write a cheque every six months is no serious fix for a broken infrastructure financing system. We need a pipeline of ready infrastructure finance. That is the task that we are going to grapple with in the coming months. We're also going to tackle the demand side factors that Government refused to even acknowledge were a problem for so long. We're going to ban foreign buyers from buying existing homes in our first 100 days. We're going to push the brightline test out to five years just as Treasury advised the former Government that they should and we are going to change the laws around negative gearing and the tax breaks for property investors that turbocharge property speculation. This Government is serious about fixing the housing crisis that we have inherited.