Shearer DavidDAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert): Ka nui te mihi ki a koutou. A new word entered our lexicon in the housing debate in the last week. It was the c" word. It was the "c" word. It was not "crisis". It was "comprehensive"—comprehensive. That was the word that the National Government trucked out after going to all its focus groups to explain its plan. Most people in New Zealand would think that it was in - "comprehensible" that there was not a comprehensive plan in place before this. They could not comprehend why there was not a comprehensive plan in place. After all our houses in Auckland are about to hit a million dollars on average—a million dollars on average. Just think of that. Back in the days when John Key was in Opposition he called the housing issue at the time a crisis. That was a small pimple compared with the enormous boil that needs to be pricked in this situation right now which we have got ourselves into under this Government. We have got a million-dollar average house price in Auckland. I came across a young couple this week who have been trying to find a house. They put an offer in and they still have not heard. They put an offer in for a very average house in Glen Eden and they are really hoping they will be able to pick it up for about $900000. It is unreal. I mean how do you find the money to put a deposit down for a $900000 house? National Government you have simply priced young people out of the housing market. You can see the panic in the Government members' eyes when they come out with a word like "comprehensive" and it was used 14 times in question time on Tuesday—14 times. Clearly the focus groups have been saying: "You've got to get that word out and try to persuade everybody that there's no crisis; all we're doing is trying to comprehensively fix the problem." Well the only thing that will happen is that we change the definition of "comprehensive" to "piecemeal" to "ad hoc" and to "bits and pieces". Every single week Dr Smith comes out with a new initiative that is somehow wrapped up in this definition of "comprehensive" and on the weekend it was a billion dollars' worth of infrastructure programming. When he divides that by five cities and then applies it to Auckland it is going to make virtually no difference whatsoever—virtually no difference. Instead what we are going to see is the house prices in Auckland continue to climb. I notice today that Dr Grimes is already predicting that house prices could fall by 40 percent. Not only are we talking about houses that are out of the reach of every average Kiwi out there to try to get into but we are also creating the conditions for a bigger crisis which is a collapse in the housing market because we know that for 44 percent of all houses being bought and sold within Auckland it is being done by speculators—by speculators.Alastair Scott: Investors—always has been.DAVID SHEARER: And when you have that amount of—they are speculators. They are the people who bought the house about a year ago and who are now selling it for $150000 more. They put that in their back pocket and I can tell you that that is the easiest—the easiest—way to make $150000 if you have got the capital to be able to invest in the first place. That is why so many foreign speculators are coming into New Zealand and doing the same thing and probably laundering their money at the same time—it has got a double whammy for them. They can launder money and make an exceptional return on their money. Our housing market should not be the pork bellies on the New York stock exchange. They should not be there just so that overseas speculators are able to come in and buy up our houses when in fact they should be for New Zealanders."