King Annette: Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeKing Annette: Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 21 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3536. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon ANNETTE KING (Deputy Leader—Labour): Mr Speaker—Jono Naylor: One of you do it.Hon ANNETTE KING: Well at least I have got something to say. That member—all he did was pick up the research notes and make a speech that everybody else has made. I have to say when I listened to the speeches—1 minute 27 seconds 2 minutes 3 minutes—that is what the contributions have been tonight.I have to say that this is a very disappointing debate from the National Party. You see we have before us tonight a piece of legislation that is not going to go to a select committee that the public of New Zealand will have no input into at all. This House costing thousands of dollars a minute is required to scrutinise legislation on behalf of the public when urgency is taken. We would expect that a Government that is so proud of the legislation that really loves the legislation would stand and make a 10-minute speech on what it means what it is going to do and why it is so proud.Tim Macindoe: We’ve talked about that.Hon ANNETTE KING: But what we are getting—apart from the interjections from the senior whip who seldom gets to his feet but makes his speeches from his backside—I have to say from the C-team National has rolled in tonight are 1-minute and 2-minute speeches 1-minute and 2-minute speeches. That is an outrage to democracy. It is an outrage that those members cannot get on their hind legs and make a speech about a bill that they are so proud of. I have to say Minister Bennett that you have not told us why there needs to be urgency. We got an explanation from “Mr Doozy” up the back. “Mr Doozy” up the back told us—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! I know that the member probably does not take offence to that but his name is Doocey.Hon ANNETTE KING: The missing “s”—the missing “s”. Let us put the missing “s” back in Mr Doocey and say that he told us why this bill needed to be passed under urgency. And why does it need to be passed under urgency Minister? Because tomorrow—believe this—3000 people will be housed. If we pass this tonight we are going to have 3000 people housed tomorrow. Let us go back to our electorates and see how many people get a house tomorrow because we took urgency on a bill that does not need urgency Mr Doocey with an “s”. It does not need urgency. It does not.Why not let the people of New Zealand have a wee say on the bill. I know why. Because maybe the thinking public of New Zealand will say: “What are you doing this for? What is the reason for this bill? Why do you need this bill apart from the fact that you want a creative way to sell off State houses?”. National does not want the people coming in who may well be State house tenants telling it what they think about this bill so it is ramming it through under urgency tonight with this pathetic excuse that it has to do it because 3000 people tomorrow could get a house.Well I have to say tell me how that is going to happen with this bill. How exactly is this bill going to provide 3000 extra houses? In fact how does selling off State houses actually create more houses? How does that work? How does selling off State houses create more houses for social housing? You see National members cannot answer the question because it is nonsensical. What it is doing is absolutely nonsensical.I think the Minister really put it into perspective for all of us tonight when she was speaking and she let the cat out of the bag when she was talking about State house tenants. She called them cohorts. That is what they are; they are cohorts those State house tenants—just a figure just a number just a statistic. They are not people who need to be housed because they are the most vulnerable we have. We do not believe—Chris Bishop: Outrageous!Hon ANNETTE KING: No it is not Mr Bishop. You totally agree with me. I can tell by the look on your face. You know it. If there is one person over there who is not in the C-team it is Mr Bishop. In fact I predict that he is going to be in the A-team pretty fast indeed.I have to say that I think National members are the Neros of New Zealand because they have been fiddling away with house prices and house policy for 7 years. They have been fiddling fiddling around the edges actually having to increase their fiddling every year as we put pressure on them by saying: “You are not housing New Zealanders. You are not treating New Zealanders fairly.”So as they have been fiddling house prices in Auckland have been going up and are going up at $1000 a day. Do you know that the increase in a month is more than a pensioner gets in a year in their pension? That is how fast the house prices in Auckland have been going up. Unfortunately if they are one of those pensioners whose house value is going up they will not be able to afford the rates if they are on a pension.Then we have the Government’s new approach to housing. It is going to free up Government land. Well we said that 7 years ago. In fact we said it at Hobsonville. And let me remind members opposite what their Prime Minister who was then Leader of the Opposition and member for the area where Hobsonville is said about the use of Government land to provide affordable housing. Can anyone remember? Go back and have a look. Just put it into Google. You will find it. He said it was economic sabotage—economic sabotage—Chris Bishop: Doing it now.Hon ANNETTE KING: —well done Mr Bishop; he had it—to build State houses on land like Hobsonville.Now it has got this idea which is 7 years old that it will open up some Government land and build houses on it. But what we know is that there will not be many that will be affordable because there is something like 17 in Hobsonville out of the thousands that have been built. Even the 17—if the people in them were to sell them today—would no longer be affordable houses. They were already over $400000 and climbing.In this new policy which was made up in the last few weeks—and we know that for a fact—rushed through put together in urgency and in a panic we are not told how many will be affordable or what affordable means. You know it was only a few weeks ago that I said to Steven Joyce on our much listened to weekly radio show on Newstalk ZB: “Why don’t you use Government land to increase the supply of land in Auckland?”. I said: “The Government owns more land than anybody else.” And do you know what the Minister did? He pooh-poohed the whole idea. He pooh-poohed it.Chris Bishop: Oh!Hon ANNETTE KING: You see it was before the Government made the decision to do it Mr Bishop. That is why he pooh-poohed it. I will ask him next week on my much listened to radio show what he now thinks of the idea of releasing Government land. He will no longer pooh-pooh it; he will say it was his idea no doubt. In fact he thinks he has most of the ideas in the National Party.You have to say that the whole housing area and these special housing zones that we have got as my colleague and friend Phil Twyford said are just a sham. They are just some sort of paper transaction that the Government is having saying: “Look we’ve got these special areas and there are 170 houses that have been built.” And then it says: “But what about all the consents that we’ve got going through?”. Well I do not know whether it has worked it out but people cannot live in consents. They actually are not houses; they are bits of paper that are shuffled around and maybe one day something will happen.So what has it done in this space? Well I like one of the things it has done. It brought in the knock-down nails policy. It got the cheap nails coming in which were going to reduce the cost of houses by $3000 a building. Big deal—big deal—because within 3 days the benefits of the knock-down nails were all gone.When you look at it it has done nothing with the Resource Management Act. We offered to assist the Government in passing the Resource Management Act around housing. Oh no it did not want to do that because it wanted the whole big enchilada. It wanted the whole lot. It was not prepared to accept a deal where we could have helped it with changes to the Resource Management Act in housing.I have to say that the Government still has not learnt that if you do not provide warm dry affordable housing you are going to end up with diseases like rheumatic fever. Let me just end on this note: it has not increased the number of houses. It has not made those houses warm and dry for many people. Today to top it all off it is stopping the funding for the rheumatic fever programme.