Woods Megan: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: General Debate[Sitting date: 28 May 2014. Volume:699;Page:18409. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): Speaking of crazy-shaped coalitions let us look across the other side. National is going to have to look and see whether ACT is out of the dock before it goes into coalition negotiations but that is while it is dealing with a guy who is howling at the moon and who is not sure whether or not there has been a man put on it but meanwhile sure he has seen Elvis down at the supermarket. If you want to talk about crazy-shaped coalitions the other side of the House should look in the mirror.On 20 September New Zealanders face a very real choice. And what do they face? They face a choice between two New Zealands. They face a choice where only a few are getting ahead. The previous speaker Louise Upston talked about the confidence that she is feeling while she is out there. Well I suggest she is talking to the very few people who are getting ahead under this Government. She certainly is not talking to the 46 percent of New Zealanders who have not seen a pay rise this year but have seen a rise in their cost of living. She has not been talking to the New Zealanders who are struggling. She is not talking to the New Zealanders for whom housing is increasingly becoming a luxury they cannot afford. There is no air of confidence when you are talking about that.But New Zealanders face a very stark alternative on 20 September. They can elect a Government that is willing to tackle these problems. They can elect a Labour Government that does have a solution to the housing crisis and is not going to sit back and think some kind of magic market with fairies at the bottom of the garden is going to fix this problem. Maybe this is in between howling at the moon.Labour does have a plan. We are going to roll up our sleeves and we are going to build 100000 houses over 10 years that will be available to New Zealanders as affordable homes. We simply have to increase the supply of housing in this country and this Government does not have big-picture thinking that sees a way to do that. It justhowls that it is unachievable and it is unaffordable. Well I am sure they would have told Michael Joseph Savage in the 1930s that that was the case too. It is time to be brave and it is time to fix things. We will also re-gear our economy so it is geared to the productive sector and we will stop people investing in the housing market and driving prices up through the introduction of a capital gains tax. We make absolutely no apology for the fact that we will disincentivise absentee landlords from driving up the price of houses.On Monday in my electorate office in Hoon Hay in Christchurch it was 3 degrees outside. I had several visitors to my office that day. One visit that has stuck in my mind all week was that of three young people who came in to get a cup of tea and get warm because they were living in a car with another one of their friends. They had been living like this off and on for over a year. It is shameful that this is happening in our country. Meanwhile this is a Government that is telling beneficiaries to come to Christchurch and it will give them a thousand bucks but that it has no plan to house them. This is not good enough. But what do we have? In my electorate I have a 70-year-old constituent who at the moment is couch surfing. This is not the kind of circumstance that I want anyone to live in—let alone elders—in our community. We need to have a plan.What have we had from the National Government in response to Labour’s plan? It has had the audacity to pull the racist card on us. I refuse to listen to that kind of hypocrisy from the party of the dawn raids. I refuse to listen to that kind of hypocrisy from a party that is willing to sit by and watch the income gap in this country grow between Pacific Islanders and non - Pacific Islanders. When that Government has a plan around housing then maybe it can do something other than come up with distractions. This is a Government that has failed to do anything to address the housing crisis in this country. This is a Government that sits back and its Ministers tell us: “No we’re not going to have problems because the market is magically going to come in and put it right.” The shrieks and hysterics we are hearing are not credible and I want to start hearing from the Government members some answers to the housing crisis.