Genter Julie AnneJULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): When I first did my training as an urban planner I actually thought that there were huge opportunities across the political spectrum. I really thought that because what most people want in New Zealand I think is the same thing. They want towns and cities that have affordable decent housing that have parks and amenities that are easy to get around and that have access to shops and jobs and all the things that people need to live a good life. They want to do that in a way that protects our natural environment and enhances it because that is what is really important to people. That is all entirely possible to achieve because some of the problems our towns and cities are facing right now are actually the result of bad planning rules.So on the one hand you have the people who are maybe on the more green left side of the spectrum who want to see better public transport for people more walking and cycling protection of the environment and ensuring people have affordable housing—they want those outcomes. Then you have the people on the right side of the spectrum who claim to want to get rid of bad regulations and make it easier for developers to build what they want to build and easier for people to do business.The reality is that the solution is the same for both of these. There are a number of really bad planning rules that contain onerous regulations inhibit development cause unaffordable housing and also create terrible car-dependent environments or you know areas where you just have swathes of houses that are nowhere near the jobs that people need to get to which causes terrible traffic congestion. That means people are reliant on cars to get around; they suffer from all sorts of health problems as a result of that and we have climate change as a result of that. Here we are with this opportunity. Across the House we could probably have found a lot of common ground to make positive changes to the Resource Management Act (RMA) that would genuinely benefit New Zealanders and create the types of towns and cities that we want to live in and protect the environment. Sadly the National Government has squandered its opportunity to lead that sort of cross-party inquiry into how we could fix the Act. Rather than having a royal commission of inquiry as was recommended by one of the Act's original architects Sir Geoffrey Palmer Minister Nick Smith declined because he thought that would hold up the process too long. Well that was 2½ years ago. We are only going to have the bill passing today but the bill does not make any real improvements to the Act; if anything it makes it far more complicated.The Resource Management Act is already 806 pages. This bill is 215 pages long. So we are going to have an Act of Parliament that is close to 1000 pages when the two are consolidated—when this amendment bill passes. Nick Smith's legacy is a bill that makes the RMA incoherent and inaccessible—even more so than it already is. It is legislation that means that people are going to have to pay planners and lawyers to just even try to begin to understand and it is going to be very difficult for people to participate in the process. That I think is the fundamental problem with the bill as it is right now. It does not achieve our fundamental goal of protecting the environment and it also makes it hard for people to do things that they want to do in our towns and cities. We could actually get wins across the board and improve it in both of those ways but that is not what the Government has decided to do.When I was out campaigning in Mt Albert during the by-election housing affordability and transport were very clearly the two largest issues on people's minds. While everybody acknowledged that housing affordability is an issue because lots of people want to live in the inner suburbs Nick Smith and David Seymour will have us believe that the answer to the problem of expensive sections in the centre of the city is to enable more far-flung development hours away from where the jobs are. That is not going to solve people's transport problems. That is not really going to solve their housing affordability problems because if you have an affordable house that is nowhere near jobs and you have to spend 2 hours a day commuting and spend lots of money and every person in your family has to own their car—well you have completely undone the benefit of having a cheaper house because you are spending so much money on petrol and you are spending so much time in traffic.The issue is that in places like Mt Albert land values are very very high and lots of people want to be there. We need to find opportunities for there to be more intensive developments there but that does not mean high-rise. I am not talking about towers; you do not need that. They are just three-or four-storey—the kind of beautiful art deco developments we had before the Town and Country Planning Act. In the 1930s we actually built really beautiful apartments in Auckland that make nice homes and we could do it again but we have to change some of those underlining planning rules. The way that the Green Party proposes to do that is a national policy statement or environmental standard on urban design that would ensure that people are allowed to build townhouses and apartments in those parts of the city where more people want to live and that is going to solve our housing affordability problem. But people living in those areas need to participate in that process and feel like they are on board with it. That is what I heard out doorknocking in Mt Albert—that people are happy with more development happening in their neighbourhood if it means that their kids can afford a place to live near them but they do think that the community needs to have some say and have a proper participatory process that should be led by the Government. That is something that we would like to see.Nick Smith's ultimate straw man argument against anything the Opposition has said about this bill is that we are opposed to housing affordability because this is the only way to get housing affordability. Well I say to you Minister that there are four factors affecting housing affordability in Auckland. Your Government could have addressed pretty much all of them and this bill does nothing to address any of them. The No. 1 factor is the tax advantages that are given to property investors. Investors made up 44 percent of house sales in Auckland in the last year. So almost half of the sales are going to property investors not first-home buyers. That is because we do not have a capital gains tax. So it makes sense. If you already own property why would you not just put more of your money in more property? That is not good for our economy in the long run and it is not fair. Why should somebody who has held on to a property for a couple of years be able to keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit they have made and pay no tax on that when people going to work every day and earning a pay cheque pay tax on their income? It is just not fair.If the National Government had instituted a capital gains tax not only would we have seen less house-price inflation—because New Zealand has had the worst house-price inflation of any OECD country probably because we do not have capital gains tax and everybody else does—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I am going to ask the member to resume her seat and interrupt her and ask her to now come back to focusing on the bill. I think she has been running on capital gains for a couple of minutes now and it is not part of this bill.JULIE ANNE GENTER: OK—fair enough but there is no question that the lack of a capital gains tax is a key factor in the lack of housing affordability.The second factor is foreign capital which is driving up house prices. Places like Vancouver which have instituted a foreign-buyers tax have seen a 16 percent drop in prices. Vancouver is a very similar situation to New Zealand. Simply by saying that the problem is about supply completely ignores some of the major factors driving house-price inflation in Auckland and in the rest of New Zealand. That has to be dealt with because otherwise we are not going to solve our housing affordability problem.The third problem is of course that we have practically zero legislation protecting renters' rights. We do not have a warrant of fitness on rental properties. So the people getting away with tax-free capital gains also do not have to invest in their properties or look after their renters. Finally of course the Government should directly be increasing the supply of houses. What we would like to see is an approach to resource management that solves this intractable problem that we seem to have. It is entirely possible to do that. We could simplify the Act we could make better legislation that protects the environment and enables better public participation and we could have the Government leading master planning of neighbourhoods that enable more homes—but not just homes because it is not just homes that we need. We need homes in neighbourhoods that have access to jobs and shops and schools and parks. People do not want to live in a subdivision full of McMansions where they have to commute for hours. The market is failing to provide what we need in part because of bad regulation and in part because of a lack of central government leadership.I really believe that if the Minister and the National Government had been serious about solving the problems with the Resource Management Act they would have taken a more cross-party approach and they would have got the experts in through a royal commission of inquiry and then we would not see this bad legislation being passed by only one or two votes. There would be a broad base of support and that would provide more security to those developers and those people doing business but most importantly to the citizens of this country who care about the natural environment and who care about housing affordability and who care about the future design of their towns and cities and want to have input into it. We can do it once we can do it right and we can invest in the infrastructure we need to support housing affordability and fantastic green neighbourhoods that are good for people good for the planet and of course good for business. That is what people can vote for this September—vote for a change of Government because this Government is not going to deliver on anything. It has proved that in the last 9 years.