Bishop ChrisCHRIS BISHOP (National—Hutt South): Thank you very much Madam Speaker. Well that was a typically self-congratulatory speech by the Hon Willie Jackson but we've enjoyed his kōrero in the Chamber this year and I want to wish him and his whānau a merry Christmas. It's been good sparring with him across the House.This is an extremely important bill and I want to congratulate genuinely the Minister for bringing it to the House. Minister Twyford every now and then delivers very erudite and excellent speeches about urban spatial economics and our land markets and the most recent one was on 7 December. He gave one to The New Zealand Initiative a while ago which I read and I enjoyed. It sounded like a speech Bill English would've given but I really enjoyed it. I want to quote him because he's absolutely right: The argument I want to make to you is that generations of urban land use policy have lacked a decent grounding in economics. The consequences of that have been disastrous. And if we want to turn it around it is going to take bold reform and policies informed by an understanding of urban spatial economics." There's some stuff in there and about the speech that we wouldn't necessarily agree with. There's some stuff that the Labour Party campaigned on that we wouldn't necessarily agree with but the fundamental underpinning of the Minister's speech was around how poor-quality urban land-use rules largely driven by central government and enforced by local governments have created artificial scarcity that has driven up the price and cost of housing and that we are now grappling with as a community.Let me tell you in the Hutt Valley because we have not built housing quickly enough over the last 10 years when we had that very sharp population spike from about 2012 and 2013 onwards—sometimes driven by immigration but actually driven by internal migration from Wellingtonians forced out of their own over-expensive housing market moving to Lower Hutt to escape the high prices in Wellington—we had a population shock. For 30 years Lower Hutt's population was about 100000 people it bubbled along around that; within five years it was 108000 people and housing supply did not keep up. Now social housing supply did not keep up and I put my hand up and say that the former National Government did not build quickly enough in Lower Hutt but we are also not building quickly enough now in terms of social housing. But the solution as I always say to people in the Hutt is we've got to free up housing rules and density restrictions in the city that make it difficult to build houses.The point I always make is that everything in the housing market is connected. If you make it difficult to build houses and you put an artificial constraint on the number of houses in a city when there's a population shock unsurprisingly rents rise and we've seen rents rise $80 a week in the last two years. When rents rise you force more people into social housing and when there's a shortage of social housing and it's as difficult for the Government to build houses in the Hutt Valley and other parts of the country as it is for the private sector you get more people seeking social housing places and they miss out because there's a queue. At the moment in the Hutt Valley the social housing waitlist is 640—640!—families or clients on the register waiting for a house and that number has quintupled in the last two years. Of course the consequence of people being on the social housing register is real homelessness for the first time in a generation in the Hutt Valley.So this bill is really important and as I said at a public meeting in Wainuiōmata last night to discuss transitional housing in the Hutt Valley in Wainuiōmata the solutions to our housing problems in New Zealand are going to be multifaceted and they're going to take a long time. It involves the State building more social housing. We all agree on that. It involves freeing up our urban planning rules which the Minister is working on alongside David Parker but critically we need to make it easier to finance infrastructure developments as well. And that's why this bill is really important and I am pleased to see it come to the House. It builds on some of the work that National started in Government. It builds on the work done at Milldale which I think everyone agrees has been very successful. And it builds on the work that we've done with the special purpose vehicles.Time doesn't allow me to go into all the details but I am really looking forward to considering the bill at the select committee. I commend the Minister for introducing it and we look forward to working with them as we get on with it."