Twyford Phil: Debate on Prime Minister’s StatementText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTwyford Phil: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement[Sitting date: 11 February 2014. Volume:696;Page:15762. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): I was worried there that the previous speaker Christopher Finlayson was slipping into a catatonic slumber as he began to speak more and more slowly as the minutes dragged on. The House is mercifully released from that last contribution.I want to talk about National’s housing crisis. The entire country is talking about it so it is right that this House talks about it too. The reason that everybody is talking about the housing crisis is that it is corroding away things that we care deeply about in New Zealand. Under the National Government first-home buyers are shut out of the housing market and homeownership is dropping more quickly than ever before. Our children are being hospitalised because that Minister of Housing Nick Smith refuses to regulate the private rental market and require a decent roof over people’s heads—at least insulation and efficient heating.Housing costs are not only squeezing middle-class families across New Zealand they are wiping out household budgets. Interest rates are about to go up. They are going to add hundreds of dollars to the mortgage repayments of families in the mortgage belt. As the Child Poverty Monitor told us a few weeks ago it is rising housing costs that are keeping child poverty high in this country. At the sharp end of the housing crisis the most vulnerable families are living in tents in sleepouts and in garages and Government agencies are even referring people to live on camping grounds.Well it is a mess. It has been brewing for several years—almost the entire time that National has been in office. National has failed to act for 4 long years. It has failed to do anything about the housing crisis. I guess that when you represent the big end of town and about half your caucus are major landlords the concerns of young struggling first-home buyers of families who are living in substandard and overcrowded accommodation and of State house tenants are not at the top of your list of priorities. I suppose given this and given that members of the National Party caucus are major property owners in their own rights it is not surprising for instance that they oppose a capital gains tax. To wait 4 long years before doing anything about the housing crisis is unforgivable.Then what do we get? Last year we got Nick “Calamity” Smith running around like a mad thing turning up at the unveiling of a new door handle pretending to be Michael Joseph Savage carrying the furniture of State house tenants into their new house. There was an endless stream of photo opportunities and little schemes like flogging off broken-down old State houses to first-home buyers at a heavy discount in provincial New Zealand where there is not a housing crisis. That is what passes for a housing policy under this Government.But it is too little too late. Not even the full force of the Reserve Bank with its loan-to-value ratio lending limits appears to be able to dampen the Auckland housing market. If you look at the front page of today’sNew Zealand Herald you will see that house price escalation is as rampant as ever under this Government. Not even loan-to-value ratios seem like they can put a dent in it. The latest data from Quotable Value shows that first-home buyers have been squeezed out of the market but that has not stopped prices rising because the speculators both foreign and domestic have stepped into the space. They are snapping up the houses and that Minister will not do anything about it.The crazy thing about the housing crisis is that the National Government had the perfect opportunity to do something about it back in 2011 as the housing crisis was beginning to bite. We had low interest rates an army of builders with nothing to do a city that needed rebuilding after the Canterbury earthquakes and an economy that desperately needed the stimulus. It would have been the perfect time for a Government-backed building programme to build houses for first-home buyers and to add to the State housing stock—instead of flogging it off as this Minister is doing—but the Government did not want to know. It wasted the perfect opportunity to head off the housing crisis as it began to bite.Why is the housing crisis such a problem? Why do the opinion polls show that New Zealanders are desperately concerned about it and so disappointed in the failure of the National Government to act? Well I think the first reason is that the housing crisis and escalating house prices particularly in Auckland and Christchurch at the moment are a major cause of the yawning gap between rich and poor in New Zealand. Under the National Government there are basically two classes of people. There are those with assets who are the property owners who are raking it in from tax-free capital gains. Most of the National Party caucus are in that category. Then there are the rest: the people who contribute to the prosperity of this nation from the sweat of their brow. They pay tax but are struggling to get ahead because this National Government is content to run an economy that rewards the speculators.And because National has allowed Auckland house prices to get away on it and because it mismanaged the roll-out of loan-to-value ratios it has failed to protect first-home buyers. The Prime Minister in the middle of last year was crying crocodile tears for first-home buyers saying that he was going to sort it out with the Reserve Bank. He said he would organise a carve-out for first-home buyers so that they would not be affected by loan-to-value ratio lending limits which have imposed a 20 percent minimum deposit on first-home buyers in this country. The National Government said that it would do something about it but it did nothing.In fact under the Official Information Act what we know is that Bill English did not ask for advice from Treasury about the effect of those lending limits on first-home buyers until after he had negotiated an agreement with the Reserve Bank to roll out those limits. What we know is that he did not even ask Nick Smith the Minister of Housing for advice in writing on the impact on first-home buyers. They simply discussed it at one of their regular catch-ups. That is how much National cares about first-home buyers. It has allowed these loan-to-value ratio lending limits to shut first-home buyers out of the market and as a result Generation X and Generation Y are becoming a nation of renters under National.But perhaps just as bad just as depressing is that the housing crisis and Nick Smith’s inept chaotic mismanagement of housing policy is blighting the life chances of hundreds of thousands of Kiwi children. When a youngster in Te Atatū in my electorate in west Auckland is living with her family and her four siblings in an uninsulated one-room garage as was reported in theWestern Leaderrecently it is inevitable that that youngster will get sick in the winter. She is not going to be able to do her homework properly when she is sharing a one-room Skyline garage with the rest of her family. When that family moves from place to place as it inevitably will—to relatives crammed into a spare room or into a sleepout or to emergency accommodation if they are lucky—that young girl is going to be moved from pillar to post from one school to another and that is why in west Auckland there are a number of primary schools that report a wildly fluctuating roll. It is because of housing insecurity. It is because of the housing crisis and this Government’s failure to do anything meaningful about it.TheBay of Plenty Timesreported today that a desperate family were forced to live in a tent for 5 weeks as they waited for the Housing New Zealand Corporation to find them a house. Housing New Zealand has apologised for that. It has apologised for the fact that it took a story in theBay of Plenty Times before it even visited the family. Housing New Zealand statistics themselves tell us that there are 77 vacant properties in the Bay of Plenty at the moment but Housing New Zealand staff could not even visit a family living in a tent in a park by a river because a house was not available to that family.So even though National’s housing crisis is widening the gap between the rich and the poor and even though it is driving families into poverty and making our children sick that Minister Nick Smith refuses to regulate the standard of housing in the private rental market. National is denying ordinary New Zealanders a decent start in life for their children. It refuses to tackle the fundamentals of the housing crisis. It refuses to tax speculators even though Auckland has become a speculators’ paradise. Speculators both foreign and domestic are driving prices higher and higher and out of the reach of ordinary New Zealanders. National refuses to build affordable starter homes for first-home buyers. It refuses to set minimum standards for private rental properties. All we get are photo opportunities tinkering with the Resource Management Act and the running down of Housing New Zealand the last part of the housing safety net for New Zealanders in need. It is a disgrace.