Salesa JennyHon JENNY SALESA (Minister for Building and Construction): Thank you so much Mr Speaker for this opportunity to contribute to the general debate. I would like to acknowledge my colleague the Minister of Housing and Urban Development the Hon Phil Twyford and commend him on the tremendous amount of work that he has put into the area of housing.We came into Government 12 months ago. We were faced with many challenges and housing is one of those challenges that we faced. We were faced on the lower end with the highest rate of homelessness when compared to other OECD countries and when we came in in terms of the housing portfolio the honourable Minister of housing has several things that he's doing.One of the things that the right honourable Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and the Minister of housing announced in May of this year was an additional $100 million to house those who are homeless to ensure that there are more housing places for those who are needing emergency housing and transitional housing and for those who are needing to be housed in what we call Housing First. There are so many of our folks who are homeless who also have mental health issues or addiction issues and they need to be housed first and to have all the other social services surrounding them.One of the things also that we're facing is we're told by a report by Counties Manukau District Health Board that in South Auckland alone in the area that they serve there are over 110000 people who are living in overcrowded conditions. Now the housing crisis was one that took nine years to develop and it was not developed under our Government. It took more than nine years to develop—the housing crisis—and it will definitely take more than 12 months to address.One of the things that I'm really proud of over the weekend which is historic for our coalition Government was when we went to Papakura and we were seeing some of the first families go into a KiwiBuild home because when we're addressing housing not only are we looking at addressing homelessness but we're also ensuring that we are assisting families to get into affordable housing. When you see families who say only 10 or 20 years ago would have been able to afford a mortgage families who are IT workers IT developers teachers those who are—one of the ladies who is a doctor with a partner who is in marketing told us that they only have a hope of owning a home now because they feel like they've won the lottery with KiwiBuild. Now what is wrong with that picture?The fact is that in Aotearoa over just a short period of time we have professional families who are not able to get into homeownership. That is absolutely wrong. We have the largest city Tāmaki-makau-rau—Auckland—where homeownership is over a million dollars.What I can't understand is the fact that as a Government we've come in whereas the Opposition now the previous National Government—when they were in Government and we were in Opposition we were making speeches from that side of the House saying that there is a national housing crisis. So many of the folk that were on this side of the House denied denied and denied that a housing crisis even existed. Let's not forget that for so long who was in Government over those last nine years and denied that there was even a housing crisis?I go back to around about April or May of 2016 where in South Auckland and Ōtara we were covering families that were living in cars and living in garages at the time—families that we are seeing right across Aotearoa New Zealand now. Even then when we showed families who were living in their cars and when we went to parks and there were half of those people who were living in cars and in parks who were working full-time the people that were on this side of the House at that time still denied that we had an issue with housing.We've come in as a Government and we're saying that we'll build more houses. Yes we're building more State houses because when we do not have enough houses we build houses to make sure that people are housed. The National Government when they were in Government they sold off State houses—sold off over 6000 State houses. We are building 6400 State houses because we need to house our families who need to be housed. Thank you Mr Speaker.