Salesa JennyHon JENNY SALESA (Minister for Building and Construction): Thank you so much Madam Deputy Speaker for this call in the general debate. I'd like to first of all congratulate the Minister of Finance the Hon Grant Robertson for Budget 2018 that has just been passed. One of the earlier speakers from the opposite side of the House said that we are apparently a don't worry be happy" Government. I absolutely refute that we are a "don't worry be happy" Government. We are absolutely doing a lot. The do-nothing approach—especially to housing—was what the previous Government did. They just sat on the side did nothing and hoped that the market would somehow fix the housing crisis. We are a Government that is moving at great pace to address a whole lot of issues that we inherited. In terms of housing we came in and we inherited a national housing crisis. We are building houses. We are going to be building 6400 State houses over the next four years. One of the first things we did over the first few months of our Government was we stopped the sell-off of State houses. During the middle of a housing crisis the previous Government kept on selling off State houses. It makes absolutely no sense to keep on selling off State houses. They sold off over 6000 State houses in the middle of a housing crisis. We came in and we found out that we are not just short of a few thousand but we are short of 71000 houses—Hon Peeni Henare: How many? Hon JENNY SALESA: —in all of Aotearoa New Zealand. We are short of 71000 houses. We're short in Auckland—our largest city—of 45000 houses. It doesn't take just nine or 10 months to build up 71000 houses. So we stopped that right away within our first few months. Aotearoa New Zealand according to the OECD—another thing we inherited from the previous Government—is No. 1 in the rate of homelessness when compared to the other OECD countries thanks to the previous Government. So instead of selling off State houses we're building State houses. In the last Budget we put aside $234 million to build 6400 extra State houses. We also put aside for the winter payment $100 million. The sad thing is that because we have such a high rate of homelessness there are things that we need to do in terms of emergency housing and transitional housing before we can actually put all of these thousands of our families and thousands of our whānau into houses. We are a country that is caring and compassionate. Everyone has a right to have a roof over their heads and I'm glad to say that I'm in a Government that has housing as one of our No. 1 priorities. We put aside $169 million for transitional houses—that's 2155 transitional housing places. KiwiBuild homes: we are in a country where 60 years ago in terms of homeownership if you had a professional job—say you were a teacher married to a nurse for instance—and were working full-time you would be able to afford to buy a house. You could save and then actually make a deposit on a house and move—not you Madam Deputy Speaker I am sorry but professional folks out there. But the reality is that in 60 years we're now at the lowest rate of homeownership. That is one of the reasons why we as a Government are not a do-nothing Government that hopes that the housing market somehow will right itself. No we've come in and we've said "We need to address this." We've put aside over $2 billion for KiwiBuild homes and we'll be building a thousand KiwiBuild homes this year 5000 next year and 10000 the year after. The other thing that we also inherited from the previous Government was a lack of skilled people. When we came in we know now we were short by 30000 skilled people in building and construction. But this is an issue that industry and Auckland Council sat down and talked about in 2011 and 2012. They actually came up with a detailed report presented it to the Minister at the time and they said "We predict that if you do nothing you are going to be short by 32000 skilled people by 2018." Guess what? We are short by 30000 skilled people today. As a Government we are doing something about that: nine Ministers with nine ministries. We're actually making sure that we train up our own people so that we can build up our own houses in Aotearoa New Zealand. In the short term we're looking at overseas skilled people but in the long term we must train our own to build up our own country. Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker."