Twyford Phil: Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTwyford Phil: Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 21 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3531. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): The National Party is trying to brand this Budget as a Budget of compassionate conservatism. What gives the lie to that particular piece of double-speak is that the very first piece of legislation they are trying to ram through the House after this Budget is legislation that basically is designed to help them flog off State houses to their developer mates in a fire sale and at knock-down prices. It is the big pay-off. It is the big payback. Actually it is not compassionate conservatism at all; it is Cabinet club conservatism. That is what this is about: flicking off State houses to their developer mates at knock-down prices breaking up communities and throwing State house tenants out on to the street. That is the hallmark of this National Government and of what it is doing to State housing in this country.The bill is all about flexible purchasing. It is so flexible that it is all about giving the Minister the flexibility to do sweetheart deals with property developers because the Government is desperate to sell off State houses to anybody who will take them. They know that our most respected social agency the Salvation Army looked at this policy and said that it would not improve the lives of tenants. The Salvation Army ruled itself out. It said: “We do not want to have a bar of it.” and so did the Methodist Mission. Bill English was forced to concede that only by flogging off these houses to property developers would they achieve their ambition of divesting thousands of State houses worth billions of dollars off the Government books. This Government has been a bystander for the last 6 years while the housing crisis has been getting worse and worse. House prices in Auckland have gone up 87 percent in the last 6 years. The average house price has gone up by over $100000 in the last 12 months. We have got families living in cars and garages and yet the Prime Minister is deep in denial. He says that there is no housing crisis. He says that there is no risk of a bust. Things are all fine in Parnell apparently.New Zealanders desperately wanted the Government in this Budget to finally do something about the housing crisis. That is what people wanted and they have been cruelly let down today even though all the evidence suggests that for the past few weeks since the Governor of the Reserve Bank gave the Government a bollocking in this Parliament for its failure to do anything about the housing crisis it has been in a poll-driven panic to try to come up with things that will make it look as if it is doing something about the housing crisis. We have seen its half-hearted measure to target property speculators which based on Treasury analysis will be lucky if it nets a thousand speculators a year and brings in $18 million a year. It will not make a blind bit of difference to the rampant property speculation in Auckland. Today the Government announced a very good scheme to use vacant Government land in Auckland to build housing on but it was an idea that was developed—and the study for it done—in 2008 by the Helen Clark Labour Government. The National Government has been sitting on its hands for 6 years. It has done nothing with the idea while the housing crisis has been getting worse and worse. But in a panic before this Budget it dusted it off and presented it as if it were a new idea.The biggest con job of all of the failed policies the photo opportunities and the deception that is this Government’s housing policy is its State house sell-off. In the middle of a housing crisis when we have a spike in visible homelessness and in people living on the streets and in caravan parksall over the country only the National Party would think it was a good idea to sell off the houses that it already owns. It tried to dress it up for months by saying that the Salvation Army was going to buy those houses but the Salvation Army has ruled that out. Bill English does not care who the Government sells these houses to. He said that. He does not care who it sells them to; he just wants to get rid of them. This bill is about making it easier for the Minister to sell off those houses and to put in place sweetheart deals that will allow someone—anyone—to take these houses off the Government’s hands.Let us look at what has happened to Housing New Zealand under this Government. It has stripped Housing New Zealand of its powers and its functions and it has given them to Work and Income. What was once a full-service social housing agency has been reduced to the equivalent of a Government-owned Barfoot and Thompson. It is now simply a letting agency and this legislation is the final nail in the coffin. This Government has been selling off State houses all over the country without telling anybody. In the past year it has sold 50 houses in Whanganui at an average of 33 percent below the Government valuation blatantly undermining property values in that town and flogging off publicly-owned assets below their market value. That is an absolute shame.This Government has milked $500 million in dividends off Housing New Zealand in the past 6 years. Half a billion dollars—it has used it as a cash cow to prop up its fictional surplus which never arrives. It has tightened the eligibility criteria so tightly that even people who are in acute need and acute poverty cannot get on the waiting list. It has subjected hundreds of vulnerable tenants including the elderly disabled and families with young children to the needless stress and anxiety of tenancy reviews—fearful that they will be thrown out on the street by Paula Bennett. The Government has closed offices sacked tenancy managers and forced tenants to use an 0800 number. This bill now strips away the last functions that Housing New Zealand has. It is no longer allowed even to give the Government advice on social housing—that function has been taken away. Housing New Zealand is no longer allowed to do research and it is no longer allowed to evaluate the work that the Government does.State housing has a proud history in this country. It is how we make sure in New Zealand that every child growing up in this country at least gets a decent roof over their heads no matter how much mum and dad may be strugglingfinancially. It is how we make sure in New Zealand that every kid gets a decent start in life. That is why the taxpayer subsidised John Key and his mother to have a State house in Christchurch in the 1960s. The security of the roof over their heads gave the Prime Minister a good start in life. Paula Bennett benefited from the same generosity of taxpayers. Now the two of them—the worst hypocrites this House has ever seen—are willing to strip away and dismantle the very system of social support that gave those Ministers their start in life. Paula Bennett is happy to pull the ladder up. She and John Key are happy to deny a generation of young New Zealanders the same opportunities that they had in life. They do not care—they do not care.Just imagine a young John Key in today’s generation sitting on a suitcase on the side of the roadin some suburb in some city in New Zealand thrown out of the house that he and his mother called home. He is worried night is falling and he has no idea where he is going to sleep the night and no idea where they will call home. That is the reality for families all over this country. That homelessness has been made worse by the policies of this Government and by their utter failure to do anything meaningful about the housing crisis. The worst cut of all is that in the middle of a housing crisis and a housing shortage Minister Paula Bennett is dismantling the system of support that provides decent housing to the 4 percent—the most vulnerable people and the most vulnerable families in our country. What an absolute scandal.Selling off State houses breaking up Housing New Zealand and dishing out the bits to charities reducing Housing New Zealand to being no more than a publicly-owned letting agency and moving to a system of direct subsidies for landlords—that is what Bill English and Paula Bennett want to do. Their agenda here is dressed up in lots of nice words: “We want to grow the community housing sector. We’re stepping up with wraparound services. It’s all about the tenants.” It is not about the tenants at all. Because do you know what? We asked Paula Bennett under the Official Information Act what evidence she had for the policy of privatising State housing and for shifting that responsibility to non-governmental housing providers and you know what she said? She said: “There’s no evidence.” There were no documents. The Government had nothing to say. There is no evidential basis for this policy but that Minister is happy to preside over the dismemberment and the dismantling of Housing New Zealand—the very organisation that puts a decent roof over the heads of the most vulnerable families in this country.