Goff PhilHon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): In order to solve a problem first of all you have got to acknowledge that the problem exists. Sadly this Government is still in denial. But in a poll that came out today 84 percent of Aucklanders say that Auckland is suffering from a housing crisis. Worse than that an astounding 31 percent of those Aucklanders say that they have contemplated having to leave Auckland because they can no longer afford to live there. Nearly a third of Aucklanders cannot afford to live in their city of choice.There is a housing crisis in Auckland—of course there is. House prices in the last 4 years have gone up by an astonishing 84 percent. We are just about touching a million dollars for the average home and the Kiwi Dream of homeownership is being denied an ever-increasing number of Aucklanders. It may be impossible to buy a home but for a lot of Aucklanders it is becoming hard even to rent a home. Rents in the last year have gone up six times faster than the rate of inflation and people are struggling to cope.Over the last year I have seen the growth of homelessness in my city to a greater extent than I have seen at any time during my parliamentary career. But what has the Government's response been? The first response articulated by the Minister of Finance was to blame the Auckland Council. The second response by the Minister for Social Housing and others has been to tinker around the edges. That is not what Auckland needs. Auckland needs a central government prepared to cooperate with the Auckland Council. It needs a central government prepared to take bold decisions not simply tinker around and not make any difference. I applaud the Auckland Council for this reason: it has grasped the nettle it has passed the Auckland Unitary Plan. It has enabled the building of 422000 additional homes in the next 30 years. What I say to the Minister is that the ball is now in her court and the court of the Minister of Finance. What Auckland needs is a Government response that addresses the supply side. We need more affordable houses.When I was Minister of Housing a third of all houses being built were classified as affordable. Now it is 5 percent—5 percent of Auckland houses are affordable. The level of increase in social housing has been pathetic. In fact we have the lowest number of social houses per capita in Auckland in 70 years. You have got to go back to the 1940s to see a time when we had a lower proportion of social housing in our city. We need the Government to kick-start affordable housing. We need the Government to provide social housing. We need the Government to build on what I thought was quite a good idea—an infrastructure fund—but to build it to a more realistic level. The amount of $1 billion is one-twentieth of the cost of the infrastructure that Auckland needs in the next 10 years if the whole of the infrastructure fund went to Auckland.Then there is the demand side. You cannot keep increasing the population of Auckland by 40000 to 45000 and not provide the infrastructure in housing and transport that the city needs. You should not be letting foreign investors buy up existing houses—only forcing the price up—rather than directing them into building new houses. You should not allow the rampant speculation where people are making hundreds of thousands of dollars by doing nothing and giving the first-home buyer a 50- or 60-year mortgage. It is not fair. You cannot keep increasing the population of Auckland unless you are prepared to invest back into Auckland the money that the Government is taking from those new arrivals in income tax in GST and in company tax. Central government is getting the revenue from the growth and Auckland City is meeting the cost of it. If Auckland fails because of poor infrastructure New Zealand fails. If Auckland fails a third of the electors of this country will not thank any party in any Government that allows that to happen.