Logie Jan: Taxation (KiwiSaver HomeStart and Remedial Matters) Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Taxation (KiwiSaver HomeStart and Remedial Matters) Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 04 December 2014. Volume:702;Page:1189. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green):It is with pleasure that I rise to speak on behalf of the Green Party in this short call I will be taking on the Taxation (KiwiSaver HomeStart and Remedial Matters) Bill.The bill has come to us kind of out of the blue and there has not been a huge amount of opportunity to absorb the detail of it. The bill covers two key things. One concerns KiwiSaver entitlement which is supposedly what the Government is doing to help young families buy their first home as we have just heard from the previous speaker Chris Bishop. But the bill is also dealing with a change for veterans. From what I can make out of what is in the bill it is putting their payments on a parity with ACC.I am slightly bewildered as to why we have this in a piece of legislation coming to the House at this time when the previous Parliament dealt very comprehensively with a very large piece of legislation called the Veterans’ Affairs Act. It was the result of years of work by the Law Commission and Parliament spent many many hours on that piece of legislation. I am at a loss to understand why the Government is now bringing us another piece of legislation and is calling it a remedial matter to change an aspect of what was in that legislation. It is very confusing. If there is a reason that is not the Government’s incompetence then I will look forward to hearing about that within the select committee process.The Greens are supporting this legislation’s referral to the select committee partly to examine that issue. We spent many hours in this House traversing those issues and they are important. It feels very present at the moment when the Government has made the decision to send people for training to serve in a conflict environment where we know lives are at risk. People’s lives are lost and damaged by the decisions of this House and it is critical that we give respect to those people for the decisions that are made and that they have to live with.I would like to spend a little bit more time just talking about some of the discussions on housing that have come up in the debate so far. We heard from Nick Smith how the situation of housing affordability is so improved under this Government. It is extraordinary is it not? The conversations we hear in the media and the statistics I read which came out in the household economic survey just last week show that although household incomes have increased by 9.1 percent since 2012 the cost of living has increased by 11.1 percent. That has largely been driven by the disproportionate increase in the cost of housing yet that is not part of this Government’s reality. Apparently all those people who are struggling to pay their mortgage who are struggling to pay the rent and who are struggling to even get into a house in Auckland—they are just deluded. There is really nothing to see here. Everything is fine according to this Government.Again this is one of those moments when I am wondering what reality the Government is living in. Who is it talking to who is finding housing affordability improved? It is no one I am talking to I must say. Maybe I am not talking to enough bankers. Maybe I need to get out of my bubble and go and talk to more bankers and have a more balanced perspective because the people I am talking to are struggling and they are finding it difficult. When we have an affordability crisis—and I will use that word based on the experiences I am hearing—when we have a supply crisis when we have a quality crisis and when we have a security of tenure crisis is this piece of legislation going to help? The answer is no. It is not going to help the level of crisis. It may help some people. That $1000 may help some people when their income is at a certain level. That may just push them over. On that basis we are not going to be curmudgeonly and say that we will not support that in principle because even a pinch of salt is sometimes helpful to the cooking but really we need a whole lot more flavour and a whole lot more work going on in this area when it is in crisis.