Turia Tariana: Housing Restructuring and Tenancy Matters (Information Matching) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Turia Tariana: Housing Restructuring and Tenancy Matters (Information Matching) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:631;Page:3499] 
TARIANA TURIA (Co-Leader—Maori Party) 
: 
 Tena tatou te Whare. The Housing Restructuring and Tenancy Matters (Information Matching) Amendment Bill is a sad case of “Play it again Sam.” without a happy ending. In its capacity to instruct the Housing New Zealand Corporation and the Ministry of Social Development to look at the relationship between the income support systems and tenants it takes this nation back in time. 
Fifty years ago in this House similar debates were being held on the future of housing and tenancy. In Opposition from 1949 to 1957 Te Uri o Hau and Ngati Whatua leader and politician Tapihana Paikea relentlessly highlighted the inability of the National Government to reduce Maori housing waiting lists. He described to the House the realities for post-war Maori who were living in fowl houses disused stables and market garden shacks. There is very little difference between then and now. Titiro ki muri kia whakatika a mua—those who ignore the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them. 
Paikea also drew public attention to the racial discrimination that was common in housing. Three months ago a United Nations special rapporteur reported on the significant disparities that continue to exist between Maori and non-Maori in areas such as housing. The Government’s own  
Social Report 
 revealed that housing costs in excess of 30 percent of income are more common in households that include at least one non-European adult. This House needs no reminding that people who spend more than one-third of their disposable income on housing costs are likely to be in poverty. And who are those people who spend more than one-third of their disposable income on housing costs? They are of course the poor tangata whenua Pasifika new migrants and the proletariat on low wages—those who traditionally ensured that their party the Labour Party would always stand by them. Yeah right! 
The housing profile is not the glossy Taubmans tale that Labour would lead us to believe. In actual fact the proportion of Maori households who find that they have spent more than a third of their disposable income on housing costs increased from 8 percent in 1988 to 21 percent in 2004. That is a 13 percent increase in the number of Maori households experiencing significant household costs. The only difference between then and now is that the fowl houses and the market garden shacks have been replaced by derelict cowsheds and abandoned vehicles including buses and caravans. 
So what is different? The difference lies in the remedy. Fifty years ago an exciting new scheme was introduced to respond to such disparities. The desire of whanau to own their own homes was realised through capitalisation of the family benefit. This scheme placed the opportunity of immediate homeownership before those families who were previously unable to find the deposit to assist with the cost of a house. I can safely say that the families of my colleagues from the Maori Party here in this House had their family benefit capitalised which enabled their parents to put a roof over their kids’ heads—a roof that they owned. When one’s first child turned 1 whanau were able to instruct the Social Security Department to accumulate the benefit without interest. The accumulated lump sum of family benefit was then added to the amount available for housing. 
Maori applicants who wanted to arrange their whole housing proposition through the Department of Maori Affairs could apply to that department for capitalisation of the family benefit at the same time as they lodged the application for loan finance. It was a one-stop shop. The Department of Maori Affairs dealt with the Social Security Department on behalf of the applicant rather than the applicant running the gauntlet of officials or automated call centres that might be encountered today. It was a highly successful scheme—a scheme that many of our whanau still talk about as providing them with a step towards self-sufficiency. 
The idea of self-reliance was also extended to those who might have experienced greater financial constraints such as widows or couples whose only income was the unemployment benefit. In those circumstances the department had special provisions for dealing with people’s housing needs—options that meant that people might not have had to capitalise a desperately needed family benefit in order to obtain a new home. 
Although I am resisting the tendency to say that they were the good old days I believe that it does make for fairly grim comparisons when one contrasts the policy of capitalisation of the family benefit with this latest housing restructuring legislation. The sadness is that although this nation has got richer the gaps between the rich and the poor have widened and for some families the benefits of the trickle-down theory never arrive. What has trickled down to the poor is poverty and the leaky home syndrome of the poor—a leaking roof a broken sewerage pipe polyurethane “Weet-Bix” as floorboards and inferior workmanship. 
Although in the 1950s the Government of the day was pursuing remarkably active policies to help citizens achieve self-sufficiency in 2006 these new policies turn instead on the tenants whose greatest misfortune has been to turn to the Housing New Zealand Corporation for help. The snooping surveillance strategies that will be set in place by this bill target a particular group of tenants with increased monitoring. It is unnecessary it is intrusive and it is discriminatory. The bill introduces a two-tier system of tenancy. It creates different sets of rights for Housing New Zealand Corporation tenants as opposed to other tenants. And is it not interesting that the Housing New Zealand Corporation tenants that are targeted are those receiving benefits and student allowances? The focus is not about ensuring the capacity of every citizen to belong to and participate in a caring community; the bill is purely and simply as my colleague Hone Harawira called it at the time of its introduction the “Snooping on the Poor Bill”. 
This bill does not address the critical issues of rent reviews budgeting basic home maintenance entitlement reviews or the over-inflation of rent that arises from extended whanau living arrangements. This bill does not address overcrowding it does not address increasing the amount of homeownership by the poor but it does address the ability of the State to carry out surveillance on the poor. 
It fails to answer the call from a whanau living in a four-bedroom Housing New Zealand Corporation house in Otara who came to the Maori Party for help to raise the issue of the housing crisis. In that one home 14 people are currently living including one daughter four sons two nephews and five mokopuna. The family do not want to shift as they are established in local schools and in the wider community. They do however wish to extend their home by building on a couple of sleepouts in order to accommodate all the children but the Housing New Zealand Corporation has declined their request. I ask the House how ridiculous is that. 
In the good old days that I mentioned before that whanau could have capitalised their family benefit in order to build extensions and still maintain their family home. But with this bill nothing in their situation will change except that they will be even more vulnerable to Big Brother snooping around. 
The Maori Party wanted to let this bill have a fair reading and that is why we agreed for it to go to a select committee. We wanted to be convinced that the bill was not just a new scheme to gang up on beneficiaries—to use information from one department to deny them rights from another. We wanted to be convinced that this bill was not just another part of the ongoing saga of the attack against beneficiaries but sadly the two—and only two—submissions received by the select committee did nothing to give us any confidence that the bill will make a difference for the better. The Maori Party will therefore oppose this bill as being unnecessarily invasive and another model of meddling for unforeseen purposes. It whittles away the rights of Housing New Zealand Corporation tenants many of whom are beneficiaries. It fails to address the real issues in the sector and it does nothing to achieve genuine progress for a caring community. And that we can never support.