Ardern JacindaJACINDA ARDERN (Labour): I want to start by just referring directly to what this amendment does because my colleague Mr Seymour seems confused. In his contribution he seemed to claim that first the Government cannot deliver housing despite all the evidence and it is the private sector that has always delivered housing. Well we have tried that. It is not working. That is why we are here. That is the first point. The second point: this amendment is about delivering the KiwiBuild plan. If Mr Seymour knew anything about the KiwiBuild plan he would know it is about partnering with private developers in order to deliver affordable housing which is what most of the special housing areas that the Government has unsuccessfully delivered attempted unsuccessfully to do—something that Mr Seymour is voting in favour of. So what he seems to be voting against I think as far as I can tell is scale. He just does not want to do that many affordable houses or is it just simply that the Labour Party has put the idea forward and it is petty politics? Either way this amendment is the one thing that will actually fulfil the policy goals of this bill.If you go to the general policy statement in the bill it says: The Bill amends 2 Acts that relate to increasing the supply and affordability of housing." It does not really do either. If you go over to the second page it says: "The purpose of the Bill is to support the wider Government programme of work to increase the supply and affordability of housing and to maintain the momentum of strong growth in new home construction." The only place where there is momentum is in house prices. That is the only place where we have momentum if you are asking not just in Auckland but anywhere in the country. We are not delivering houses at the pace we need.This amendment fulfils the general policy statement of this bill. Without this amendment this bill really is hollow. Just because you say it it does not make it true. This bill does not have the substantive amendments required.Coming to some separate clauses I want to start with—because there has not been much discussion about it—proposed clause 50U "Corporation"—as in Housing New Zealand—"to manage affordable housing development". This is the way that we are delivering the KiwiBuild plan. But I think what is really important here is that we are putting parameters around what the corporation has to deliver because unlike the special housing areas there has not been necessarily the impetus to ensure that we are increasing stock.Let me give you an example: Spring Street in central Auckland was designated a special housing area. It is a group of pensioner houses—one-bedroom units—of roughly 40 units all currently held by Housing New Zealand. It decided that this was prime real estate where you could build more housing. So there was a tender process where Housing New Zealand decided that it would sell the land to a private developer but that private developer would only be required to then lease back to Housing New Zealand—how many units?Louisa Wall: How many?JACINDA ARDERN: Forty—the same amount we already had. What an absolutely ridiculous proposition. We would put ourselves in the position of selling prime real estate—and we know that because of the way Housing New Zealand operates it will be under market value—to a developer to develop. It could put on however many private dwellings that it chooses to make a quick buck none of which are required to be affordable and then lease back at top dollar to Housing New Zealand the same number of units it already had. That is pure stupidity—pure stupidity.So it makes absolute sense that we have proposed clause 50U here in this amendment which not only ensures that the houses that are completed are affordable but also we are ensuring that they are not used for speculators and that we are making sure first-home buyers have access to those units.The other thing that is important and I want to note in this amendment is of course that we are focusing on speed and affordability. The average house that is currently being built in Auckland is 200 square metres. By default it is not affordable. So having someone who goes into the market with the express purpose of building houses that are smaller—smaller yes but the average house built in the UK now is 90 square metres—is what we need and it is not what the market is providing Mr Seymour. We let the market try. It failed. We have the worst rate of homeownership in 50 years. This amendment Mr Seymour is about turning that around and actually doing what the bill claims it is trying to do."