Ngaro Alfred: Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeNgaro Alfred: Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 05 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13344. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]ALFRED NGARO (National): I rise to take a call on the third reading of the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill in its final stage. I want to commend the Minister of Housing. I also just want to take a short call because much has been said by my colleagues about both the substantive process and the outcome in this piece of legislation which we think is absolutely important. The regulatory impact statement established in its overall conclusion that the special housing areas in which localcouncils or the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment would exercise more flexible resource consenting powers in conjunction and collaboration with the Government’s proposed changes to the Resource Management Act would most likely increase land supply over the short term in ways that are consistent with collaboration with those two parties. We believe that this is important.I just want to cover a couple of brief comments in regard to the submissions that we heard in Wellington and Auckland. Here are some of the things that we have heard in responding to the submitters and have amended the bill accordingly. We had submitters that were genuinely supportive of the Government’s intention to streamline planning and consenting to boost land supply and housing supply but there were some changes. In fact the Property Council in its submission said that this is not a silver bullet. The Social Services Committee made changes to strengthen the bill by clarifying how and when the powers of the bill can be used and by clarifying how the provisions of the bill will work with other legislation including the Resource Management Act.The select committee also amended the bill to specify the inadequate infrastructure which was a concern from a number of developer submitters who talked about the concern that there was not the parallel development in regard to infrastructure. So the bill has been amended to ensure that infrastructure must either exist or be likely to exist in proposed special housing areas.I just want to cover also one other key principle. I think that what was quite critical was that there was a lot of concern in regard to the override principle. We have to be up front and honest about that. Some might call it an anti-democratic approach but really it is a process and a way of ensuring that if there is no ability to come to an agreement in the sense of progress then there must be a process to move this intent on. The select committee has also heard along with the Minister and has agreed that in regard to the override principle there be included a dispute resolution process. This has been important along with Supplementary Order Paper 351 and what it includes around establishing the affordability criteria. Again it was quite clear that submitters wanted to ensure that when we talked about affordability—and I want to finish on this because I think this is important. Supplementary Order Paper 351 further improves the bill by allowing councils to consider the affordability of dwellings when recommending the criteria for qualifying developments. This is something that was quite clear in the submissions. It was something that submitters felt was very important in addressing the areas around affordability. This adds to what I think is a very substantive piece of legislation. I commend this bill to the House.