O'Rourke DenisDENIS O'ROURKE (NZ First): I want to talk about the housing crisis. The Government does not want to do that because it is clear from its Budget that it has no new ideas about how to solve the crisis that it actually caused. For example Jonathan Young said just a moment ago with pride that the Government was spending $100 million on homes on Crown land. But he did not mention that the Government is also—Matt Doocey: On Crown land?DENIS O'ROURKE: On Crown land yes. He did not also mention that the Government is spending $800 million on new prisons. So eight times more for prisoners than for housing on Crown land. Big big deal. And the Government has done very little else about the housing crisis. The Government caused it through grossly excessive immigration mainly in an attempt to keep wages down and to make Auckland's consumer economy look good and secondly by allowing grossly excessive foreign ownership of homes in New Zealand especially in Auckland.Those are the two main drivers. However much the Government wishes to deny it that is the truth. The Government has spent years in denial on housing issues. But now the chickens have come home to roost but sadly those chickens are actually homeless people and increasingly they have nowhere to roost. They are the people who will now never be able to buy a home—never be able to buy a home—and will have the greatest difficulty in renting one. That is the reason why there has been a need for such huge increases in the accommodation supplement because they cannot afford to rent houses without it either.That is not a record of success; that is a record of terrible failure. This is a half-pie Budget because it does not do half enough on housing amongst many other things. I suspect that Steven Joyce will not dish out the other half whatever that is until much closer to the election. That is not the way a country should be run. The Budget should be designed to tackle the housing crisis as the nation's No. 1 problem right now not waiting until later for some lollies to make the Government look good on housing closer to the election.While population growth from National's immigration free-for-all does generate consumer-led growth especially in Auckland it does not produce anything in terms of more production for the nation or more productivity. But it does produce huge pressures on housing health and an array of other services and that is the truth of that. We all have to pay for that.So here we have it. National causes the housing crisis now the worst in the developed world—the worst in the developed world—through a shameful legacy of neglect. There are going to be more homeless people in the news over this winter and more State tenants being pushed out of State houses because of inappropriate housing policies. There has been a budgeted expenditure of 34000 more houses which is grossly inadequate in relation to the sheer size of the housing problem. Actually most of that is not anything new because most of those houses are just replacements for thousands of State houses that have been sold off and are budgeted by Housing New Zealand. It is not something new that the country can look forward to. The net result is not much more than 1000 new houses from this Budget and so that is pathetic. If you ask people in places like Whangarei Masterton Queenstown and other parts of the country whether they think there are enough houses to buy or to rent then I can tell you that they will have a very strong message for the Minister and this Government.As far as Auckland is concerned the projected shortfall there is nothing less than hundreds of thousands of houses over the next 10 years while immigration continues at more than 72000 per year and overseas investors are still rushing to New Zealand to buy up houses that are going up strongly in price in Auckland. The reality is we need about 40000 more houses in New Zealand. The private market is not going to cope with that—by one of the Minister's own admissions in fact the private market cannot cope and there are just not enough resources for that. This is something that this Government has needed to address over a long period and that is what has got us to where we are now. It is a vicious circle: excessive immigration causes excess demand so the Government wants to bring in more people so that it can build more houses but that creates more demand and so on and so on and so on. It is a circle that will never be solved and there is nothing in this Budget of any value at all for additional residential land especially in Auckland. That is I suppose why Jonathan Young talked only about using parks and reserves like Point England for that purpose. Nor is there anything in the Budget to actually build the houses that will need to go on that land either.So what you can say about this Government's Budget is that it is pathetic as far as addressing the housing crisis is concerned. Not only that but it does not offer anything more than people who are seeking to purchase their first home already have. Now they have the HomeStart scheme and the Government says it is doing something about the resource management legislation but in actual fact it needs a much more imaginative and much larger scheme to help all those hundreds of thousands of people who cannot buy a home of their own simply because they cannot afford it and have no way of getting into it.New Zealand First on the other hand does want to establish a new agency to—and we have wanted this for years—purchase and develop land ahead of time to augment the private market to sell smaller sections for modest homes and to build affordable homes and to sell them over 25 years to people buying a first home at a lower-than-market interest rate. That is the sort of policy that we need and that the Government has not provided.There are other ways like housing bonds that can be provided so that the finance can be provided for new houses in New Zealand and just ordinary Government borrowing. It is justified because these are assets on the Government's books on the Government's balance sheet. They will not be a burden on the taxpayer and they will be worth it in both economic and social terms because housing is a great investment—socially in support of health services in support of anti-crime objectives and there are many other social and economic reasons why housing is such a great investment. Yet this Government year after year after year for the best part of the decade has done far far too little to invest in housing in this country. It has relied on the private market to do so when everybody in this country who knows anything at all realises that the private market simply cannot cope.There has been a big injection of funds into rental supplements—$25 to $75 a week for two-person homes and up to $80 a week for larger homes depending on location—but in fact that compensates only for the massive increase in house prices which in turn has led to huge increases in rents caused by National's housing policies over the last 9 years. So again the Government is just playing catch-up. This is not good money; it is money down the drain money that should be used to help people to buy houses and money that should instead be used to actually build houses and develop land. All of that money should be going there. It should never have had to go into massive annual rental housing supplements. It should never have had to go there. It is going there only because this Government's housing policies are a total and abject failure.So in summary this is a disappointing Budget for thousands and hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders because they know that the Government is not going to do anything about immigration they know the Government is not going to do anything about foreign speculators—they know that that is going to continue—they know they are not going to get the assistance they need to buy homes they know that there are not going to be enough State houses and they know there will not be fairer policies for most New Zealanders on housing issues. This Government has been a total and abject failure and anyone in this country who wants a house either to purchase or to rent will need to vote for somebody else.