Hague Kevin: Riccarton Racecourse Development Enabling Bill Riccarton Racecourse Bill — First ReadingsText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHague Kevin: Riccarton Racecourse Development Enabling Bill Riccarton Racecourse Bill — First Readings[Sitting date: 03 November 2015. Volume:709;Page:7575. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KEVIN HAGUE (Green): I think my colleague Eugenie Sage has already indicated that the Green Party will be supporting this legislation at first reading. We will then be very interested to hear the submissions that are made particularly by local Christchurch people and then determine what position we take on the legislation thereafter.The earthquakes that devastated large parts of Christchurch and indeed the wider Canterbury area have according to the ledger of effects left a permanent and highly negative impact on those communities. If there is one positive thing to have arisen out of those terrible earthquakes it must surely be the opportunity to make decisions about the future that are less constrained by poor decision making in the past; that the opportunity to reimagine what the city could be is in front of citizens of that city—and early on in the rebuild process it seemed as if that opportunity was going to be grasped. There was a process that involved a lot of public input into how Christchurch should be in the future. Unfortunately it seems that some of the momentum behind that process—some of that opportunity—has been lost and is being lost. Our concern about the bills that sit before the House today is that this might be another case of a lost opportunity or an opportunity at least half lost.The opportunity that arises from the need to build new houses is the opportunity to build houses in a different way—to build houses as Bob Burnett has done in Christchurch to a much higher standard of energy performance for example. Why can these houses not be 10 Homestar - rated for example? The opportunity arises to create medium-density housing that is clustered around public transport nodes. I am not sure that that is going to be the case with this housing development. Once again possibly it is an opportunity lost—the possibility of creating housing development that sits in balance with the natural environment around it—and one of the unfortunate aspects of this legislation is that we are losing as Eugenie Sage has said one of the few areas of green space aside from Hagley Park that is available in the city. So that is the concern that we have.Auckland is a city built on volcanoes which gives us the opportunity to stand on top of some of those and I invite any member of the House to stand on top of Mount Wellington and have a look at the housing developments nearby because they demonstrate pretty neatly what could go wrong with this development. What we see are cookie cutter mansions where developers have done the thing that is the logical commercial thing to do which is to develop houses to the boundaries or as close to the boundaries that they can to create the houses that they can sell for the most. So what we end up with is a development that I believe may well come to be a slum in the future because it provides poor-quality housing and we do not have to do that.Other colleagues have spoken about the issue of affordability and yes it is great to see a requirement for some of the houses at least to be affordable. Would it not be great to see them all being affordable houses or for it to have an affordability standard that actually relates to the real lives of the people who are actually in need? So there are some reservations. On balance we support the legislation at this point but we look forward to hearing what the people of Christchurch have to say about it.