Parker DavidHon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): Thank you Mr Speaker. I heard the ACT leader David Seymour say that no progress had been made in housing and I'm going to spend my five minutes in ahead of tomorrow's Budget to disabuse him of his ignorance.I do a weekly TV show on TV3 with Duncan Garner and Simon Bridges. Simon Bridges has started asking me questions as to whether the Labour Government's doing enough to solve the housing crisis. It's interesting because anyone with a memory of longer than three years can remember that for the prior nine years the National Party leading Government with the support of the ACT Party—David Seymour—refused to acknowledge that we even had a housing crisis in New Zealand. Yet in the three decades from the 1990s till now our house prices saw the highest growth after inflation—real growth—in the OECD: they went up 266 percent in real terms to the point where a house in Auckland cost 10 times the median household income which was plainly unaffordable for many.So having denied the housing crisis they left us with a country where they had sold off State houses—they sold more than they built new ones. They leased in a few but of course they leased houses that already existed rather than building them decreasing further the private sector stock as well as the public stock. They allowed the workforce to wither post-GFC and after the GFC we had fewer people in apprenticeships so that when things came right after the GFC we didn't have the people who could build houses.Now what have we done? We've done a huge range of things and it's working. We banned foreign buyers. We updated the national policy of existing homes. We updated the National Policy Statement on Urban Development to require councils to make room for growth up and out. We're fast-tracking consents. We've got infrastructure funding that includes grants but we've also got new financing facilities that enable subdivisions to be able to be financed without adding to council debt burdens. We've changed tax rules to interest deductibility to change who can pay the marginal price for the next house purchase of an existing house and we've had to do that because as David Seymour says interest rates are really low—but that's not the fault of Government; that's what's happened to interest rates around the world post-COVID.Instead of the number of people in training going down we've got 100000 extra people in training since COVID hit. Of those around 20000 are apprentices in the building trades. A lot of the other people will have micro-credentials and the like. What's happening? Well we're also funding public houses. We're funding 18000 public and transitional houses by 2024. Now that's a big enough number. You compute that down: it's more than 5000 a year it's more than 100 a week it's more than 15 a day when you exclude Sundays. Fifteen houses extra a day makes a difference if you do it for a while—which we are.What happened to the total number of houses being built? The number of consents to build houses in New Zealand last year the stats out a couple of weeks ago—it's 41000; more than 40000. In 2017 it was 30000. That's a massive increase in the number of houses being built and we're now building more houses than population growth needs and this year is going to be just as good if not better than last year.What's it like in Auckland where the problems have been most pressing? House builds have gone up from 10800-odd in 2017 by 60 percent to over 16000. Where's the growth happening? Well this is what I find really interesting. Apartments have gone down—that's because we've banned foreign buyers because they were being predominantly purchased by foreign buyers. That building effort is now going into semi-detached townhouses flats units and other dwellings. The number of single houses is roughly flat but the number of town houses flats units and other dwellings has gone up from 2200 to 7200 a year—a 300 percent increase in the typologies of smaller houses that people can afford to buy.We are making a difference here. I think that we are turning a corner. We hear this statement that rents are going up astronomically. They're not. They're starting to even out as well and I reckon within a year's time with the additional support that we'll see coming through this Budget people can be confident that we've got this under control.