Woods MeganHon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Minister of Housing): This year's Budget does what Labour Governments do well—driving economic growth while looking after our people—and I'm proud to be part of the Government that has delivered Budget 2021. I do want to take a moment to acknowledge some of my colleagues that made this happen: our Prime Minister for her leadership around the areas to focus on but also our Minister of Finance. Putting together Budgets can be a lonely time for Ministers of Finance. They do need to phase they do need to scale they do need to insist on reprioritisation. Every Government comes in with a manifesto full of three years of activity that it will deliver and in every term of Government the first Budget that a Government delivers does a third of what that Government promised to do in its manifesto to the people. So I want to acknowledge the work of Grant Robertson for crafting what I think was an incredibly clever Budget that allowed us to focus. It allowed us to address the long-term structural issues that New Zealanders need to address but it also allowed us to deliver on critical manifesto commitments with clear pathways over the next two Budgets. I think it's not a three-part harmony as he called it but a trilogy that we will over this term of Government need to deliver on our manifesto promises. Of course Budget 2021 was set against the backdrop of 2020. It took the next steps in our economic recovery from COVID-19 and we cannot divorce this Budget from that. The collective effort and strong health response from New Zealanders to keep COVID from spreading in our community is paying off and this is backed up by a number of commentators. We see the OECD economic forecast this week that expects New Zealand to be one of the strongest performers due to our swift and decisive response to eliminate the virus and support households and businesses. In line with the Budget update the OECD forecasts growth of 3.5 percent in 2021 to 3.8 percent in 2022. We are investing in our people. We are investing in infrastructure and we are tackling those long-term issues like inequality housing and climate change. These are all issues that need to be addressed. We're investing $57.3 billion in infrastructure over the next five years to drive our economy. This is a massive investment for New Zealand and it goes some way to addressing the infrastructure deficit that we face as a country and that we know is critical for us to be able to deliver on our desires and aspirations for New Zealanders around housing unaffordability. In this Budget of course is included the appropriation for the $3.8 billion housing acceleration fund that we announced back in March and this will enable us to maximise the potential of the land that we own to get more pace and more scale into those large-scale projects. It will also allow us to work with councils it will allow us to work with iwi and it will allow us to work with Māori to ensure that we are setting up more land for development and that we are finally doing something to address affordability in our housing market. As we came out of COVID as the Minister of Housing when everyone was prophesising that actually what we were going to see was a collapse of our housing market one of the things that we looked very carefully at was what happened post the global financial crisis. What we saw was a development community that not unexpectedly went to the safest part of the market for them and that wasn't high-density affordable housing. It was large houses on single sections and what that did was it reduced the number of first-home buyers that we had able to access housing in New Zealand. As a Government as we came out of COVID we were determined that that was not going to be our fate. We had a chance to build this back better. As it was as we all know we far from saw a collapse of the housing market. We far from saw that slump that so many people thought was going to happen. Instead we saw a period of hyperinflation and we have to recognise that actually if we just leave the market unfettered we are not going to get those affordable housing outcomes that we know that we need to deliver economic growth while looking after our people. That's why that was such an important investment in this year's Budget. Another important investment that was appropriated in this Budget is the ability for Kāinga Ora to borrow an additional $2 billion to make strategic land purchases. We don't want the Government to be a passive bystander that looks on and says Tut tut! Isn't it sad? Housing's really unaffordable." We are a Government that is making the commitment. We are showing that in our Budget decisions—that we want to be an active player—and it is our responsibility as a Government to ensure that housing affordability is one of the issues that we put at the core of things. What we want to do is to stimulate more development that builds upon the critical work that we have done already and the further work that we are going to do and as we look to increase intensification we can look to increase scale and we can look to increase pace and I hope that we can work across the House. I hope that we can have a shared commitment to New Zealanders that we as a Parliament do put things in place that address this most fundamental of issues for New Zealanders. We also saw in this Budget in the area of housing some packages to address the longstanding deprivation that we have in Māori housing. What we know if we look at all the indicators across Māori is there are greater rates of homelessness and lower rates of homeownership. Across the housing continuum we want to address this. Ultimately opening up homeownership for more Māori is an aim of this Government. If we are to address fundamental wellbeing around health and if we are to address fundamental wellbeing around education the stability of long-term secure dry housing is absolutely critical to that and homeownership is important as well. That is why we have carved out $350 million from the housing acceleration fund to open up more land whether that be papa kāinga or whenua Māori or it be land held in other forms by Māori. That is for the infrastructure under the ground to allow the houses to be built but it's also matched by another $380 million fund for Māori housing—housing for Māori—and this is really important. We're looking to those funds to deliver over 3700 warm dry homes as well as repairs to existing homes. One of the issues we have with our insulation schemes in some parts of New Zealand is we simply can't insulate the houses because they're not in such a state of repair that you can put the insulation in and it will make a material difference. So I'm looking forward to us being able to deliver on that. Despite the rhetoric that we just heard from the deputy leader of the National Party Budget 2021 was also a Budget that delivered on health. We saw $4.6 billion in new day-to-day spending over the next four years. We saw $704 million for one-off expenses like building coming through this. We as a Government now into our fourth Budget have shown that we are going to address the infrastructural deficits that we have in our health system. We're not content to have hospitals in the states of disrepair that we found when we came into Government. DHBs receive another $2.7 billion to keep up with cost pressures and this represents a 45 percent increase in DHB funding since we came into Government in 2017. It also includes in Budget 2021 an increase of $200 million for Pharmac. In the last minute that I have available to me there's one other colleague that I want to acknowledge for her work in putting together Budget 2021 and that's the Hon Carmel Sepuloni for the work that she's been doing through the Welfare Expert Advisory Group to turn around what has been an injustice in this country for 30 years now: to increase benefits to make them at a level where people can live with some dignity. That is something that has been a key priority for our Government. No one has had more tenacity in their advocacy for us to undertake this work and deliver for those New Zealanders than Carmel and I want to acknowledge her for that work. Budget 2021 is a Budget that I am immensely proud of. It is a Budget that allows us to address our long-term issues and it puts us on a path going into the future with some optimism. Thank you Mr Speaker."