Woods MeganDr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): It is my pleasure to take a call on the Social Development and Housing Sector. I think when we look at Budget 2016 we can see the clear denial from this Government that we are in the middle of a housing crisis. We can see that the Kiwi Dream of homeownership is slipping away from more and more New Zealanders. I think if you actually have a look at the Government's activity post-Budget and the flailing around on the issue of housing that we have seen with bungled announcement after bungled announcement—some of them by tweet—from this Government we see that this is a Government that has no answers to the housing crisis.I want to take issue with the comments that the member for Waimakariri Matt Doocey made in his speech because I think what we had there was another example of post-fact politics. We have the repetition of the idea that Christchurch and Canterbury can be held up as some kind of exemplar of how things can be done to solve the housing crisis. This really speaks to the fact that this Government does not get it—that what was in Budget 2016 and the bungling about since then is really not going to address the problems we have with housing in this country.We had this holding up of an exemplar with Matt Doocey saying that we had only single-digit growth in house prices in the Canterbury region in the last financial report. That may be the case but let us look at the bigger picture. The period of hyperinflation before that has seen house prices in the Canterbury region rise by more than 30 percent on pre-quake levels. If that is what this Government thinks is affordability—and thinks is having a good hand on the tiller of housing—then we really are in trouble. And that is what we have been saying. This is what it thinks equals success and what it thinks can be held up as an exemplar—that when housing has risen to 5.5 times the median income in Canterbury this will be held up as some kind of exemplar. This speaks to a Government that has absolutely failed on the issue of housing.What we do have in Canterbury—and I am dumbfounded that Mr Doocey does not see it in his own electorate office—is an ongoing issue with overcrowding. We have an ongoing issue with more and more Cantabrians being shut out of ever hoping to own their own home because Mr Doocey when you are going to get a mortgage inflation of 30 percent over 6 years makes things unaffordable for many New Zealanders. For many New Zealanders that puts the dream of homeownership out of their reach and more and more Cantabrians have been put out of reach. In the 8 years that this Government has been in power it has done nothing to address the housing crisis and it has exacerbated it.A month ago Labour celebrated its 100th birthday and we did not just look at our glorious past; we actually talked about a bold vision for the future. We talked about what we are going to do in our next 100 years and tackling the housing crisis is one of those. We talked about setting up an affordable housing authority. And when we look at how this will play out in Christchurch in terms of the way in which the money in Budget 2016 could have been used—alternative ways that it could have been used—you see that there is an alternative way.If you take the issue of the East Frame in Christchurch where this Government will claim a victory despite this being another bungled anchor project that is sitting with nothing happening on it after one already residential anchor project has already fallen over we could do this in a different way. We could have a Government that is not content to sit back and make some zoning decisions and think that the houses will magically appear. What we could have is a Government that is willing to work alongside developers to make sure that we actually get houses built. If we take the residential development that was planned for the East Frame—which was around 900 inner-city apartments which I think is actually a pretty exciting prospect for Christchurch and something that I want to see built—I think that we can look at alternative ways that this could be done. We could see that we would not rely on traditional development models like this Government has done. This Government is so stuck in 20th century thinking that it is out of ideas and is not willing to look at different ways of doing stuff. Instead it is content to see projects fall over.Votes agreed to.