Walker Holly: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Walker Holly: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 14 August 2012. Volume:682;Page:4369. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
HOLLY WALKER (Green) 
: 
 I am very pleased to rise to take a call in this estimates debate on Vote Housing. I think it would be fair to say that it has not been a banner year for housing. The appropriations outlined in Budget 2012 certainly do not engender much confidence that the next financial year will be any better. 
There can be little doubt that we are facing a multifaceted housing crisis in New Zealand. This is a crisis of affordability with rents rapidly increasing in most major centres. In fact in our largest city Auckland an estimation earlier this year that Statistics New Zealand prepared for the Auckland Council suggested that there were 85000 homes in which the tenants were paying unaffordable rents. The dream of homeownership is out of reach for many thousands of New Zealanders of my generation who find that the dream of owning their own home is something they can only aspire to. It is also a crisis of availability with thousands on Housing New Zealand Corporation waiting lists. Those waiting lists have themselves been magically reduced by simply removing two categories from the lists which makes it very easy to chop off large numbers at once. But those who are still on the lists are waiting and there are many of them. 
Those who have been chopped off the lists are now battling it out in the private rental market which is becoming increasingly difficult. Private rentals are oversubscribed with hundreds of people showing up for every open home or responding to listings and finding that landlords really are able to take their pick of their tenants. If you have pets or children or other challenging circumstances you can pretty much guarantee that you are going to go straight to the bottom of the list when it comes to looking for a private rental property. There are not enough homes to meet the needs of New Zealanders. Recently another estimate in Auckland suggested that there is a shortage of 70000 homes in Auckland alone. 
It is also a crisis of quality with hundreds of thousands of children living in cold damp homes that are making them sick and that is both in Housing New Zealand Corporation properties and in private rentals. The full effect I believe of the leaky homes crisis is also yet to be felt in terms of the quality of housing in New Zealand. Nowhere are these crises of affordability availability and quality more apparent than in our largest city Auckland and in our second-largest city Christchurch where they have been compounded by the devastating impact and aftermath of the earthquakes. 
So within that context of a housing crisis I want to address a specific issue which is how Housing New Zealand Corporation is coping with its “Smarter. Faster. Fairer.” reform programme particularly from the perspective of how it is delivering for tenants. I want to focus on quality and maintenance and question whether Housing New Zealand Corporation tenants who are by the Minister’s and the Government’s own reckoning only the most vulnerable families are being provided for and whether they are living in adequate warm safe conditions. 
We heard some time frames from the Minister in question time today in response to questions that I asked. He said that when Housing New Zealand Corporation receives an urgent request for health and safety maintenance that should be dealt with within 4 hours. When it receives a request for urgent maintenance that should be dealt with within 2 days. And when it receives a general maintenance request that has credibility as the Minister would say that should be dealt with within 10 days. 
Despite the fact that 2 weeks ago in a written question to the Minister he told me that he cannot “give an accurate indication of how much work is still to be completed at any one time.”—and if anyone would like to look up that answer they can look up question for written answer No. 4914—today he told the House that Housing New Zealand Corporation in fact meets these time frames 93 percent of the time. I wonder what has changed in the last 2 weeks between when the Minister was unable to provide us an estimate of how many maintenance requests were outstanding and today when apparently 93 percent of the time they are magically being met. 
But if we put that to one side and look at the experiences of the tenants you really would have to question whether this 93 percent is an accurate figure. I believe the Minister may be confusing two things. I think he is confusing the difference between response times in terms of lodging a request and actually having that lodged in the Housing New Zealand Corporation system and perhaps somebody making a phone call about it and job completion—