Walker Holly: Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWalker Holly: Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 16 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10061. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]HOLLY WALKER (Green): Well I guess we can start on a good point and that is it is good to see that the Government has finally realised there is a housing crisis going on in New Zealand. It has taken it long enough but it has cottoned on and it has cottoned on to the fact that that crisis is particularly apparent in Auckland. We have known for some time and we have been saying in this House for some time that Auckland needs approximately 13000 new buildings—new homes—to be consented and built each year in order to keep up with the growth and the population change and the demand for housing in Auckland and yet over the last several years the average has been between only 3000 and 4000 new homes built each year. That is nowhere near enough to keep pace with the demand for housing in Auckland and that has created a crisis.It means that homeownership is increasingly out of reach for young New Zealanders and first-home buyers. Just last week we had reported the staggering news that the average house price in Auckland is $735000 which is certainly a pretty high bar for your first-home buyers. That is up by 12 percent over the last year.The Minister of Housing when he spoke earlier in this debate talked about interest rates. He said that when interest rates are low house prices are low and he was very proud to be part of a Government that had presided over very low interest rates and yet the average house price in Auckland has increased by 12 percent in the last year. It is now $735000 and it is forecast to reach $1 million in the next 3 to 4 years—$1 million will be the average house price in Auckland. This is a crisis situation and the Government has finally cottoned on. This bill the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill is its attempt to do something about it.We have been saying for a long time that the solution to this crisis is to increase the supply of housing. The Government has finally cottoned on and it is at least attempting to do something about the supply side in this bill. This bill indeed is the Government’s answer to the lack of supply of affordable housing. The first thing I think we have to say about this bill is that it is nowhere near enough and it never will be enough without a dedicated Government house-building programme and houses that are set aside for progressive ownership by young families and first-home buyers to give them a foothold on the property ladder. Unless this bill incorporated something like that it could never be enough to address the urgent supply crisis that we have.The Green Party will oppose this bill at its first reading but we will listen carefully and contribute constructively to the debate at the Social Services Committee with an open mind. But with the limited time that we have had to consider this bill we cannot support it at its first reading because it raises a number of significant red flags for us. The first of those is that it is modelled as the Minister said in his speech on the Hobsonville model. I thought we could perhaps go into that a little bit because in my submission the Hobsonville model is hardly the model you would want to roll out across Auckland and across the country for the provision of genuinely affordable housing. It could have been when it was first established. Indeed it probably was the model that you would want to roll out because when it was first initiated it was a mandated mix of social affordable and private housing developments with concurrent community development. It was a groundbreaking development and it was a real experiment in creating both affordable homes and a livable neighbourhood in the same area.But tragically this Government axed the social housing component of the Hobsonville development when it came in. In fact the local MP in that electorate—one John Key—said when he announced that decision that it would be “economic vandalism” to have State houses and presumably their riff-raff tenants in such a nice area as Hobsonville. So—Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga: He didn’t say that.HOLLY WALKER: He did. He said that it would be “economic vandalism” to have State housing in Hobsonville. Look it up. Not only did National axe the social housing component but also it axed the Gateway Housing Assistance loan scheme after only 17 families had used it to buy their first affordable home in Hobsonville. All that is left which is a quota provision for so-called affordable housing puts that affordable housing into two brackets. The first bracket starts at $400000 and the second and larger bracket of affordable housing starts at $485000. I would challenge anyone on the Government benches to go and ask a family in Auckland on the average income who are renting and hoping to buy their first house whether $485000 is affordable for them to buy their first home. They would laugh you out of their overpriced low-qualityrental property. They would laugh you out of their rental property because $485000 might be affordable for some of those on the Government benches but it is not affordable for families on the average income who are looking to buy their first home.As Phil Twyford pointed out in his contribution earlier there is absolutely no requirement in this bill that the new special housing areas that it creates will have to guarantee the provision of affordable housing even using that Hobsonville Point definition of affordable. They will merely have to give consideration to the provision of affordable housing and they may well go on and actually create housing developments that have no affordable housing component at all. There is absolutely no guarantee that this radical trumping of the Resource Management Act process that this bill contains will actually produce any more affordable housing for Aucklanders or for anyone else in the country.The second big red flag for the Green Party with this bill is the powers that it grants to the Government to overrule and override local councils’ planning processes in these new special housing areas. We know that this bill is prompted largely by the crisis in Auckland and we know that it is based on the Auckland Housing Accord which was reached last week between Len Brown the Mayor of Auckland and Nick Smith the Minister of Housing. In the case of Auckland the Government and the council have indeed agreed on the terms of the accord although I might add not without some incredibly heavy-handed tactics by the Minister to begin with. But they got there in the end and they have now committed to work together to implement the housing accord that they have agreed on.But this bill does not apply just to Auckland. In fact although Auckland is the only region specified in the schedule to the bill for now there is the provision that other regions of the country can be added later on based on data from Demographia and Roost Mortgage Brokers about affordability of housing in those areas. Based on that data we might be looking at areas like Waikato the Bay of Plenty Nelson Christchurch and Wellington which could be some of the next areas to have a special housing area. But there is no requirement that the Government reach an accord with the councils in those areas before it goes ahead and sets up special housing areas. There is no requirement that the Government works collaboratively with those councils. There is a requirement that it tries to reach an accord with them but if the Government cannot it can just unilaterally say: “Well we tried but we couldn’t reach an accord with the council. But we think there needs to be a special housing area in this area and we are just going to do it anyway.”In that situation the bill grants considerable powers to the Government to override local planning processes if it cannot reach an accord with those councils. The Government can appoint the panel that will make decisions about the developments in those social housing areas. It can essentially control the process and override local democracy. There are incredibly Draconian amounts of power that the Government can take in that situation if it tried and failed to reach a housing accord in one of these other regions. I suppose we should not be particularly surprised by that given that this is this Government’s modus operandi and we need only look at Christchurch City Council and the former Environment Canterbury to see what the Government thinks about local democracy and the credence that it gives to the local decision makers. So if I was in Christchurch where indeed the housing crisis is almost as bad as Auckland’s I would be very very worried about what the Government was going to come in and do to my city under this bill.We could perhaps have supported legislation to set up special housing areas in areas where a genuine accord had been reached by the Government and the council working collaboratively together but we cannot support the Government coming in over the topand running the process in the way that this bill allows. And there is another risk with special housing areas because since there are no quotas on affordable housing and there is no emphasis on in-fill and brownfield development it is a potential recipe for sprawl. We have seen this Government’s obsession with land supply and opening up the urban fringe and rural land for housing developments which does not actually increase affordability. Indeed with the transport and infrastructure costs it can be a real cost to families.So there are a number of red flags for the Green Party in this legislation. We cannot support it at first reading. We will engage constructively and collaboratively at the select committee but with those red flags about affordability about the Government’s powers to override local councils and the recipe for sprawl that it could potentially represent we cannot support this legislation.