Twyford Phil: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTwyford Phil: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 11 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:5636. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): I am going to talk about housing. The really intriguing thing about this Government’s handling of the housingissue has been that in the face of a crisis that has got worse and worse over the last few years all we have seen from the Minister Nick Smith since he became the Minister for Building and Housing 2½ years ago is a series of grudging half measures. The standard operating procedure for this Minister on housing has been denial trivialisation complacency and refusal to acknowledge the extent of the problem until the focus groups showed that people are starting to get concerned. Then what do we see time after time after time? He tosses out some grudging half measure as a sop to public opinion.Last week the Prime Minister made his most revealing comments yet on this issue in an interview with Leighton Smith on Newstalk ZB where the Prime Minister said that Aucklanders like their house prices going up because it makes them richer. This was very interesting and very significant. It was the most candid that the Prime Minister has been and it explains why we have a non-housing Minister and a non-housing policy.He is a Minister whose job is to look like he is doing something—to provide political cover for a Government that has made such a cynical political calculation a calculation that there are sufficient numbers of Aucklanders who own their homes and who will feel wealthier and happier because of rising paper wealth that they can never cash in unless they move out of the city giving up their job and moving away from family. That does not happen. The Government knows that but it is content to make that calculation—that there are enough homeowners who feel that they are getting wealthier because of skyrocketing house prices. In doing so it will throw under the bus the 50-plus percent of Aucklanders who do not own their own home—who rent. It will condemn Generation Rent to a lifetime of renting—the very tenants in their own land whom the Prime Minister talked about only a couple of years ago.Nick Smith talks a big game on supply—the supply of houses. His diagnosis of the housing crisis in Auckland is simply that there are not enough houses. It is all about supply and nothing about demand. But he has singularly failed to deliver supply. In 2½ years as the housing Minister there is such a shortfall in houses that the Productivity Commission—his policy touchstone on housing; the Government’s pet thinktank—predicts that at current rates that shortfall is going to go from 32000 now to 60000 houses in 2020. That is a failure by anyone’s reckoning from a Minister who made it his ambition to increase the supply of houses. It is getting worse by 5000 every year.That is why house prices in Auckland are skyrocketing and that is why the New Zealand Herald reported that they have been going up by $511 a day on average for the last year—$511 a day. You can make more money under this National Government’s policy by owning a house than by working. There is only one way to get rich under this Government and that is by speculating in residential property. That is its policy. The National Party is the party of property speculators foreign and domestic. That is whom it stands for and the Prime Minister’s comments revealed very clearly that the Government is selling out New Zealand and selling out young Kiwi first-home buyers because it does not care. It has made a cynical political calculation that it would rather count on the votes of Auckland homeowners who think that they are getting wealthier. It does not give a damn about the lost generation that will never ever have the Kiwi dream of affordable homeownership.The crowning glory of Nick Smith’s tenure as housing Minister so far has been his Auckland Crown land fiasco—Carmel Sepuloni: I thought it was him lying on the road.PHIL TWYFORD: It is hard actually to choose which one is the real fiasco. Documents released under the Official Information Act the other day revealed exactly what everybody knew. His Budget policy on developing vacant Crown land for Auckland housing was rushed. Treasury said that it was almost too late. It was past the deadline and we know why—