Heatley Phil: Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHeatley Phil: Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading[Sitting date: 22 May 2014. Volume:699;Page:18293. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL HEATLEY (National—Whangarei): I rise to support the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill (No 3) in its second reading. This is the second phase of National’s Better Local Government reforms. It forms part of that and it will give local authorities the tools to provide better services to local communities.It is probably timely to remind the Green member Denise Roche that in fact the regional councils she speaks so fondly of were not utilised by her and her lobby groups as a check and balance; they were utilised as a way of stopping stuff happening. For the extreme environmental movement if you cannot stop something slowing it down is the next best thing and that is what it uses the processes for. It is interesting to note that that extreme environmental group they call the Green Party has alongside Labour used every opportunity to stop what this Government has put forward to improve housing affordability.When we said we needed to open up new land for housing they opposed it on the basis that cities would get larger so cities could not move out. When we said that we would change the Local Government Act the Building Act and the Resource Management Act rules so that there would be denser housing—in other words building up—we found that the Labour Party and the Green Party opposed that. So if you cannot grow a city out and you cannot grow a city up that means that there is nowhere to go. That is why the Labour Party members this weekend when they talk to all their ethnic groups—the Indian community the Chinese community the Samoan community the South Pacific community—they will be telling them that they can no longer come to New Zealand because Labour’s solution to housing affordability is to stop immigration stop those people coming into New Zealand.This is another bill where we are introducing measures to improve housing affordability and that is the ability of councils to make the person who builds a new house pay development fees for the library that is going to be built 10 kilometres down the road or the swimming pool down the road. What we are arguing is that that should be funded through the general rate take or other mechanisms.Denis O’Rourke: Driving rates up. You want to put rates up.Hon PHIL HEATLEY: The difficulty for the new member of New Zealand First is that you cannot oppose everything that we work hard to bring to this House to address housing affordability. You cannot just stop people having children. You cannot stop families coming from countries overseas or even New Zealand families returning. You cannot do all that social engineering in order to drive house prices down. Actually you have got to build more houses—houses going up or houses on sections or redeveloping land that has been used for building or commercial purposes previously.I support this Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill (No 3). It is part of the answer; it is not a silver bullet. It is part of a suite of changes that we are making to improve housing affordability and I will certainly be voting for it.