Eagle PaulPAUL EAGLE (Labour—Rongotai): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's a real honour to be talking in this general debate. Look I've been inspired over the last week or so attending school prize-givings. I have most of the secondary schools in Wellington City in the Rongotai electorate. Matt Doocey: Did you get any awards? What'd you win? PAUL EAGLE: I did. I got lots of awards and those awards were saying how well the coalition Government was going. That's the award. That's the award I got—the overwhelming and just overt Congratulations what a great job you're doing." These are schools that I would say weren't traditional Labour schools but can I say there's no shame—there's no shame—in them coming up. Mums dads caregivers the senior students the principals—everyone's on the waka saying what a wonderful job this coalition Government is doing. When I look over the last two years—because it has been that—people had literally been crying out for change and the big changes that this Government has taken on have been well wanted. Look can I say when they talked to me they said "We want a Government who starts tackling the long-term challenges we face." That's things like we've just heard: the housing crisis—we called it a crisis because we weren't ashamed of that; they denied it on that side of the House; child poverty—that's right child poverty; and climate change. I'll come back to that in a minute because I know that the Prime Minister and the whole Government the coalition—we are not too afraid. We are not too cynical to avoid tackling the big long-term issues facing New Zealand. We're looking ahead 30 years not three and astoundingly—well not really—people are saying "Yay! That's what we want. We want a plan for Aotearoa New Zealand."—the long game that unpicks years of denial or entrenchment. That's what that side of the House was doing for their nine years in Government. But this Government is delivering a landmark action on climate change this week. I'm really proud of that. The biggest challenge facing our international community and New Zealand. We've young—SPEAKER: Order! Order! Move on. We have that legislation coming up soon. It's not to be discussed now. PAUL EAGLE: Sure—fine. So we know that that is coming. Happy to move on because I'll talk about my favourite subject and that's housing because we are tackling the long-term challenges in housing. That's on the agenda too but can I say we are undertaking the biggest public housing and social housing building programme. I know when I look around the Rongotai electorate there are lots of examples where houses were boarded up houses were pulled down. This Government is rebuilding those and putting housing back on there. So I'm a little bit miffed when I hear things from the previous speaker Simon O'Connor that talked about how nothing was happening because what was really going on on that side of the House was they were preparing to undertake the biggest asset sale ever. They keep talking about this community housing sector. They keep talking about this market these other people who are going to suddenly save us build all these houses and resolve the housing crisis—which in their language wasn't a crisis. But what struck me was I remember clearly that even the head of the Salvation Army was miffed himself when he said "Well I didn't know that we were going to buy all these social housing units off the then Government." He had no idea. No one knew. They had no housing Minister on that side of the House no one knew what was going on but we did because we knew that they were going to undertake the biggest asset sell-off ever. We saw it. We saw tinkering with all sorts of State-owned assets. That's what was going on. We are undertaking the biggest rebuild programme. I know when I visit Fife Lane in Miramar the site of the first State house and not only there but at the prize-giving at my old school at St Patrick's people were saying that it was good to see those empty blocks of land with housing being built on them. That's a direct result of this Government. That's a result of a housing Minister and a housing team of Ministers who have come together saying "We must do this quickly." and that's what we're doing. That's an example of some of the long-term change being rectified in our mere two years. Can I say I got this in the mail myself. [Holds up campaign flyer]—"Making progress on what matters"—this was brought to two of the three prize-givings I went to. Isn't it great when people bring along the material that we sent out and say "You're doing a great job."?"