Willis NicolaNICOLA WILLIS (Deputy Leader—National): This bill is the unique product of a negotiation and bipartisan accord between the National and Labour parties to ensure that more housing can be built in New Zealand. And it is right that people listening to this debate today will say Well why has National chosen to work with the Government in this way?" And so I think it's important that I put on the record for this House the context in which we are debating these changes to the Resource Management Act (RMA) because here in New Zealand today we are facing a housing emergency. This is despite the election of a Government in 2017 that had at the core of their manifesto a commitment to solve what they then described as a "housing crisis". Since that point we have seen rampant house price inflation at levels far beyond that seen around the rest of the world. This has led to immeasurable social harm with more than 4000 families now raising their children in emergency housing prices up 26 percent in the past year alone reaching a staggering eye-watering median of $925000. We now have a State house waiting list of historic levels with more than 24000 New Zealanders squeezed out of the private rental market and forced to line up at the Ministry of Social Development for a house. Things have never been worse for first-home buyers. Whereas in 2001 the average house was worth around three times the average income today that ratio is more like eight to one. A first-home buyer today wanting to purchase a median-valued property would need to save $185000 in deposit—that is an extraordinarily steep mountain to climb.In National we think it is untenable to have the property ladder pulled out of reach for so many New Zealanders. That is why we support this bill's measures to make it easier to build more housing in New Zealand because we believe that only by building more houses and building more affordable houses in the places where people want to live will we be able to truly restore the idea of an egalitarian property-owning democracy.This bill will allow our major cities in Wellington Auckland Tauranga Hamilton and Christchurch to grow both up and out. It will allow people to add more housing to existing residential areas and to add the kind of housing that first-home buyers can more readily achieve—that is apartments townhouses smaller dwellings. We need more of those choices for the first-home buyers of today and tomorrow and this bill will enable more of them to be built. It also allows for the fast-tracking of greenfields development on the outskirts of our major urban areas so that more housing can be built on the outskirts of our city. In short taken together these measures will reduce the cost the complexity and the delays that currently face too many people when they set about trying to build a new house on an existing residential section. It will make it easier and it will unlock more homes.The bill has not been without its critics and I want to acknowledge today those who have raised their concerns about how this bill will work in practice. At the Environment Committee that considered this bill we listened to and scrutinised hundreds of submissions and I want to make it very clear to those who submitted that your contribution your analysis made this a far better bill than it would have otherwise been. We were given a range of perspectives both at a detailed level and a higher concept level that we listened to as a committee. As a result we have made extensive amendments to this bill through 50 pages worth of amendments in fact which I think make this bill much better and therefore much more enduring than it would have been in its original form.The key areas that have been reformed and made better are around design standards. It was the view of members across the House that those New Zealanders who came to the committee and said "There must be good design standards when you're having more intensified housing in your urban areas"—it was our view that those submitters were right. So we have made changes: to allow for landscaped areas to allow for greater outdoor living spaces and outlook spaces and to reduce the height of housing in relation to boundaries. We also listened intently to local authorities who said that they needed to maintain some discretion so that they could exclude areas from intense housing development that were not properly suited to it—areas for example that were subject to natural hazards areas that had particular historic heritage areas which would not be able to support the level of housing that this bill implies. So we tidied up the qualifying matters section of this bill to ensure that local authorities were able to carry over assessments formed during previous planning processes.A third area where I think we have improved this bill is that we have fixed up some of the transition measures around private plan changes that are already in process that will bring on new housing development. And we have allowed for local authorities to put in place district-wide standards around things like hydronic loading and permeability. These are technical terms and I talk about them in this third reading speech because I acknowledge all of those in the engineering departments planning departments and other departments of our local authorities who told us these things matter. We have heard you. We have also heard the voices of the hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders who have said to us that "We can no longer tolerate a situation where it is too difficult to build new housing in the suburbs of our New Zealand cities." We have heard those people and this bill sticks fast to its purpose of ensuring that more people will be able to build a home without facing the disincentive of a laborious resource consent process while having the certainty that development can occur.I want to acknowledge the constructive approach our select committee took and in particular I want to acknowledge Eugenie Sage the chair of the committee and Rachel Brooking from the Labour Party. It is an unusual situation when National and Labour work so closely on the development of something but I think that it has meant that concessions on both sides have made this a more enduring piece of legislation. But I do want to put this on the record of the House particularly following the contribution from Minister Parker: the truth is that Labour had an approach to housing that today as we stand here has failed. They promised 100000 KiwiBuild houses; they have not and will never deliver them. They said that removing interest deductibility from landlords would somehow improve things; all we have seen since then is further house price appreciation. They added a maximum sustainable employment goal to our monetary policy and subsequently we have seen extraordinary house price inflation.So here on the National side of the House we will continue to raise our concerns about this Government's approach to housing. We will continue to be constructive critics where we see their policies failing. But most importantly we will continue what we see as a solemn duty to keep putting forward the constructive policy solutions needed to restore the dream of home ownership in New Zealand whether it's further reducing consenting processes enabling more greenfields development bringing on more community housing exploring cooperative housing models looking at actually legislating for build-to-rent housing doing more in the building supply chain reforming unit titles. National will keep putting forward solutions; we will do that work. We have said for many years that RMA reform of this sort was necessary. Labour heard our cry. It took four years but today is a good day. Our communities will have their character enhanced by this bill—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Order! Order! The member's time is up."