Twyford PhilPHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): I am sorry that the members of the National Party in this House are not supporting this bill which is a common-sense and rational response to a failed housing market. How do we know it has failed? It is because we have the lowest homeownership rates in 64 years. It now takes 50 years on average to pay off the average Auckland house. We know it is failing because we have an epidemic of families living in cars garages and campgrounds and that that overheated and failed housing market is made worse by an influx of uncontrolled foreign investment that is driving house prices higher and higher.There are many other countries particularly around the Pacific Rim that have enacted measures that are similar to my bill—to Labour's bill—to try to control the destabilising effect of uncontrolled foreign investment in the housing market. It is the policy of the Australian Federal Government to ban non-resident foreign buyers from buying existing properties. If people want to invest in real estate and they are not a resident and they are not a citizen they have to build a new house and thereby add to supply. That policy has channelled $30 billion of foreign investment into the construction of new homes in Australia in the last 12 months.I want to refer the House to recent statements by the Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau who had this to say about Vancouver. Vancouver is a very nice city as anyone who has been there will attest but it bears many similarities to the Auckland housing market. It is incredibly expensive. Justin Trudeau said recently: An influx of capital from Asia is partly responsible for soaring house prices in Vancouver … We know that there is an awful lot of capital that left Asia in the past few years. Obviously overseas money coming in is playing a role [in the Vancouver housing market]." He has just launched an investigation into the impact of foreign buyers in the Vancouver and Toronto housing markets.Singapore Malaysia Hong Kong—they all have restrictions like my bill or stamp duties which are designed to restrict the destabilising effect of uncontrolled foreign investment in the housing market. In Beijing and Shanghai non-resident buyers cannot purchase residential real estate in those cities. Why? Because the Chinese Government is committed to protecting the economic interests of the people who live in those cities.The Government has cynically downplayed the impact and the role of foreign buyers in the housing market here. For years it refused to collect the data on the presence of foreign buyers in the housing market in spite of the fact that in both Australia and the United Kingdom it is the policy of Governments in those two countries to have a searchable and transparent register of foreign property ownership. From 1 October last year the Government required non-resident foreign buyers to register with the Inland Revenue Department and recently Land Information New Zealand released the data it had collected over that 6-month period. The Government cynically tried to say that it showed that only 3 percent of the transactions during that 6-month period went to foreign buyers but it had excluded 45 percent of the transactions from the data set that it used to calculate that 3 percent so the data showed nothing of the sort. It was meaningless. It made no useful contribution to the public debate about the impact of foreign buyers in the housing market.Even more damaging for the National Government's credibility on this issue was that the four Australian banks have now stopped lending to foreign buyers. They have stopped lending to foreign buyers. Who do you believe: the National Government when it says that foreign buyers have no impact on the housing market or the four Australian banks that completely dominate lending for mortgages in this country? That in a single stroke demolished what little credibility the Government had left on this issue.National wants to make this an issue of race. It is telling the 64 percent of New Zealanders who want to see Labour's policy enacted—National is telling those people and the 54 percent of their own voters who want to see Labour's policy enacted—and who say that they want a Government to put the interests of young Kiwi homebuyers first that they are xenophobic. That is the definition of being out of touch. Those members are utterly out of touch. They stand on the side of foreign non-resident speculators against the interests of young Kiwi first-home buyers."