Parker DavidHon DAVID PARKER (Labour): The point I was making before the election of course is that KiwiBuild in addition to all of the houses that are currently being built by the private sector would add to supply. Of course it would not add to supply overnight because you have got to issue contracts and you have got to get planning consents. We promised that we would build 100000 extra affordable houses over a 10-year period. The Minister for Building and Housing in the last day or so with Paul Henry admitted that the Auckland housing market is out of control—the first time that he has admitted that there is a crisis but he still will not use the word. I heard our colleague from New Zealand First describe him as the Minister of Homelessness". I prefer the alliteration of the new term that has been devised in this debate which is the "Minister of Houselessness". I think that is going to stick. Minister why is it that we are bringing forward all of these credible additions to housing policy to fix this problem? It is because we do have a state of emergency. We have got the lowest rate of homeownership since the 1950s and it is still going down. We used to have higher rates of homeownership than Australia; now we have got lower rates of homeownership than Australia. The average house price in Auckland has risen to $1 million and the median has gone up too. We have got people living in garages in cars on the streets—Andrew Little: Under bushes.Hon DAVID PARKER: —under bushes and under bridges. We have got homelessness in numbers that we have never seen ever in the history of New Zealand. We have got economic consequences that are going beyond the housing market and into the rest of the economy where exports are down and speculation is up. We have got people having to spend far too much on housing and they are not investing enough in the real economy which is where jobs and higher incomes come from. We have got Reserve Bank policy now ineffective because the banks are not passing on interest rate cuts. The banks are saying that prices are parlously high and they are worried that if they drop interest rates they will feed the bubble and make things worse. In the midst of all that we have the "Minister of Houselessness". Cartoons in the last day have shown that he has not got the screen appeal of Agent 86 but the Maxwell Smart of National does seem to be embarking on operations for KAOS rather than for the Government. We have heard from the Minister who has just sat in the chair Gerry Brownlee. His answer to New Zealand when he said that these higher prices do not matter was: "New Zealanders follow my example; eat cake." We have had the saboteur from National come forward with a policy that says that we need an omnibus bill. Why did the Government do that? It wanted to whack through under urgency changes to the long-established principles under the Public Works Act that people as part of their rights if they have a property taken off them compulsorily should actually have it offered back to them in some circumstances. It wanted to change that rule of decades to preserve it for a subset of the population which is Māoridom but for non-Māori rights holders in respect of land previously compulsorily acquired and then disposed of it did not want to confer that old right. So what did the Government do? It had this clever idea of an omnibus bill. The Speaker ruled that in order for that to be justified this has to be a wide debate. So as a consequence it has offered the Labour Party the ability to put forward comprehensive housing policy as to how we would fix this housing crisis which brings me to Part 3. Mr Chairman you will hear other parts I am sure relating to some of the other matters that the Minister in the chair Gerry Brownlee raised recently relating to the need for Resource Management Act reform and we have got some ideas around urban boundaries that we have already announced and will be discussing later in this debate. But this one is actually getting the Building and Housing Group through the Minister for Building and Housing to bring forward a plan for affordable housing. You know of the 1300 houses that have been built in these affordable housing areas fewer than 150 of them have been affordable but we need tens of thousands of affordable houses and 150 from this failed special housing area shows we need this plan."