Radhakrishnan PriyancaHon PRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN (Minister for the Community and Voluntary Sector): Thank you Mr Speaker. I want to begin my contribution today by sharing with the House a story of a young woman I'll call Alice who grew up in the Ōranga suburb in my electorate in Maungakiekie. I met her in 2016 when she was a teacher-aide in a local school. She told me her story which is not uncommon. She had grown up as I mentioned in Ōranga. She went overseas for a few years you know got married had a couple of children and came back home because she wanted to raise her family here in New Zealand in the suburb that she had grown up in close to where her parents continued to live. She couldn't find a home. She moved in with her whānau. There were about 15 of them living in a two-bedroom home when I met with her. That was meant to have been a temporary situation. It had been two years by the time I spoke to her.She loved her job working with children at the local school but she felt at that point that she wasn't able to earn enough to be able to ever dream of owning her first home. So she left that job a job that she was incredibly good at and it was an incredible loss for that school. She moved to a job that paid a bit better in the hope of saving some money and eventually at some point being able to own a home.This is not an uncommon story and I share that because it represents the real-life struggles of Kiwis when it comes to first-home ownership. I want to put that at the heart of our debate in the House today and at the heart of the housing package that on this side of the House we announced yesterday and that we are incredibly proud of. We've come a fair way since 2016 when Alice experienced what she experienced back then and many others did as well. I want to acknowledge that it's taken us decades to get to a place of a housing crisis but we have always been a Government that has acknowledged that there was a crisis in the first place and continued to take steps to address that. In yesterday's package we tilt the balance towards first-home owners first-home buyers and I'm so proud of that. We're making it easier for first-home buyers to get into a property by addressing both demand and supply as other members of this House have mentioned.In terms of addressing the demand side measures we're lifting the income caps on First Home Loans and First Home Grant programmes so that more people can actually access the support that they need to buy their first home. We're extending the brightline test—we're doubling it in fact—from five years to 10 years with an exemption to incentivise new builds and therefore increase supply in that sense as well. We're also closing a longstanding interest deductibility tax loophole that for so long has favoured property speculators. We're tilting that balance. We're investing in supply investing in new builds that will help drive demand but we're also making sure that we have a skilled workforce to be able to supply the housing that we need.Finally we're removing the barriers that have held up housing builds for way too long by investing in critical infrastructure. In Tāmaki-makau-rau where I'm an MP for example we know that while we may have land to build houses we don't have the critical infrastructure nor the investment by council to be able to provide that infrastructure—like pipes like transport links—so we're funding that and we're providing that so that we can actually use the land that we have to build houses.There is no simple fix. There is no silver bullet. But we are taking incredibly important steps to fix this crisis. We need to also view that in the context of the changes that we have made over the last term as well. Let's not forget that ours is a Government that stopped the large-scale sell-off of State housing. We need to address this crisis the housing crisis across the spectrum and so we're building more public houses. We've brought in rental reforms to ensure that security of tenure is a possibility and that people can live in rentals that are healthy as well. Those are important changes that we've made as well. We've increased significantly new public and transitional homes. We've also put into place progressive homeownership that we continue to build on—again tipping the balance towards first-home owners.I want to make the point that this also sits in the context of lifting wages of addressing the increase of the cost of living over many years as well. All of those need to be seen in their totality when we ensure that we take the steps to fix the crisis that we're in. If we'd had a Labour Government a few terms before I want to say that Alice and those in her position would have had a pretty different experience back in 2016 as well. We've taken steps—SPEAKER: Order! The member's time has expired.