Mackey Moana: Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMackey Moana: Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 22 August 2013. Volume:692;Page:12795. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MOANA MACKEY (Labour):Labour will not be supporting this Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill. It is not because it thinks that those accords or those special areas or fast tracking of consents are necessarily a bad thing. It is simply because this bill will do nothing to increase the supply of affordable housing.We seem to have a Government that says it wants to do things but then refuses to put those things in legislation. That has been a bit of a theme this week: put it in the bill. If what you want is affordable housing put it in the bill. The fact that the Government has refused to actually enshrine in legislation that this bill is about affordable housing leads us to believe that that is not really what it is about at all. The fact is that if what this bill will deliver are more houses it will deliver more unaffordable houses. How is that a solution to affordable housing?From our perspective in the Labour Party we think that if you are not prepared to actually make it clear in the legislation that this is not just about any old home in these parts of the country that are unaffordable but about affordable homes then you are probably not that serious about it. That probably indicates that you are not that serious about it. This Government is not serious about affordable housing at all.If you look at the Government’s track record you see that it has not been serious about the issue of affordable housing. The great initiatives of the National Party are two things. One is interest rates. The global financial crisis delivered lower interest rates but National has tried to take credit for that saying it has somehow been by its good management and not by a complete collapse of the global economy that interest rates have come down. But interest rates have come down because we have been in a recession and I say to the Hon Phil Heatley that a recession is not a housing policy. It is very worrying to hear from the National Party members that they seem to think that a recession is an affordable housing policy. Well even with the recession and the global financial crisis we have not seen the affordable housing crisis go away.The second big scheme the Government had was the Gateway Housing Assistance scheme. This was going to be the big game changer that was going to deliver affordable houses to first home owners who needed them in those markets where housing was particularly unaffordable—the main one being Auckland. Hobsonville a greenfield development was going to be the first place where we would see all these hundreds and hundreds of affordable homes. And how many did we have? I think we had seven. I think that policy delivered seven Gateway Housing Assistance homes and none of them were affordable. And this is the wonderful thing: the only people who could qualify for National’s Gateway Housing Assistance scheme were people who from day one could afford a home at market rates. The banks would lend to people on the Gateway Housing Assistance scheme only if they could see that down the track they could pick up the full cost of the land and the house.So in National’s first term what it did to help first home owners into their homes was to have tax cuts for the wealthy which none of these first home owners got and an affordable housing scheme for the wealthy. I actually know one of the young women who got one of those Gateway Housing Assistance homes and she got it only because her parents put up their house as collateral. Well they could have done that in theprivate market as well. So that was an epic fail on both fronts by the National Government in its first term.What we have seen is Labour introduce itsKiwiBuild policy of 100000 affordable homes for first home owners. That is where Labour has targeted the policy and it has scared the bejesus out of the National Party. Let us be honest: we are here passing this insipid piece of legislation because now National members know that they have to show that they are taking the affordable housing crisis seriously. Well this bill is not going to deliver affordable homes. It is not going to do anything to deal with the affordable housing crisis.There is a horrible moment coming for the National Party when it is going to have to accept that the invisible hand of the market is not going to deliver affordable first homes for first home owners. National is sitting back just hoping and wishing that at some point the omnipresent invisible hand of the market will finally show itself and deliver a housing market that means that first home owners can get into those homes. Well it is not going to happen.That is not going to happen without a Government that takes this issue seriously enough to actually intervene and assist and make sure that the levers are there for affordable first homes. It is not going to happen. The market is not going to deliver. So as I said there are things in this bill we support but it does not go even vaguely near the level of action that we need to see from this Government if affordable first home ownership is going to become a reality in this country.