Woods Megan: Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 21 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3544. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): Never before has so much pride been displayed by so few in such a short space of time. It has been quite cooling. That was one of the longest contributions that we have had at a second reading on a bill going through under urgency where it is not having the scrutiny that we would expect in Parliament under normal circumstances in terms of its select committee stage. It is frankly an arrogant Government that thinks that it can rush through legislation at this pace even under urgency without giving that legislation a full debate and a full airing. We have heard some fantastical explanations why. There was Mr Doocey who thinks that magically houses are going to grow overnight if only this bill is passed. We will wake up in the morning and throughout the land there will have sprouted houses into which the good people can move.There is a naivety in this Government which is showing through in this legislation. We are hearing over and over and over again with this piece of legislation the panic that has set in in this Government. There has been some polling and those members have seen there is a problem—their inaction on housing over their 7 years in Government—yet here we are pushing through a half measure that is only enabling something that is not going to help the situation. It is the only solution that they have come up with. Other suggestions that they have had around housing seem to have disappeared such as the much-touted during the election campaign and the much-touted at the beginning of this year Resource Management Act reforms. That was going to be the silver bullet for housing in New Zealand. We are still waiting for Dr Smith to show us those reforms. We have actually said: “Show us them. Put them on the table and do you know what? If there is some stuff that will help with housing we’ll look at it. Let’s use the mechanism of a national policy statement and then we could actually perhaps join with you and work on that.” but has National fronted up and shown them to us? No because this is a Government that does not have answers around housing. This is a Government that has got empty ideological rhetoric which is not going to make a blind bit of difference to the lives of ordinary New Zealanders.What we have had touted tonight—starting with the Prime Minister and echoed through all the research note speeches—is a clear commitment to compassionate conservatism coming from the Government benches.Hon Member: Big community.Dr MEGAN WOODS: The compassionate conservatism that those members believe they are displaying seems to have evolved so that actually it translates into the big society. One of them let it slip but I think he got it wrong and called it “big community”. The term that your overseas overlords use is “big society” when talking about this. But National Party members need to actually have a look at what compassionate conservativism is. We actually have had National Parties in the past in this country that have practised compassionate conservatism. What is happening in this House tonight and in this legislation is not the conservatism of Sid Holland and it is not the conservatism of Keith Holyoake. When those leaders of the National Party sought to remove the State from housing they looked to sell houses to the individuals who lived in those houses. They did not look to flog them off to their mates in the corporate sector in order to put people under corporate overlords. This is the Cabinet club conservatism as my colleague Phil Twyford called it that underwrote the 1990 market rentals that Ruth Richardson put in place.Do not kid yourself that this is any form of compassionate conservativism. When compassionate conservativism started to be touted by right-wing parties—it was Bush who first started using it; he abandoned it pretty much after 9/11 and just went into plain old “kick ’em in the guts” right-wingism actually. But compassionate conservativism does not look back to your roots. You are a party that has been better than that—Mr Assistant Speaker I am sure you are as well. The National Party does have a history that is rooted in some belief in that but what we are seeing displayed tonight is not that. This is a return to the 1990s and a belief that you can sell State houses off to anyone.We started with the fiction that this was legislation to enable State housing to be sold to the community sector in some hope of achieving their big society. Well the problem that we are seeing here as we have in many places is that the key providers in that sector said “Yeah thanks but no thanks.”; they did not believe that State house tenants would be better served under this model than they could be with the Government providing so they did not want a part of that. And what have we had now? We have had Bill English saying that yes we could be seeing some of these being sold to private property developers. The Government has tried to dress this up as something that this is not. This is pure and simple a flogging off of our State houses.What else are we seeing? Not only is the Government divesting itself of the ownership of the housing it is divesting Housing New Zealand of some of the core policy functions and thinking that need to go into this so that we will no longer see Housing New Zealand having a policy function. We will not have a dedicated part of our Government that tries to put the bits of housing policy together. Instead we are going to see a continuation of the approach that we have seen with the functions spread and splintered across the Government and we will see that it does not have a coherence that has tenants at the centre and the well-being of the tenants at the centre. My colleague Phil Twyford put it very well when he talked about a State-owned version of Barfoot and Thompson and said that we will have a State-owned letting agency not a Government department that is dedicated to doing what we expect Housing New Zealand to do and to doing what its functions should be.That is a very sad day for New Zealand because what we used to have in this country is a belief that a core part of the safety net that we provided for our citizens was housing—housing that would mean that people would not have to go homeless. I think what we are going to hear through the course of this debate is examples from all around the country that we can speak of where we have constituents who are not being well served. What is most upsetting for us is that these very same constituents are going to be even worse-served under the changes that we are making here under urgency tonight. There is nothing in this legislation that is going to give back to our tenants. Instead what we have is an ideological commitment to selling houses off to whoever the right bidder is that the Government can find.The shortage of housing is getting worse and other speakers from this side of the House have alluded to the fact that selling houses does not create more houses. I think my colleague Annette King chose to point out that selling them off is not going to magically create more houses any more than passing legislation under urgency Mr Doocey will allow for houses to magically appear on the landscape of New Zealand. What we have to have and what we are not having from this Government is a proper commitment from the Government to ensuring that New Zealanders are housed—something that we think is a pretty basic role of Government and something that we are committed to doing. Just simply passing the buck on to the community sector which does not want a bar of it is not responsible government in this area. Passing the buck and abrogating itself of its responsibility as a Government is not good enough.But what is more galling is where I started: this is a group of people who are trying to kid themselves that this is some kind of compassionate conservatism. This is a return to their 1990 roots not their roots in the past in the 1960s and the 1950s when actually there was a grain of truth in the fact that the National Party in New Zealand did exercise a kind of compassionate conservatism. There was a belief in the role of the State. There was a belief that it needed to do right by New Zealanders. We are not seeing that in this legislation. What we are seeing is a Government that is walking away from one of its core responsibilities which is providing adequate housing. It is a Government that is out of ideas. It is a Government that is poll driven. What we are seeing here tonight is not going to solve anything.