Genter Julie AnneHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker. In today's Dominion Post there's a letter to an editor Will I ever own a home?" from Hudson Todd age 12. "With the large nationwide increase in house prices" he writes "I'm worried I'll never be able to buy my own home. There is an extreme housing shortage". The Government needs to take action. "The Government has to do something about this before parents get stuck with their kids forever!"I can understand the concern of that 12-year-old but with the extreme increase in house prices we've seen over the past year it's not just the next generation who are still living with their parents. I know a 38-year-old builder who is an incredibly hard worker. He and his wife have both been self-employed for a long time. She's taken the last year off because they had their first child. They live with her parents in a rental in Johnsonville. They've been saving up for a deposit so they could buy their own place and maybe even build his own place. But with the median house price increasing at such a rate $50000 across the country in just February alone $100000 in Auckland. If you live in Auckland that's an additional $20000 in one month that you would need for a deposit on a first home. No one on a normal income can save $20000 in one month. In fact many people in New Zealand on the median income would be lucky to save that in a year.That builder's my brother by the way. He's a real person and there are so many like him that have been locked out of the housing market. I know that the Government has every intention to address this crisis but the reality is that this was a crisis several years ago and now in the last year it has gotten so much worse. I have a little graph here just to show you. [Holds up graph] This is data from Bernard Hickey at The Kākā and it shows realised capital gains by New Zealand landlords over the last period of time. You can see it was going up. It was going up. Look at what's happened just in 2020. That was before the most recent increase that we've seen over the past few months.So the Green Party has put forward constructive solutions. We have a four-point plan that we announced today. Firstly remove the cap from the brightline test. This is a simple action that could be taken. It doesn't mean introducing a new tax. It is entirely fair. We already have a law that if you're investing primarily for the purpose of capital gains you should pay tax on that capital gain when you get the income. But having a five-year limit on that brightline test or even if that's extended to 10 years can have perverse incentives and cause people to hold on to properties longer. Just get rid of it. If you're buying a home not to live in you should pay tax on the profit that home makes when you sell it.Secondly we think there are a bunch of tools that can be given to the Reserve Bank and I know some of them have been investigated. One is ending interest-only mortgages for investors. That is incredibly important for the financial stability of the country as well. Put in debt-to-income ratios for investors and we also think we should look at limiting it to cash deposits for investors or at least limiting the amount of equity they can take out of their existing home. While we're in this state of increasing house prices what happens is those who already own property have even more equity which they can then use to buy up more properties and bid up the price of more properties while those who don't own property are left further and further behind unable to save up that deposit. Those are some tools we'd like to see the Reserve Bank get ASAP. There is no time to waste.Thirdly the Government has to take responsibility for its role in stimulating the economy. The Minister of Finance Grant Robertson listed a lot of nice things they did last year—slightly increasing benefits increasing benefits for those who were particularly affected by COVID-19—but that is insufficient. Reserve Bank has said that they're continuing their monetary stimulus because the Government's not pulling enough fiscal levers. This is the time to raise income support. This is the time to implement the recommendations of the Welfare Expert Advisory Group report to end child poverty. We could do it. We could do it in this three-year term. There is no excuse for this Government not to do that right now. And the best most direct way to stimulate the economy is to give money to people who don't have enough.Finally and I wanted to talk about this a lot but I'll run out of time using Kāinga Ora to build affordable homes not just houses out in the suburbs it has to be quality—density done well. Let's scale it up: 5000 homes a year either State houses or community papakāinga housing around public transport."