Twyford PhilPHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): I am proud to be the mover—and the shaker. It is appropriate that we are debating this issue in this housing bill this afternoon because the role of the Government in fixing a broken housing market is one of the fault lines that runs through this House. It divides the left and the right. It divides the people who have a kind of childlike touching faith in the ability of the market to fix itself from those people like us who informed by history and experience have a confidence that the powers of Government can be used to do good in our community and that it is the job of the Government to actually make markets work for everybody. That is the idea that lies at the heart of our KiwiBuild policy and this proposed new Part 3 of the Housing Legislation Amendment Bill. These days the Government is very fond of talking up what it calls a massive building boom in Auckland. Well just how massive is that building boom? Currently in Auckland 9651 homes have been consented in the last 12 months. That means that about 8500 homes have been built. In 2004 12937 homes were consented so we are way below—25 percent below—the peak of 2004. If you factor in population growth currently under John Key we are consenting about six homes per 1000 population at the moment—six homes per 1000 per year. Under Norman Kirk's prime ministership in the mid-1970s New Zealand was building 16 homes—16 homes—per 1000 population per year. So this is far from being a building boom. I want to talk about why using Government procurement—using the power of the State to stimulate the construction of new homes—is a good idea in the current market. Our construction industry has been gutted of skilled labour by the boom-and-bust cycle which goes up and down like a roller coaster. Every time the market goes down we lose half our skilled tradespeople. They leave the industry and often leave the country. A Government procurement programme like KiwiBuild as embodied in new Part 3 would maintain the supply of new residential builds at the equivalent of the top of the market and keep it there in a countercyclical way for a decade giving local New Zealand construction firms and all of the industry trades that support them the certainty and the volume to increase their production to take on more staff and to train the 5000 apprentices that we estimate would be needed to build the labour force to implement this policy. It would allow using companies like Mike Greer Homes. Mike Greer has pioneered state of the art off-site manufacturing at his Concision factory in Rolleston in Canterbury and is using the latest high-precision digital German equipment to build high-quality homes at a much more achievable cost. These are the kinds of benefits of building up the workforce and employing new design and production technology to build better houses at a more affordable cost. It will also allow us to bust through the rorts and the anti-competitive practices that plague the building supplies market. I could walk into a Home Depot in California and buy treated Pinus radiata framing timber for residential construction at a quarter of the price that I would pay if I go to a Bunnings Warehouse or a Mitre 10. Our building supplies market is seriously anti-competitive. It is uncompetitive. Kiwis are paying nearly 30 percent more than Australians for exactly the same building materials. Through this policy—building 10000 homes a year using Government procurements to that—we can cut through those supply chain blockages and drive down the cost of building. This is how Labour will restore affordable homeownership to a new generation of New Zealanders.