Groser Tim: Affordable Housing: Enabling Territorial Authorities Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Groser Tim: Affordable Housing: Enabling Territorial Authorities Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:649;Page:18488] 
TIM GROSER (National) 
: 
 In some respects I have some sympathy for the position the Minister is in. She has just been appointed to this position recently after God knows how many disastrous predecessors. She has inherited a problem the roots of which are deep and substantial and she has been told to come up with legislative sleight of hand masquerading as a substantive solution. Frankly the time left for a substantive solution to the things actually driving this problem has long since disappeared. What we have left is a political fig leaf and it will not cover the reality of the problem the Government will confront when finally it is forced to confront the electorate and face the decision of the New Zealand people as to who is to govern them for the next 3 years. 
We have with this bill an empty vessel almost wholly without content. Let us look at the language. It is childlike in its simplicity. We have bold declaratory language leading absolutely nowhere. Clause 6(1) is my favourite—“Territorial authorities that want to find out whether there is enough affordable housing”. I have never heard anything more childlike in its simplicity than that clause. Clause 8(1) states: “A territorial authority that decides to assess the need for affordable housing … must choose the method”. Well what on earth would it do? I have never seen anything so amateurish so childlike and so thin. But of course I understand the problem because the roots of a solution would have had to be taken years ago by this Government and this Minister who is in the unfortunate position of receiving a suicide pass on an issue of fundamental importance to the New Zealand people has come up with a completely empty vessel. 
Let us examine what the real problem is and put some numbers around it. In 1999 a median-priced house in our country cost just over six times the median wage. By 2006 this cost had catapulted to 10 times the median wage and it is higher today. In 1999 it took 42 percent of the average pay to service a mortgage on the median house price. Today it takes around 81 percent and that is after people have saved 20 percent for the deposit which of course by definition is a larger sum of money. It is no wonder that New Zealand is now one of the least affordable places in the world to find a house. 
If members of this Government think that this political fig leaf this legislative sleight of hand that they are forcing through in the dying days of this Parliament [ 
Interruption 
]—under urgency I say to Mr Cosgrove—will fool anyone then I say to them that the only people it will fool I am afraid are themselves. They will find this out the hard way on the hustings in a matter of weeks. The day of reckoning is right before them in all their electorates— 
Hon Clayton Cosgrove 
: Bring it on! 
TIM GROSER 
: —including Mr Cosgrove’s. 
The Minister said that this bill is voluntary and she asked what the alternative is. I will tell the Minister what the alternative is. The alternative has nothing to do with this approach. The alternative has to do with coming to grips with high interest rates. What has driven high interest rates? It is an inflation rate that has been divided up into two sectors for the last 5 years—the traded sector and the non-traded sector. 
The one thing the Government had control of if it had wanted to attack the roots of this problem was non-traded sector inflation which has been nearly above 4 percent for 5 years. But that would have meant tackling the gorilla in the room—the role of the Government—and tackling the need to do something to reverse the disastrous slide in productivity that is behind this problem. Having seen the Government do nothing on that front for 5 years we now see entering from stage left a massive inflationary injection from the traded sector which—up until now—with the higher exchange rate we had and with constant price depreciation from the manufacturing plants of China helped to contain inflation. But it has now gone berserk in the opposite direction. We now have imported inflation adding to the additional problem that this Government never tried to resolve and never tried to get on top of. These are the real solutions to the problem not this phoney legislation.