Parker DavidRESOURCE MANAGEMENT (ENABLING HOUSING SUPPLY AND OTHER MATTERS) AMENDMENT BILLThird ReadingHon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): I present a legislative statement on the Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Bill.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.Hon DAVID PARKER: I move That the Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.As a new Government we accepted that New Zealand faced a housing crisis and that it is our duty to turn around these long-term trends. I think we all now accept in this House that many people have been experiencing stress from housing costs resultant overcrowding and homelessness. Today we deliver legislation that builds on the Government's existing National Policy Statement (NPS) on Urban Development bringing that forward faster and amending the Resource Management Act to deliver better outcomes. This bill will mean that more New Zealanders can have a healthy home sooner whether they're owners or renters. I'd like to thank the Environment Committee and officials again for their work on the bill.There's no doubt that the bipartisan approach of Labour and National to this legislation supported in the House today by the Greens and the Māori Party is important. It will help provide greater long-term certainty and stability in respect of this important setting.Before I turn to the details of the bill though I would like to respond to what I thought was a slight over-egging of the pudding by the deputy leader of the National Party in the House last week where she claimed that this bill will make greater inroads into the housing crisis than other measures that the Government has already taken. Although its impact is significant and will be beneficial to housing supply it should be seen in context. It's a welcome addition to the heavy lifting that's being done by some other policy initiatives altogether. The cost-benefit analysis done by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) showed that the existing NPS on Urban Development will add 72000 dwellings as a consequence and PwC now think that that's a conservative estimate.In addition as a Government we've also introduced a suite of other actions to increase housing supply to get people into warm dry housing and as I've said it was us in 2017 who were willing to acknowledge a housing crisis that had been denied in the face of people sleeping in garages and in cars. We've invested taxpayers' hard-earned taxes wisely. We've had a $3.8 billion Housing Acceleration Fund to speed up and scale up home building by enabling infrastructure needed to support housing. Most recently this has included $136 million allocated to large-scale projects in Porirua and $282 million in Auckland. In our first term we established the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development to lead our housing response. We established also the Urban Growth Agenda and Land for Housing Programme to improve land supply. We established Kāinga Ora to provide a joined-up approach to housing and community development. We passed the Urban Development Act the Infrastructure Funding and Financing Act and as I've said previously put in place the NPS on Urban Development. These measures have enabled housing development they've ensured that more capital is available to build infrastructure and they've supported well—or they are going to support—well-functioning urban environments. We also passed the COVID Recovery (Fast-track Consenting) Act and projects referred under that Act have included more than 3400 residential units in the 2021 year. We've required the Reserve Bank to consider housing and monetary and financial decisions and we've amended the Overseas Investment Act to ban most overseas buyers of existing residential property to curb offshore speculation in our home whilst encouraging investment into new housing.This term we've continued at pace by continuing with the comprehensive reform of the resource management system we've dedicated $400 million to the Progressive Home Ownership Fund to help families into their first houses and the next phase will see Kāinga Ora offering support for shared home ownership for households earning less than $130000 a year. In March this year we released our housing package with that $3.8 billion infrastructure fund to accelerate housing faster with more support for Kāinga Ora and with higher income and housing caps so that more people can access first-home grants and loans. We doubled the brightline tax test and we phased out interest deductions for residential investments in existing homes again tipping the balance in favour of homeowners and encouraging investors into new homes rather than bidding up the prices of existing houses.As a Government we boosted apprenticeships and support for trades training. This has been hugely successful with more than 100000 people extra in training and many tens of thousands of those are in full-blown building trade apprenticeships. We've launched the Construction Sector Accord to help meet the challenges facing that sector as it's rapidly expanded. We announced the $350 million Residential Response Fund to help balance our finance sector through COVID-19. We amended the Building Act to exempt smaller projects and lift the efficiency in quality building. We established the Māori and Iwi Housing Innovation programme to enable the building of more homes on Māori land. We introduced the healthy homes standards and amended the Residential Tenancies Act because renters deserve healthy and secure housing. We funded over 18000 public and transitional houses to be delivered by 2024. We launched Housing First working with councils to support housing providers and we've delivered an action plan for homelessness which is actually one of the many reasons why we've succeeded as a country to overcome COVID because we enabled a lot of homeless people to come off the streets.The impacts of all of these policies on the supply of homes are clear in the numbers. There are now more than 74900 public homes 8770 more than before the 2017 election. Building consent numbers are running at record levels with more than 155000 issued since October 2017. More than 47000 consents were issued in the year to the end of October and an average of 44000 is expected over the coming year according to the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment's national construction pipeline. So that will be about 265000 additional houses or homes after the next six years. In Auckland alone the number of houses being built has almost doubled over the last five years from 10000 in 2017 to 19000 per annum now. This is all very substantial progress and for the first time in a long long time New Zealand is building more houses than needed to accommodate population growth so we are making progress. That is the background to this bill. This bill builds on that strong foundation of housing action. PwC modelling found that the medium-density rules in this legislation will add tens of thousands more dwellings in the next five to eight years than the five tier 1 urban areas. That strengthens our plan to improve housing supply by bringing forward and strengthening the NPS on Urban Development and it makes land use and infrastructure more efficient. This approach was reinforced by the Infrastructure Commission in their submissions to the bill. They highlighted that demand for infrastructure is driven primarily by population growth and made the point that this bill is unlikely to increase the total cost of infrastructure in the long run as it shifts where development happens rather than whether it happens. Intensification in cities rather than sprawl is shown to bring economic benefits as well as environmental and wellbeing benefits. This bill introduces the medium-density residential standards which will mean that more people in our cities will have more housing choices—not being forced to do anything; they'll have choices—at more price points. Importantly these homes will be in areas close to transport schools jobs hospitals and other services—in other words: where people want to live. The Environment Committee has strengthened the bill to ensure that density and livability go hand in hand. Intensification will also help low-carbon urban form and the protection of valuable productive soils outside of cities that we need to grow food.Finally the bill makes things easier and cheaper for councils and their communities by streaming this part of the council plan-making process and so will in turn make sure that the houses that we need can be built sooner.We've heard for many years now that too many Kiwis are locked out of the housing market. They will see this bill as a further opportunity to get a foot on the housing ladder and obtain a healthy and secure home to own or to rent. With this bill we can look forward to more housing choices like an extra home out the back for a parent or to provide a home for a renter or a first-home buyer; houses with easy transport options nearby so people can get to work businesses school or the places that they recreate. We're going to have easier development options for papa kāinga and to support extended family and multigenerational living and we will do this with increased amenity and I think better housing because if people aren't spending as much on land they can afford a better house. All of this is enabled; not required. The choice is for the landowner or developer.The final point I'm going to say is that I find it incredibly odd that the party that claims it wants less regulation and favours greater autonomy for property owners is now tripping over itself to argue—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): The member's time has expired. The question is that the motion be agreed to.