Martin Tracey: Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMartin Tracey: Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 21 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3624. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]TRACEY MARTIN (Deputy Leader—NZ First): I take a short call on behalf of New Zealand First to strongly oppose the Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill. I have to congratulate Bill English. It has taken him 20 years to get to a place through incremental changes with dots on a page that the National Party has been trying to get to since the 1990s and that is to completely dismantle Housing New Zealand Corporation.What will be left once the advice issues get handed over to the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment? And what does the ministry know about actual social housing? Is this another situation where “Mr Fix-it” is going to take over and stuff it up? Is that what this is about? Is this really a partnership between Paula Bennett and Stephen Joyce that the country should be worried about going on into the future through the next election perhaps?What are we doing through this bill in taking away the advisory capacity from Housing New Zealand Corporation and placing it with the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment—business innovation and employment? How interesting because suddenly the rhetoric is again around human beings being productive units. In this one with the housing of those human beings that is now all about being a business. This is a continuation to give National its credit of the spin about “New Zealand Inc.” as opposed to thinking about it as “Family New Zealand”. That is where New Zealand First is coming from. This is about “Family New Zealand”.We find it interesting because whenever New Zealand First says that with immigration we should possibly be encouraging people to spread out throughout the country the answer from the Government benches is “You can’t tell people where to live.” but that is exactly what the Government intends to do with regard to social housing. That is exactly what it intends to do. So apparently you cannot ask a new settler to spread out around the country and enjoy some of the benefits of regional New Zealand but if you are a poor New Zealander you can. If you are a poor New Zealander the Government can actually decide where you will live because it is not going to provide you with any housing in an area where it has decided it is not going to do any regeneration around employment. The Government has decided that it is going to suck everybody into the main centres because—business as usual—it is “New Zealand Inc.” as opposed to “Family New Zealand”.So that is one reason why New Zealand First will strongly oppose this bill. The other reason is that it is just an out and out sell-off. You have got to hand it to the people whom that Government pays to market the words inside their press releases—I hope that the taxpayers are not paying all the media bill for the National Party over there but you have got to hand it to whomever it is paying. They know how to spin the English language—that is for sure. They know how to take what is a bitter pill and gloss it up in some sugar coating and then feed it to the New Zealand public with words like “flexible” with other words like “choice” for example. Apparently if you are rich in New Zealand you can have choice in New Zealand but if you are poor in New Zealand the Government will use that word to beat you up. That is the reality of what is happening here today and it is happening with every single piece of legislation that this Government is forcing through at this time under urgency.The other thing that we find very interesting is the situation where what we are really talking about is that social contract that New Zealanders believed in—or the majority of New Zealanders believed in—from the 1960s. Instead of actually saying that we are going to send this off to private business now—and it will be private business; the NGOs do not have the capacity—the Government will create what will appear to look like an NGO but at the end of the day it will be private business that will buy these houses. It will be private business that will on-sell these houses.It is interesting that this is being pushed through under urgency. I wonder whether it will be pushed through this quickly prior to 2017 because there just might be the off chance of a change of Government in 2017 and there just might be the off chance that there will be new legislation not allowing non-resident or non - New Zealand citizens to buy housing properties. But that legislation under current free-trade agreements cannot be put through retrospectively so it cannot affect anybody who has already bought huge numbers of rental properties in New Zealand. So this piece of legislation moving very quickly creates another organisation into which these houses will all be placed and then they can be on-sold to non - New Zealand residents. We find it highly suspicious. We will be opposing the bill.