Moroney Sue: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 03 May 2016. Volume:713;Page:10716. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour): Well for generations it has been the Kiwi way: the right of New Zealanders to be able to raise a family and have a secure place to live. Even through the Depression years that was something that New Zealanders were able to aspire to and to do but not under John Key’s National Government—no more.I am not talking about people at the lowest end of the income bracket even. I am talking about people who regularly come to MPs’ offices who are on decent wages who are in the middle brackets of income who are telling us that they cannot afford the unaffordable housing costs that are going on under this John Key National Government. The Government members opposite are so out of touch that they have used this debate to explain to New Zealanders that it is not even happening—that their reality is not a reality at all. That Government is arrogant and it is out of touch.We have the Government members in this debate about social development and housing celebrating the reduced number of people who are receiving benefits. Well the Labour Party members would join them. They would join in that celebration if those people were coming off benefits to go into paid employment. But they are not and there is no celebration in celebrating people being denied benefits only to end up at the food bank. Alfred Ngaro in his contribution recognised that that is what is happening. He talked about going to visit the Salvation Army to find out how much the food bank needs are increasing in the communities that it serves. That is nothing to be proud of.Alfred Ngaro: And then you go into National policies.SUE MORONEY: That is nothing to be proud of Mr Ngaro. Your Government is putting more and more families through the food bank system—off benefits and straight into the food bank. That is not the vision that the Labour Party has for a brighter future for this country.When talking about housing we cannot ignore the unaffordability that is continuing to creep right throughout New Zealand under this National Government. It used to be confined to Auckland but because of that Government’s failure to fix or even recognise the Auckland housing crisis it is ending up in many other communities.In respect of my own community of Hamilton today the New Zealand Herald announced that in the last year house prices in Hamilton have gone up by 34 percent—in 1 year alone. That is on the back of the previous year when house prices had jumped 21 percent. So do the maths: 21 percent the year before last and on top of that another 34 percent. It is no wonder MPs are seeing people coming through their doors in droves saying that they cannot afford to buy into the market and they cannot afford the increasing rents that come off the back of that.But at the same time—and here is the big kicker—the Government is selling off State housing stock. So the people who normally would fall out and drop out of the private rental market now have no safety net with State housing. Those Government members are pretending that they are not privatising; they are absolutely privatising the State housing market and they know it.Here is a cautionary tale. Normally these tales come from overseas but this is a cautionary tale from New Zealand. The Government is doing exactly what it once did with the rest home sector. It pretends to give it to charitable organisations. Those charitable organisations do it to the best of their ability but find that they struggle quite quickly and guess what? Within a decade we found that those rest homes are almost all now in private hands. That is exactly the path that that Government is using to privatise State housing stock and to get it into their private investor mates’ hands.So we continue to see a Government that is focused on actually supporting people who want to hide their money and to find taxation loopholes in a country like New Zealand. We are becoming a tax haven for goodness’ sake! That is where that Government’s priority is lying rather than in actually addressing the issues that are affecting everyday New Zealanders—hard-working New Zealanders who as I said before are on modest incomes and on middle incomes and increasingly are finding it hard to make ends meet on even the higher level of incomes because of that Government’s failure to act.It is not rocket science. When there is a housing crisis we need more houses. We need more decent houses and we need the Government to act. The market is not fixing this one National. It is not fixing it. And we know that the National Party members sit on their hands and believe that the market will deliver.