Salesa JennyHon JENNY SALESA (Minister for Building and Construction): Madam Chair thank you for this opportunity to speak on the annual review of Housing New Zealand and I'll also cover social development as well but I'll begin with Housing New Zealand.Housing New Zealand Corporation in 2016-2017 recorded a surplus of $65 million and in the year prior to that in 2015-2016 it was $134 million. But when you look at this appropriations report a little bit later what they cover is payment of dividend. Now one of the things that the previous Government did and I quote Under the Housing Corporation Act the corporation is required to pay its annual surplus to the Crown unless"—and I must emphasise that word: unless—"the responsible Ministers authorise otherwise."Now we know that over the last nine years when the previous National Government was in Government for most of those years Housing New Zealand Corporation was required to find a surplus and this surplus was paid back into the Government's coffers. We know that for a whole lot of our State houses utilising some of that money—as Housing New Zealand Corporation is right now—to ensure that the houses are well maintained and that they are warm dry and healthy was not done. I'm happy to say though that that is what is currently being done now under this current Government.I have to reflect on both the previous speaker and the former Minister of housing Nick Smith who spoke about how he was proud of the previous National Government's record on housing. Can I say that when you have record homelessness when we know that Aotearoa New Zealand has the worst rate of homelessness now and when we are No. 1 for homelessness when compared to the other OECD countries I would not be proud of that particular record. That is a record that none of us should be proud of: the fact that we are short by 71000 houses across all of New Zealand; the fact that in Auckland our largest city we are short by 45000 houses; and the fact that we know there are still so many of our families that do not have a roof over their heads.Can I go back and reflect on 2016-2017. One of the things that I as a local member of Parliament and many other colleagues from this side of the House tried to ensure that the Government at that time was aware of was the fact that we actually had a housing crisis. This was something that we acknowledged when we were in Opposition and it is something that we still know today as a fact which is one of the reasons why we're saying that we will do this KiwiBuild. One of the things that the former housing Minister was talking about was the fact that we would only be building several thousand homes. The Hon Nick Smith didn't then say that the thousand homes that the housing Minister is talking about is 1000 KiwiBuild homes. That is not counting the houses that Housing New Zealand Corporation is building. That is not counting the houses that private developers are building right now only the KiwiBuild homes and the year after that it'll be 5000 KiwiBuild affordable homes and in the third year 10000 KiwiBuild affordable homes.But can I go back to the fact that we have a housing issue that we are addressing. After nine years of the previous Government we have been landed with so many issues. Housing is one of them; homelessness and the fact that we are having to—one of the points that my honourable colleague who has given a speech also mentioned was the fact that we are now no longer selling off State houses and that we should look at Glen Innes and Glen Innes is a good example. The same time that the previous Government was selling off the State houses was the time that they were also investing in motels.Now when we look at the social development part of this annual review we see that the demand in terms of social housing exceeds supply in many communities. We also see covered in there transitional housing. Now the fact that in 2016-2017 we had to invest in so many emergency houses and transitional houses was because we were not catering for the numbers of houses that our people need because the previous Government was selling off State houses."