Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Mr Chair for this opportunity to address some of the comments made by Grant Robertson I think who sadly will not be able to hear my comments. Hopefully he is listening on his crystal set at home. He took it upon himself to tell me that there is no Santa Claus. What a cruel cruel man is Grant Robertson! But the reality is that there is a Santa Claus. There is a market and overwhelmingly it works. If you want to question that then the first thing you might ask yourself is why it is that the cost of goods that people consume whether it be cars whether it be electronics whether it be clothing or whether it be food has gone down relentlessly in real terms for decades and decades and decades.There is one asset that people choose to consume in New Zealand that strangely enough has not gone down in real terms and that is housing. You would have to ask yourself: what is different about the housing market from every other commodity that people like to consume? I will just give you a suggestion that there is no other market that has more intervention by councils and the New Zealand Government than the housing market because all of those other things I listed are things that can be produced offshore and imported and that is why we have a competitive market the New Zealand Government cannot touch.But what the New Zealand Government is able to touch is the infrastructure and the regulatory environment surrounding land. Those are the things that are regulated by the Government where there is extensive Government intervention and strangely enough we have found ourselves with a great shortage of that commodity and at the same time steadily rising prices which is what has occupied most members and much of the New Zealand public for some time now.So here is the world that works: free markets providing many of the things that we consume with continually dropping prices and increased welfare for citizens. Here is the world that does not work: the world that is regulated and monopolised by Government and that is access to buildable urban land and the infrastructure to service housing. That is the world that does not work and that is the world where we have had increasing prices and a shortage of supply. If only members opposite were able to understand these simple distinctions between a free market and a market where the critical inputs are regulated by Government or monopolised in their provision by local councils.Of course if it is a Government failure that has led to our difficulties with housing affordability then what needs to be done is that the Government needs to change its policy approach to those areas of the market that it dominates. This Committee needs to be debating legislation to seriously reform land-use planning particularly in urban settings. It is not good enough that our Resource Management Act has grown from 400 pages to 900 pages in the last 25 years. It has simply become more complicated. Only Grant Robertson only the Labour Party would believe that an activity governed by 900 pages of legislation—the purpose of which is just to set out the rules for another level of the Government's interventions—was a free market.When we do development we need infrastructure and the roads and the pipes that make up urban infrastructure are extremely costly to councils yet the development that councils are in charge of consenting is extremely profitable to central government. We need to renegotiate the deal between central government and local government and actually share revenue to incentivise councils to consent more land. That is the public policy prescription that New Zealand needs. We do not need to fix the free market where it operates. We need to make the inherently interventionist housing market more efficient and that requires better Government policy. There is a Santa Claus.