Street Maryan: Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeStreet Maryan: Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 03 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13189. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour): I feel that I must rise to respond to some of those points that the Minister of Housing has just raised. First of all about the latter point if we work backwards through his speech our position in 2008 was as it is now that there should be legislation that legislates for affordable housing. We are opposing this Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill because it does not. It simply sets up accords that are ill-defined that have no particular target and that judging by the words on these pages will not advance affordable housing one jot in New Zealand or at least in Auckland which is the only part that this bill applies to at the moment despite the fact that there are housing affordability pressures in many other parts of New Zealand including the Minister’s own electorate.Just to correct the Minister again—although I am getting a bit tired of having to get up and correct him—the law that we passed on affordable housing was not mandatory. It was voluntary and it did allow councils to take up a legal option that was not previously available to them. We did not mandate it. This is nonsense this kind of approach that the Minister takes where he says: “Oh well does the Labour Party want us to legislate for house prices and legislate for affordable housing or not?”. Well we did that and we did it in a way that was much more effective and worked in concert with other measures such as shared equity in Auckland Wellington Christchurch Nelson and Queenstown which were at that time the top five most expensive places to live in.So there is no ambiguity about our position at all Minister. The position in our legislation had been that here was a tool that was available to local authorities to use.Hon Michael Woodhouse: And none of them used it.Hon MARYAN STREET: Queenstown did. Queenstown—Hon Michael Woodhouse: No Queenstown didn’t.Hon MARYAN STREET: The member opposite says nobody took it up. Well in fact Clive Geddes who was the Mayor of Queenstown Lakes District at the time did take up the use of that legislation. So it is not true to say that nobody took up that legislation. Certainly that far-sighted mayor at the time in Queenstown did.The other thing relating to this that I want to pick up on is that the Minister says this is—what did he say? Grunty. He said it is the grunty part of this legislation. I wish it were. I just wish it were and I wish that it did something that was a bit more detailed than it is. We had the usual complaints about the Resource Management Act. The Minister does what he does really well and that is isolate one example and talk about it as if it is the norm. He takes one example of a consent difficulty—and I must say that he has managed to pass this disease on to the Minister for the Environment as well who tends to take the exception and project it as the norm for consenting.This is relevant to Part 2 because speeding up consents to 6 months may not be in anybody’s best interests. When consents under the Resource Management Act take a long time they usually take a long time for a good reason. It is possible to get past objections that are frivolous and vexatious. It is entirely possible to get past those and the Environment Court has now set down 22 years’ worth of case law to avoid those objections happening. What we have got here is something that risks consents being so rushed at 6 months that they will deliver an imperfect result. I do not want to see another Abbotsford as the people from Dunedin will know well occur because this Minister has decided that we need to speed up the process. Never mind if theengineering reports have not been done accurately. Never mind if the geological reports have not been done adequately or if the right people have not been consulted or if the nature of the soil or the rock bed or the susceptibility to natural disaster have not been sufficiently gauged. Never mind that—what we will do is say that we delivered consents in 6 months. I would rather the Minister delivered safe affordable housing than consents in 6 months.One further point I wish to make relates to a point the Minister made earlier where he took sole and personal responsibility as far as I could tell for the drop in interest rates for the lowering of interest rates. Never mind that there has been a global financial crisis and a period of reasonably prolonged recession around the world never mind that the United States is printing money to keep down interest rates artificially and never mind that there is cheap money available around the world; the Minister says that it is he and his Government that have caused interest rates to drop.I just wanted to give one story. I bought my first house in 1985. I was a young teacher and I had two mortgages. The house cost $66000. It was half a house. It was a terraced house in Auckland Central and it cost me $66000. I had a $20000 deposit because my parents had died and I borrowed the money my sisters got. We clubbed together and put down a deposit. Can I just say that I had to get two mortgages. First of all the banks were not that keen on lending to women alone. Never mind we got over that hurdle. My first mortgage was on an 18 percent interest rate and my second mortgage was on 23 percent. I remember it vividly. I remember it vividly because it took every part of my $35000 or whatever I was earning as a young teacher at that time and it was difficult. It was really difficult. Interest rates are all relative. If the prices of houses are out of the reach of anybody who is on a median income or below then it does not really matter what the interest rates are if they do not have the income to sustain borrowings of $360000 or $380000. It is all relative.So for the Minister to get up and crow about low interest rates as if it was all his own work—I think that if it was all his own work there are things we should be a bit cross with him about. If that is the case then what the Government is failing to recognise is that it is low incomes that prevent young families from being able to finance the prices of houses these days. My first house was $66000 and it was still hard work because of the interest rates. Now the interest rates are low but the house prices are hugely high. So we are in fact worse off now Minister even with low interest rates than we were years ago. Thank you.