Clark David: Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClark David: Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 21 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3660. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North): Thank you for your advice earlier Mr Chair. I do appreciate it and I appreciate the opportunity to make a wide-ranging contribution to this debate. I do feel strongly about this but I will certainly be speaking though to one clause in the bill and that is clause 2 the commencement of the Act and of Subpart 3. I wish for the House to consider that we change the commencement date to 1 April 2018. I think that way we could be certain that a Government that cares about State housing and a Government that cares about our most vulnerable will be in Government and we can have that debate again. We can ensure that this bill is never implemented. That will be what I will move and that is for the reasons that I am now about to give.What has happened here with this bill is that we are rushing it through the House without the opportunity for public input. It is a bill deliberately designed to reduce State housing in this country. It is designed to take the Government out of the provisions for social housing. As we have heard from many members in this House the problem with that is that the private market is not delivering the affordable and adequate social housing that is desperately needed in our society.I will give another example that has not been brought up. This is an example of a woman whom I met just last weekend on one of my home visits in the suburb of Wakari. I went to visit this woman and she said she was quite happy for me to tell her story because she feels strongly about this.Kris Faafoi: Where?Hon Ruth Dyson: What suburb?Dr DAVID CLARK: Wakari in Dunedin. She said to me that she is fearful that she will not be allowed to stay in her State house any longer. It is a three-bedroom State house. She is now living on her own but she uses the other two bedrooms frequently to take care of her grandchildren when her son is called to work at short notice. She has grandchildren whom she cares for in that house. She has lived in it for a good chunk of her life because for one reason or another she has never had the opportunity or the prospect of affording to buy her own home. She would love to but she has never been in a position to afford her own home. So the State has said: “Look we will look out for you. You are a good contributor to our society.” She has always worked up until recently. She is now unable to find work as she rapidly approaches retirement. She has been made redundant several times. There is simply just not enough work in Dunedin for this woman who would like to work like she has her whole life in order to keep affording a standard of living that we could call living with dignity.She tells me that now she has to save to buy a cup of coffee. She has got a good friend who rings her up every week and says: “Let’s go out for coffee.” She is embarrassed by the fact that she cannot go out every week with that friend because she cannot afford the cup of coffee. When she has paid her insurance which she does refuse to give up—and she says that that is discretionary—she has only $20 left over every week with which to feed herself. She has an elderly dog that she refuses to give away and that she has cared for for many years. She said: “That dog eats pretty close to $20 worth of dog food a week.” She has got nothing—absolutely nothing—to live off each week. When she goes to get a haircut her kids donate her money to get it. That is not the kind of living in dignity that we would want for our citizens. That is not the New Zealand I signed up to where someone who has worked for their whole working life bar the last few years because they cannot get work is forced to worry about whether they are going to have a stable place to live and whether they can care for their grandchildren adequately. Even now she is living in a house that is fairly cold I would have to say from having visited her. She is a good woman.We need to make sure that in our society there is adequate protection and that people who are in need are looked out for and looked after so that they can continue to make a constructive contribution to our society through the caring for grandchildren through the voluntary community work that that woman does and through other means.The point that I want to come back to is that the case for this particular intervention has not been made because there is a market failure. I mentioned this in my earlier contribution the market failure that sees many families who want to get into affordable houses being unable to get into them and families who want to provide warm dry homes for their kids to live in being forced into the private market because of unmet need in the State sector. Those people are in a position where they cannot—they cannot—get what they need out of the private sector. If we had an adequate State housing sector that would force private sector providers to meet that need at the level that the State housing sector meets it and it would address that market failure and the unintended consequences we see in the existing market.One thing that I have noticed in all of the legislation that has gone through the House is that there has been a lack—