Hipkins Chris: Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 21 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3644. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): It is a telling indictment on the current National Government that the only time its members are willing to get up on their pins and talk in this debate is when they are trying to shut it down. They are not willing to stand up and actually defend the clauses of this bill. I want to turn to some of the clauses that have not yet been mentioned in this debate and they are the clauses around KiwiSaver—clauses 22 and 23—that make changes to the KiwiSaver provisions in the legislation that allow someone to withdraw their contributions to KiwiSaver to purchase a first home. What this bill does is that it means that somebody who has been in another superannuation or retirement savings scheme and transferred to KiwiSaver will still be able to access those provisions where previously they might not have been able to. So potentially it is quite a sensible provision in terms of ensuring that people can use their retirement savings to buy their first home.But let us just think about that for a moment. That is how far we have come—when the main solution for people who cannot afford to buy their first home is that they can pull out all of their retirement savings to buy a house. That is what it has come down to. They have to make a choice between whether they are saving for their retirement or are able to buy a first home. That is the actual reality that many New Zealanders are facing. We are not talking necessarily about young people—well they are young relatively speaking but we are talking about people potentially in their 30s who might be looking at buying a first home. If they do that and they put all of their savings and all of their money into buying their first home and they then spend the next 10 to 15 years getting their head above water in terms of paying that off how long are they going to have to save for their retirement? As Michael Cullen said when he was the Minister of Finance you cannot eat your house. People are going to need to have savings in their retirement if they are going to live comfortably. I support this particular provision in the bill. I do not necessarily support the other provisions and I am going to talk about the other provisions in this part in a moment. I support this provision but I think we do need to take a step back and ask how on earth we have got to this point where it is a choice between owning a home or saving for retirement because we need New Zealanders to be doing both. We need to make sure that New Zealanders are supported to do both so that they can own a home and they can be sure that they are going to have a comfortable and secure retirement. Unfortunately the reality is that many are having to choose between that. There are other factors at play here when they are making those choices. Many of the people in their late 20s and early 30s who will be in this position—maybe even in their mid-30s—will also have student loans that they are repaying.What we are doing more and more and more is loading cost on to a generation of New Zealanders who are not going to be guaranteed the same comfort in retirement that they are seeing for the generations who have gone before them. That is going to create intergenerational pressure. I say to all of those who are nearing the age of 65 that when that pressure really starts to come home when the retirement boom starts to happen and the next generation of New Zealanders are faced with the choice of increasing taxes to pay for that—which they will pay—or making other changes there will be a conflict. The future generations of New Zealanders will remember that they had to make a choice between saving for their own retirement and buying a home. I think that is going to be very unfortunate. I think we should be factoring that in now and we should be planning ahead for that so that that conflict does not happen because that could be immensely damaging to intergenerational attitudes and I do not think that that is going to be healthy. So I think although that provision is one that I support I think we do need to look at that wider issue of housing affordability and those wider issues around that massive burden that is being placed on an emerging generation of New Zealanders and the pressure that that is going to lead to in the future.Clauses 19 20 and 21 which have been more widely debated in this bill make changes to the remit of the Housing New Zealand Corporation established under the Housing Corporation Act 1974. Previously Housing New Zealand was the main adviser to the Government on social housing policy. That is now being transferred to another agency as part of a wider move which has seen the policy function moving to the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment—or whatever; I cannot remember the exact order of the words in its name—and the needs-assessments being transferred to Work and Income. So the mentality behind this is that Housing New Zealand is simply the owner of the houses. That is all its remit is; that is all it does. I want to say as strongly as I can to the Government that although I understand the distinction that it is trying to make with these changes it is not working on the ground. There are major challenges that that change is creating.