van Velden BrookeBROOKE VAN VELDEN (Deputy Leader—ACT): Thank you Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of the ACT Party in opposition to the Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Bill at its third reading. The ACT Party wants more homes to be built in New Zealand. We want people to have access to warm dry affordable homes so that all New Zealanders feel like they can have a future in this country and so that young people don't feel like they're being priced out of the market and that their best hope to have a property-owning future is to move to Australia. And we're hearing so much of that happening from our skilled tradespeople and our skilled workforce at the moment. And ACT wants young New Zealanders to be able to feel like they can someday own their first home because that provides stability for families. It provides stability that a lot of people are looking for as they want to settle down and raise children in suburbs and communities with their family around them.We often think of the people who send us emails who we meet in the community who tell us We don't feel like we have a future in this country." And we have to change what we're doing so that people do feel like there is a future in New Zealand because they have homeownership. I often think of a man that I met in Ōāmaru who was a 30-year-old tradesman who told me that he was moving to Australia because he didn't actually feel like he had a future here.Hon Member: Shocking.BROOKE VAN VELDEN: And I think that is—it is; it's shocking and very saddening.But while we know that there is a problem in housing and how many homes we are building in New Zealand this bill is not the solution to the problem. And that's for two reasons. The first is that it focuses on changing our planning laws when we know it's not the planning laws that are the issue. It is infrastructure financing and funding. The second reason that we have for opposing this is because of the process that came about while we're passing this law. Now ACT has stood in this Chamber and opposed a range of laws that have been rushed through with limited consultation. Rushed law seldom leads to good law and that's why we oppose it.So I first want to start off by talking about the shoddy process that's led us here to the third reading because I think it gives context to the issues that we've found in the bill throughout the process. Not only was it rushed it was put forward in a very unusual manner. This is a bipartisan approach with two parties that have zero credibility on solving the housing crisis. That's why they stood up to have a bipartisan approach because they wanted to abandon attacking each other on an issue that they both have no credibility on. They considered the benefit of standing up on podiums side by side in the media saying that they had found a solution before they considered the people that would be affected by their law change. They considered themselves before the people of New Zealand and that's why we ended up in a process that was secret because it was so much more important that they wouldn't spoil the surprise and the announcement that they'd somehow just solved the housing crisis and they couldn't possibly tell anybody what they'd been up to because you know that would spoil it for everybody. And that's a shame because bipartisan approaches shouldn't be a bad thing but the result is a bad policy that won't actually work and it won't solve the problem because they've misdiagnosed it.So what should have happened? Well they could have started by consulting with people who actually build homes in this country: the builders the developers the architects the local councils and the planning experts. That's what the ACT Party did as soon as we heard of this announcement. And would you believe it? They told us that this policy won't do anything. It won't deliver the houses that it promises to a generation. It won't deliver a single more home. It promises more theoretical homes. But you can't live in a theoretical home and that's because they're adding more zoned land when zoned land isn't the problem to build more homes.Now when we looked through the very short select committee process I was amazed with that shortened time frame that people were able to express the flaws in this problem—even with such a short process. And the councils and developers pointed to the lack of infrastructure which doesn't allow them to intensify in existing town centres close to community services. So this enabling housing supply bill which says "enabling housing supply" doesn't do anything to enable housing. But what would enable housing is more infrastructure.There are many issues but I'll just touch on a few. The first is obviously that it doesn't touch on infrastructure funding and financing which actually holds up development. Because if you look at the Auckland Unitary Plan which came into effect in 2016 it has zoning for up to 400000 more homes. The zones are there but some developments still can't occur because of the infrastructure that's holding it back. And we heard of a wonderful example from a person who lives in Grey Lynn and they would love to see more intensification happening in their suburb but the issue that's holding them back is the infrastructure. They already have overflowing sewage overflowing pipes. We don't want to see that happening across our cities. The ACT Party does want to build more homes but we don't want sewage in the streets. We also want to make sure that we live in a democracy that listens to people and listens to local knowledge and the experts.A second example is the Hamilton City Council. That is a growing city but it also lacks infrastructure for its older parts of the city. They've said that it would cost about $4 billion just to bring up their infrastructure to intensify under the National Policy Statement on Urban Development that already exists before you then go and change the rules again for more intensity. I think that is a huge issue because it is not good for planning and certainty and it's not good for councils. The medium-density residential standard creates a completely new zone that would allow three three-storey homes in any suburb in our five largest cities one metre from the boundary. That won't be more homes; they'll just be in a different place to where the councils had expected them to be when they were planning for communities. People want to live in a home but they also want to live in a community that's serviced by their community that has access to transport—access to being able to go to work to school the shops the libraries the public parks. People want to live in a community not just a home.The last aspect is that this was divisive rhetoric and we've been seeing this in a whole range of policies that this Government has been pushing through. It was supposed to target the nimbies the people who said "Oh they couldn't possibly like another home in their suburb and that's terrible because they don't want other people to have a home." That's not the case. They're not listening to the actual problem which is that people have identified that intensification in their area won't work because of the infrastructure problem. The ACT Party doesn't just oppose; we propose. We reached out we told the select committee we told National and Labour that we would want to see infrastructure added to this bill and they rejected that. They rejected a policy that would actually work. We are not opposing this because of politics; we're opposing this because of people and because we want policy that works. New Zealanders deserve policy that doesn't just say it enables; it does—and this policy won't deliver a single more home."