Brownlee GerryHon GERRY BROWNLEE (National—Ilam): So it's called the KiwiBuild reset but as the Hon Simon Bridges said it should be called the KiwiBuild retreat. Surely there has never been a more well-pronounced flag-waving policy from any political party that has floundered so badly as this.We should have seen it coming; we always predicted it was all over. We knew it wasn't working well when after 18 months it had only delivered some 70 houses and many of those were just purchased and had been sitting in developer lots for quite a long time unable to sell. We should have known it was coming because even though Mr Twyford had set himself up as a bank of last resort for developers the product was not coming through.What was worse is we knew that there were subdivisions where houses were suddenly labelled as KiwiBuild homes that could have previously been bought off the private market for a price that was less than the KiwiBuild cap. So what we saw was in fact a KiwiBuild programme that was escalating the price of so-called affordable homes in New Zealand.When we looked at the Budget documents there was not a mention of it—not a mention of it—anywhere in any of the Budget documents. So for quite some time the Government has known that this was a complete failure of a policy.What did we get in the reset announcement? What are the new initiatives that are coming through? Well there's no detail—none at all. There's nothing that would give anybody in this country any confidence that there was going to be a greater supply of land for example or affordable housing. Those details apparently are going to be filled in later.When a crisis occurred in Christchurch some years ago there was an immediate move by the then Government—the National Government—to make land available for houses. At the stroke of a pen in conjunction with local authorities 43000 residential sections were created immediately. Was there ever a real crisis for housing in Christchurch as a result? No there wasn't. Whole new subdivisions sprang up very very quickly put in place by the private sector. What it shows is that if there is the opportunity to build the private sector will build. The problem always has been accumulating the funds that are necessary to get into housing.The only good thing that comes out of the reset is the lowering of the requirements around deposits. The only limitation on that is that it is now strictly limited just to the KiwiBuild product. So that doesn't help young people who want to go and buy somewhere of their own choice somewhere else. It doesn't help people getting into a second-hand home second-owner homes. It is very very limiting. So there is nothing in this new reset that is at all exciting.It's no wonder the Prime Minister didn't turn up to the event because there was nothing really to announce other than that the target itself had been dropped. We know that this is a Government that is very good at dropping targets—very good at dropping targets.Then we look at the contribution from the Green Party to this reset: apparently some kind of rent-to-own scheme. Well we know that the former Minister Mr Twyford—the architect from the start of this doomed policy—asked his department over 12 months ago for some kind of information about a rent-to-buy scheme. Who knows what it was that was proposed; we don't because we haven't seen it—it's not in here. It's not in the Budget documents; there is no provision for it. But what we do know is that the official information was that it would help a very small number of people.And why is that? It's because this Government has gone out and said it won't sell any existing State homes. So you can have people who've lived in that State home and paid the rent all the way through for 25 or 30 years. Calculate that against the capital value of that home and they've paid for it—they've paid for it. But they can never own it under this Government. There is no opportunity for them in those often advanced years to get anywhere near homeownership.What I would say too is that if we are going to have a rent-to-buy scheme wouldn't it be most sensible to look at the areas where there is least demand for State homes yet a number of empty State homes which we see throughout the country?