Woods Megan; Salesa JennyHon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Minister of Housing): I'll introduce some general comments and I'll address the two specific questions that have been put by the Opposition spokespeople for housing.There are few things more important to New Zealanders than having a safe warm dry secure place that they can call home. That's why this Government sees housing policy as critical to what we need to do to achieve our wellbeing objectives. We have a housing crisis that is decades in the making. Not only have we not invested in the critical infrastructure that is required throughout our towns and cities to build houses but we've also had a sell-off of our State houses in the decade preceding this one. We haven't had that ongoing commitment to building public housing or indeed building housing per se and that kind of investment.We know how we got here. The question is how we get out of this what we need to do to address our housing crisis. Now there is no one single simple fix to our housing crisis that we face today. Instead what there is is a commitment from a Government to have a suite of policies that work together. So that is why I am so pleased to be joined by my Associate Ministers of housing who are all playing such critical roles in how it is that we have a multi-faceted approach to addressing a housing crisis that is decades in the making.First of all we have to make sure that we strengthen the system now and in the future. We have to increase the housing supply. That is something that we are immensely proud of as a Government that we are seeing start to happen. We have to provide immediate support to our most vulnerable who are the victims of inaction by successive Governments on the issue of housing. And that is what we are also committed to: that what we do know is that this is decades in the making.It is going to take time to turn it around but we are starting to see the green shoots of change coming through and we can look at some of the evidence points around us. We can look at public housing: there's 9075 more net public housing places since when we took Government in November 2017. Of those we can see that there are new builds—they're a substantial proportion of those new places: 7313 of those new public housing places.We then can look at what we're doing in the issue of transitional housing. When we came into Government in 2017 there were 1198 transitional housing places. And this is why we have a homelessness problem. We did not have adequate investment in transitional and emergency housing from the previous Government. I am pleased to report that today there are 5143 transitional places in New Zealand—that's 3424 that we have added in the 4½ years that we've been in Government and something that we can look to.Progressive homeownership—that we have started for the first time at scale rolling out a way to help New Zealanders who wouldn't otherwise have bought a house—and yes I'll come back to that. KiwiBuild—it's not a programme that dare not speak its name; it is actually delivering at a rate that the previous Government's eyes would have been watered by given the special housing areas only delivered 100 affordable houses over a period of nine years. I am pleased to say that what we have is 1304 completed KiwiBuild houses in the period and the time since we've been in Government; 917 are currently under construction now.One of the Opposition housing spokespeople asked the question around What is the future for KiwiBuild?" Well I think as we face the headwinds of a construction industry that is going to see it harder to get developments off the ground that a Government that has a commitment to countercyclical tools like KiwiBuild is incredibly important. To hear one of the Opposition spokespeople say it's time to pack it in and use that money in different ways I'm interested—genuinely interested—to hear how he proposes to spend that money differently. I think that is important that we start to hear what the Opposition's plans in housing are because I've been waiting 4½ years and haven't heard that.So KiwiBuild does have a future. KiwiBuild certainly does have a future with this Government. But what we do need to do is ensure that we are backing young New Zealanders into homeownership. Now with KiwiBuild we had the courage to do one of the more difficult things in politics: to say that actually we needed to step back we hadn't got it all right; that there were some critical elements missing that allowed us to have KiwiBuild reach its potential. And one of those was the fact that we simply did not have the infrastructure in place in many of the places where we would look to build at an affordable typology which is in terms of intensification. So if I look at Eastern Porirua if I look at parts of Mount Roskill if I look at parts of Māngere the infrastructure that was laid down when those suburbs were built only allows us to build back one for one. And that is why this Government has committed $3.4 billion to investing in infrastructure so we can get the intensification we can get that density and with it will come affordability. It is the burying of the head from the previous Government when they were in Government that just did not look at what was required if we were going to have affordability built into our housing system—that is one of the things that we are still grappling with today.The other housing spokesperson for the Opposition from the ACT Party asked me whether or not we stood by our decision of using the land for housing appropriation to buy the land at Ihumātao. We say "Absolutely we stand by that decision." What we had in the stand-off that was happening at Ihumātao was a legacy of the failure in housing from the National Government. This was part of Nick Smith's last-minute attempt to try and do something that just went horribly wrong. So the number of houses that we were going to get under the current settings at Ihumātao was precisely zero. As a Government we are committed to taking the time to ensure that we can get some housing there and to working with partners and to ensure we don't get bogged down into that stand-off again.So the other area that I'd just like to touch on in terms of the green shoots that we're seeing from our Government's commitment to a suite of housing policies is a place-based approach. We're saying there is no one-size-fits-all for New Zealand—that actually some of our regional centres are suffering some of the biggest housing deprivation that we're seeing. We have to take a more nuanced and a more sophisticated approach to our policy settings here. So I look with great pride at an area like Hastings that has had so little attention in housing for decades. I look at March 2021: a total of 108 Kāinga Ora public homes delivered to date 117 currently under construction 52 in feasibility and 19 in procurement. And the Hastings District Council is developing council-owned land which will deliver 150 affordable homes for locals that live there.I'm sure that the Associate Minister responsible for Māori housing will take a call at some point and elaborate on this—we are incredibly proud of our Māori housing strategy our MAIHI strategy; we simply had to do something to address the issues that stretch the housing continuum from homelessness through to the inability to get into homeownership for Māori. And we are trying things for the first time as a Government. These have never been tried in New Zealand before. We have a programme of work we have the commitment as a Government and we are doing things that have never been done before. So I look forward to through the course of this debate answering questions but finally also hearing some detail from the Opposition about what they would do.CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jenny Salesa): As-salamu alaykum and Eid Mubarak to all of our Muslim brothers and sisters today."