Faafoi KrisKRIS FAAFOI (Labour—Mana): It is a pleasure to take a call on Part 1 in this debate on the Housing Legislation Amendment Bill. I want to continue along the theme that a number of my colleagues have spoken on around affordability. I do want to point to paragraph 10 of the regulatory impact statement which is on Part 1 which says that three-quarters of the special housing areas require around 10 percent of homes within the development to be affordable. Either way you look at it special housing areas are a form of market intervention and therefore I do not think our friend Mr Seymour would agree with those.I think we really have to question the effectiveness of special housing areas. I do pay respect to my brothers and sisters from Auckland but there is an issue emerging in Wellington too. I do not have a special housing area within my electorate. I know that the Government has an agreement with Wellington City Council that does not cover my area but when you look at the market as it operates in a raw sense in Porirua you can see the market at the very top end working quite well if you are a developer. There are plenty of houses in some new developments in Porirua that are around the $750000 to $1 million mark. [Interruption] Yes that is right. If you are in that area of the market construction is going well—that end of the market is booming.But if you are at the affordable end of the market—and you can look at defining that however you like and I do acknowledge Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 210 from Metiria Turei—there is nothing available for you. In theory you could claim that the special housing areas would be able to come in and make a difference but as we have seen in Auckland that is not the case and we seriously question whether or not the affordability percentages around the special housing areas are having any effect in Auckland and if they were to come further south what they would do to a market such as Porirua.At the moment in this region we have got around 460 empty State homes. In my particular area of Porirua there are 126 empty State homes along with large swathes of land that used to have State homes on them that the Government demolished. It promised to return some homes to those areas and has not done a single thing.David Seymour: Halfway mate.KRIS FAAFOI: Mr Seymour has got something to say about that; I do not think it would be helpful. So we have got a market in Auckland that is not working and a market in other areas of the country that is not working. Although we support the extension of the special housing areas I think we have to take a good hard look at the effectiveness of these special housing areas and look at just whether or not they are working and whether we have got a large enough percentage of those affordable homes being built for Kiwis.I do remember at the beginning of the process of the Aotea block being built that there was a proposal that a certain percentage—larger than 10 percent—had to be deemed affordable. That did not happen. What you have got now is that people who have got plenty of money are fine in the Porirua market but people who have got no money are struggling to get into the property market to buy a house or even find a house to rent in the private market and there is almost nothing available in the Housing New Zealand sphere. Of the 42 houses that are available in Porirua at the moment I cannot see why those houses are not being given to families that are on the waiting list. I believe the waiting list as it stands which was cut down about 2 or 3 years ago is about 60 families. So we have got empty homes in Porirua and 50 or so families that desperately need them.I think the extension of the special housing areas might be something that the Government is trying to do to make more affordable homes available but it is certainly not meeting the demand from those people who want affordable homes. I would suggest that this Committee looks really closely at SOP 210 from Metiria Turei which defines affordability. Mr Seymour does not like it because it is a market intervention. But if you look at it if you look at how the market is operating now it is not working for all New Zealanders. It might work for Mr Seymour and his friends.Grant Robertson: It's not working for him.KRIS FAAFOI: It may not be but it is certainly not working for all New Zealanders. So we have got some serious concerns about Part 1 of the bill and the effectiveness of the special housing areas. We have got even more concerns about Part 2 but we will come to them when the time comes.