O'Connor SimonSIMON O'CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): Oh I'm quite excited about this. I've been up and down like I don't know a yo-yo for the last well few hours. Look if delivery by this Government was based on rhetoric working groups spends of money which achieve nothing and empty promises then I am the first on this side of the House to admit the Government is delivering for indeed that's all it has. Everything else anything of substance has been and continues to be an absolute utter failure. This was incredibly incredibly clear when we went through the Budget documents and the Estimates discussions particularly around social housing which I'm the spokesperson for but right through the social development side of things. In fact even some of the facts that the Minister supposedly just put on the table make absolutely no sense. First-home buyer rates are as high now as they ever have been regardless of any changes to foreign buyers. In fact the other side of the House knows darn well that actually first-home buyers had been doing quite well thank you very much for many many years. Those percentages have not changed. The area where the real challenge has been is homelessness transitional housing social housing and beyond and this Government has delivered absolutely nothing. When you went through the Budget documents that was absolutely evident. [Interruption] The Minister scoffs and I will actually touch on one thing they are delivering: it's a cash load of money which is just a sign of failure.But fundamentally in homelessness the Labour Government is just doing what the National Party did: more money into Housing First. Thank you National. That was something we introduced. So thank you Minister for continuing that. We'd love at some point the recognition to come to this side of the House to say Thanks National. You introduced that." It would be jolly decent of you.In the social housing space—other colleagues have touched on it—there was the absolute failure of KiwiBuild. It was an absolute bribe to the public of New Zealand in an election period—100000 homes over 10 years—which has absolutely fundamentally not been delivered. That was very clear. We knew it was coming. Amongst other reasons all the rhetoric changed. The Prime Minister couldn't even mention the K word "KiwiBuild". But in the Budget documents it was very clear it was all being wiped away in fact. In fact on Budget day as we moved into urgency what we saw was a new piece of legislation slid in. Nice little Māori name there Kāinga Ora where KiwiBuild Housing New Zealand and HLC were all just going to be all blended in together just to fudge it all quite nicely.Hon Carmel Sepuloni: It's a "Nice little Māori name".SIMON O'CONNOR: So let's have a look—yeah Kāinga Ora. So very interesting because it's gone under the radar of most New Zealanders deliberate as it was. Huge failure. Then we had of course the reset. I think of it as the great retreat. A reset I said certainly around KiwiBuild. Now there's just a target to build as many houses as we can. Well sort of I don't know news perhaps to this House: every Government's target is to build as many houses as they can as quick as they can. What a massive massive retreat—massive massive retreat. There's a huge talk about the houses that have been built. Well you can't correlate that with the fact that the housing register the number of families waiting now has over doubled in 18 months—in 18 months. It's doubled. It's over 12000 and as I said to some people the other day it's easy just to get sort of caught in the statistic. That is 12000 New Zealanders who are struggling and what is the answer from the other side? Rhetoric and absolutely nothing.In fact that's not fair to say just rhetoric because the other thing we discovered when we were going through the Budget documents is that the amount of money that this Government is budgeting for emergency social housing grants is about to go through the roof—about to go through the roof. That is an admission of failure in black and white in the document because if it was true that this amazing—well supposedly amazing; I shouldn't mislead the House—Government was going to solve the social housing crisis house those 12000 people solve everything then why is it that in the social development budget over $118 million has been budgeted and $120 million in subsequent years for emergency housing grants? Bear in mind we spent about $27 million to $30 million in the last year. This is a blatant admission of failure by the Government that not only do they have no solutions other than throwing some cash around—and by the way New Zealanders that's your taxpayer cash—they've got no solutions. When they talk a huge game about all these houses they're going to build why is it that they need over $120 million a year more?"