Willis Nicola; Woods MeganNICOLA WILLIS (National): At the heart of this multi-billion dollar set of Estimates is an organisation called Kāinga Ora and that organisation has been conducting itself in such a concerning manner that the Public Service watchdog has had to step in and investigate. So my line of questioning to the Minister tonight is going to be about how she can offer assurance to taxpayers about how she can be confident that that organisation—subject to a Public Service inquiry for the lack of conduct by its staff their lack of integrity and their lack of political neutrality—is worthy of the trust she has placed in it on our behalf whereby she trusts that organisation to borrow $8.3 billion of money and she allocates it hundreds of million dollars to spend.What people listening to this debate need to know is that Kāinga Ora is a bloated underperforming bureaucracy. It is an organisation that has grown from just over a thousand people to more than 2000 people on this Minister's watch. It has roughly doubled in size and so taxpayers have a right to ask Well have we got double the results for that doubling of staff?" Well no. No we have not. We've seen a quadrupling in the State house waiting list and that is the core function of Kāinga Ora—it's to provide State housing. On this Minister's watch it has quadrupled. We've seen a complete failure on KiwiBuild. We should be having 16000 houses by now according to the promises made by this Government. But actually we've only just got 1200 about the same number of staff that they've hired. We've seen Kāinga Ora go out and bid in direct competition with first-home buyers for homes so that they can make the Minister's numbers look good when it comes to State houses. That's $824 million worth of homes bought by the Government in competition with first-home buyers. And what the Minister gets up and says when I ask her about this is she says "Oh well as a percentage it's fine." What people listening to this debate need to know is that over the entire course of the past National Government this occurred less than 10 percent of what this Minister is doing.So what we have here is a bloated and performing bureaucracy. And so my first question to the Minister is given the serious allegations and the serious issues that were brought to public attention by me last week that she knew about since August but did nothing about how can we be confident that Kāinga Ora can be trusted to deliver in the public interest for New Zealanders? And does that Minister have confidence in the board of Kāinga Ora and its ability to secure value for taxpayer money?Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Minister of Housing): Thank you Mr Chairperson. I'll take a short call and address some of the statements as well as the questions that were in there. I think it's been well canvassed in this Chamber the fact that I was not satisfied with the conduct of Kāinga Ora in regard to a series of emails and I in fact referred it to the Public Service Commission and asked them to have a look at it. But the member asks about how it is that the New Zealand taxpayer can have confidence in Kāinga Ora and their ability to deliver. I want to direct the Chamber's attention to a series of numbers. If we take it back to 2016-17 the year of which our Government had nothing to do with delivering 409 houses were delivered by then Housing New Zealand. We then see 2017-18 when there is a change of Government that that goes up to 838. I then want to take us through to 2018-19: that goes up to 1461; in 2019-20 1229; and in 2020-21 1866. So the member asked the question that we might have doubled the number of staff are we doubling the performance? Well the answer is we're more than doubling the performance when it comes to that core role of actually building houses to help New Zealand solve a housing crisis.The member says that all that this agency does is buy in houses to improve the numbers. That simply is not correct. And I'd like to again take this House's attention to another series of numbers. If we have a look through for example 2012 to 2013 63 percent of all properties that Housing New Zealand—under the previous Government—bought were buy-ins. They weren't building them; they were buying them off the private market. What we have done through a programme of work has got it down to 13 percent of all new properties being added by Kāinga Ora being buy-ins. So when the member talks about this very large number $824 million that's what happens when you actually have an active acquisition programme around houses and you are a Government committed to adding to the housing stock not flogging it off. I'd like to point that member's and this House's attention to the fact it's around 0.2 percent of all real estate transactions in this country that are accounted for by Kāinga Ora. On this side of the House in this Government we think those that are in public housing deserve somewhere to live as well."