Seymour DavidHon DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Well thank you very much Madam Speaker. I've gotta say I was curious when I saw that this debate had been asked for by the Labour Party. I couldn't work it out. And then I watched Kieran McAnulty's demeanour and his attempt at faux crescendos rising up and down in his body position and I thought: that guy wants to be leader. That's why he did it. Unfortunately there are some more important issues at play.There is at base the fundamental fact that we have a country which is one of the most sparsely populated on the planet. We have more room more places for people to live a better climate a better place for people to live than perhaps any other place on Earth. We are so lucky. And yet somehow through decades of policy neglect we have made it too hard to build a house—too hard to get the resource consent too hard to fund and finance the infrastructure too hard to get the building materials and too hard to get the building consent. As a result there's a shortage—there's a shortage of homes. I think that is in large part why the Government changed in 2017 and why Labour were elected. And here's the thing: they made an enormous mistake in that they truly believed that if they could reach back to their heritage—pictures of Peter Fraser the then Labour Prime Minister carrying the table through the first State house—if only they could go back to that. And we actually just heard it from the Greens If only we could go back to that."Glen Bennett: Wrong Prime Minister. Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: Then all of a sudden they believed—and he said it's the wrong Prime Minister. He's right it was Michael Joseph Savage. But none the less—Labour very focused on their history but not focused on the results today. None the less the Labour Government believed that if only the Government built the houses then the problem would be solved. The issue was they didn't solve the problem with infrastructure funding and financing. They didn't solve the problem with resource management law and make it faster to get a consent. They didn't solve the problem with building materials or building consents or the shortage of builders. Amazingly they managed to make it worse.They put all the money into Kāinga Ora (KO). They gave them billions of dollars. But were they faster? No. It took them 58 months from go to woe to build a house on average. Now you put that in perspective. Noah took an estimated 55 years to build the ark. So I'll grant that Kāinga Ora were faster than Noah but Kāinga Ora unfortunately were not saving humanity. Far from it. Not only were they terrible as a builder so inefficient that they are losing half a billion dollars a year—you know every day today Kāinga Ora will lose $1.5 million dollars. And you know I heard the Labour Party accusing this Government of running the country like a business. My thought was: how would they know? You know they ran Kāinga Ora into the ground. They say they care about community housing but they can't make the numbers add up. Not only that Kāinga Ora were horrific as a neighbour to all those people who were too scared to call the police because the Kāinga Ora neighbours next door might do something to them and they weren't going to get kicked out by KO whose policy was sustaining tenancies. They weren't that good as a landlord either.Altogether we had a Labour Government that put everything into Kāinga Ora—terrible as a landlord terrible as a neighbour terrible as a builder so inefficient that they lost half a billion a year. And even when they tried to build affordable housing they were so inefficient they actually pushed the price of housing up. The great shame of it is not that we've lost all that money not all the mismanagement. The great shame of it is that after six years of that Labour Government New Zealanders are more short of housing than at any given time.So what are we going to do about it? We're going to stop obsessing about State houses. People just need houses; people need a warm dry roof over their head. We're going to make it easier to build them whether you're the States or not. We're going to fix the resource management law. We're going to do city and regional deals to coordinate infrastructure funding with city planning. We're going to do infrastructure funding and financing so the pipes and the roads and the bus stops show up when you build new homes. And we're going to make it easier to bring in the building materials that the rest of the world uses at lower costs so we can build homes more efficiently.Then and only then will New Zealanders finally be able to realise the dream of New Zealand. This beautiful open space with a mild climate really will have a place for everybody. That's the dream not Labour's ideological obsession over failed State delivery."