Goff Phil: Taxation (KiwiSaver HomeStart and Remedial Matters) Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Taxation (KiwiSaver HomeStart and Remedial Matters) Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 26 March 2015. Volume:704;Page:2680. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): There are two aspects to this bill. One is a rather pathetic effort to try to deal with the housing crisis which is in Auckland in particular and it will not do much to help at all. The other is something that this Government has desperately tried to paper over which is a massive stuff-up in the Veterans’ Support Act last year which will result in this bill on the surface reducing veterans’ payments by 25 to 33 percent.Let me deal first of all with the housing issue. There is a minor change that is proposed. It is allowing people to use their member tax credits under their KiwiSaver scheme towards their first homes. It gives an individual $10 a week—$10 a week. I want to ask the members on the other side of the House how that helps people in my electorate or their electorates when they are faced with house prices in Auckland going up by $1700 a week? So there we are we get a tax credit worth $10 a week and the price of houses is going up 170 times faster than the aid that is given by this Government. It is pathetic—it is pathetic.They deny that there is a housing crisis yet homeownership in Auckland has decreased from three-quarters of the population—75 percent in the mid-1980s—to 61 percent today and it is falling. In Auckland 40 percent of the properties are being sold to property investors. They are making a killing out of the inflation and this Government is doing nothing to help the first-home buyer who increasingly is finding that that Kiwi dream of owning your own home is disappearing—it is out of their reach. How do you deal with house prices going up by $90000 a year in Auckland? What young family can actually keep pace with that? They cannot do it. That is why most young people today are being locked out of the home market where the National Party is more interested in its greedy property investor mates making a fortune. This bill is a sticking plaster over a gaping wound. It will do nothing substantial to help the real problem and that is a problem of a housing shortage.I hear all the time from the National Party what Treasury’s advice is and how it is following Treasury’s advice. What does Treasury say about this? It says that this will not make it better for homeowners; it will make it worse. Let me quote: “the Government will end up undermining affordability for first-home buyers.” When you add to the demand and you do not add to the supply as this bill does all you do is push home prices up further. The only real beneficiaries of this measure will be property investors.I want to talk about the other aspect because I proudly stood in this House and supported the Veterans’ Support Act that went through last year. What we are finding in this legislation—it is called remedial; it is remedial because the Government stuffed it up—is that somehow the Government put the payments for veterans at a gross level when it meant to put them at a net level. So this piece of legislation will reduce payments to veterans by 25 to 33 percent. I asked the Minister in the chair repeatedly during the Committee stage yesterday to provide an explanation—no explanation. The Minister would not get to her feet to say how the stuff-up happened would not get to her feet to apologise to the veterans for the mistake that was made and would not explain why the veterans had not been informed. That was a disgrace.I challenge the next National speaker to answer this question: how much has been paid over what should have been paid and to how many veterans? It is a very simple question. Veterans deserve to know that. The country needs to know that. Will this legislation be retrospective? Will the Government be clawing money back that it paid to the veterans that the veterans received in good faith—and now it is saying the veterans are not entitled to it? They are easy questions. The answer may be: none. If so why will not one National member get up in the House and say that? Why would the Minister repeatedly fail to answer questions? The Minister is paid $280000 a year to answer the questions and we had Ministers in the chair yesterday who would not get up and give an explanation to the country would not give an apology and would not give an answer.