Logie Jan: Social Housing Reform (Housing Restructuring and Tenancy Matters Amendment) Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Social Housing Reform (Housing Restructuring and Tenancy Matters Amendment) Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 19 November 2013. Volume:695;Page:14840. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green): The Green Party also fundamentally opposes this Social Housing Reform (Housing Restructuring and Tenancy Matters Amendment) Bill. Weoppose it because we believe in homes not just houses. We believe that homes are important to the foundations of our society. We oppose this bill because we know that if we have good warm dry affordable homes for everyone we will all benefit through reduced health costs improved educational outcomes and improved economic productivity. We believe that because the evidence tells us that.We oppose this bill because we honestly value the tangata whenua and the community and voluntary sector. We recognise that they have a lot to contribute to community housing through their own value base not through being turned into arms of the State which is what this bill attempts to do. We oppose this bill because we do not believe that the Ministry of Social Development or Work and Income will improve services for people needing housing support—in fact we fear the opposite. We oppose this bill because we think that the priority is building communities not temporary shelters.I have spoken already in relation to this bill about most of my adult life being in rental housing and the costs of that to me economically as well as in terms of increased stress. But I was really lucky to spend my childhood in one house in a place with a big garden fruit trees and three bedrooms. It was warm and dry. I got to go through the same schools—the primary school the intermediate school and the secondary school—with consistency. I did not have to move between my schools and none of my friends had to move either.In my childhood none of my friends moved house and that is such a contrast to the reality of so many children now. We see in South Auckland the turnover in private rentals being on average four families a year. We hear about schools where there is 100 percent churn in the population of the school. Those children have lost the childhood that we had. They have been taken away from the stability of a continuous education and peer group. They do not have the childhood that we had. What this bill does is make that even more precarious. Even the lives of children in State housing are now being threatened.I want to remind that side of the House that it was a liberal Government that first recognised the importance of State housing. It saw that the growing reports of extortionate rents and squalid living conditions required it to intervene to protect our society and to provide some basic decent standards. That very vision is being eroded by this Government and by this bill. I think it is an absolute shame and a change of our national values. Shame on this Government.I think that the Green Party as an alternative has a vision in terms of the State’s role. I know that housing is of such concern to our communities. I was speaking with a cleaner in Wellington Hospital recently who was asking what can be done because he wants to get out of extortionate rents in the private market. I told him that our answer is about more secure tenure—the opposite to what this Government is doing—and the idea of a rent-to-own property where the Government’s ability to access low interest rates could be passed on to New Zealanders so that New Zealanders could be provided with secure tenure and the ability to own in the future. I hope New Zealand will vote in the future for that vision—a vision of community and of all of us having a decent standard of living—and not this dystopian vision.