Williams Andrew: Budget Measures (Miscellaneous Fiscal Matters) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliams Andrew: Budget Measures (Miscellaneous Fiscal Matters) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 15 May 2014. Volume:698;Page:18043. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]ANDREW WILLIAMS (NZ First): I take a call on behalf of New Zealand First on this omnibus bill the Budget Measures (Miscellaneous Fiscal Matters) Bill which covers the cheque duty climate change and the building supplies bills. It was very interesting to hear Mr Paul Goldsmith of National giving his checklist of all the positive things in this Budget and what people were getting out of it. He could have equally put up a checklist of what was coming out of the Budget as well on the counter-side which he did not do. He seemed to show only the glossy side.He could have said that $18.5 million is coming out of output expenses for the Department of Corrections. He could have said that $22.5 million is coming out of the courts. He could have said that $2.2 million is coming out of the Customs Service. He could have said that $1 million is coming out of economic development. He could have said that $53 million is coming out of education outputs. Further with his checklist that he was so proud to show us he could have gone on to say that internal affairs is being chopped by $25 million that justice is being chopped by $14 million that labour is being chopped by $31 million and that the Police is being chopped by $42 million. In total when you add up what is being chopped out of the Budget Mr Goldsmith the checklist shows that $284 million is being chopped out of operating output expenses of Government departments this year. That is nothing to be proud of. In a population that is expanding and we have heard that 42000 more people are going to come into this country—the size of Wanganui or Whanganui depending on whether you put an “h” in it—in the coming year $284 million is chopped out of the operating expenses of Government departments to come up with the contrived figure of a $372 million surplus. That is not anything to be proud of.At the same time today we hear about the building supplies bill and how this is going to save $3500 per house built at a time when in Auckland house prices have gone up by 51.9 percent in the last 3 years. That has been the increase in house prices. We are talking many many tens of thousands of dollars if not hundreds of thousands of dollars not just an average over the whole country of $3500. And that $3500 is coming about not because of the cost of building itself but because of the cost of competition to buy houses.Today I received from one of our constituents this real estate paper from Auckland and lo and behold it is all in Chinese. I guess the members from—John Hayes: Are you racist?ANDREW WILLIAMS: No no not at all. I guess the member from Wairarapa or the member fromWaimakariri or the member from Taupō would be quite surprised if in their own town there was a 50-page newspaper all in a foreign language selling properties in your home town. I think Mr Hayes you would be surprised. You would—I am sure you would—because it does not happen anywhere else in New Zealand apart from in Auckland.John Hayes: You’re a xenophobe.ANDREW WILLIAMS: No I am not.Melissa Lee: You’re a xenophobe.ANDREW WILLIAMS: No not at all Ms Lee. I have three children aged 20 25 and 28 who are saying they will struggle to get a home in Auckland because the people their age in their 20s Ms Lee are unable to afford even a deposit on a home in Auckland any more because they have been driven out of the market. I have many real estate people in Auckland say to me that people are walking in the door and offering up to $200000 or $300000 more than what a property is estimated to be worth—offering cash. It has nothing to do with loan-to-value ratios or with going to the bank and lending or anything else. They have got the cash they are walking in and they are paying serious money over the odds. So Ms Lee do not give me a lecture about that. I know what is happening—I know what is happening.We are seeing auctions for houses on the North Shore that are sold to cash buyers who are literally on the other ends of agents’ mobile phones back in foreign parts and they are buying properties left right and centre pushing up the prices. So the problem here is not tinkering around the edges cutting out the costs of a few nails cutting down the cost of a bit of plasterboard and cutting out a few of the costs of materials. The problem we have here which is the big elephant in the room is that the Auckland market—and the Auckland market drives the rest of New Zealand—is currently seeing a huge amount of property being bought from interests abroad and that is pushing up the price of the market.Ms Lee next to my property in Auckland there recently was a 550 square metre piece of land carved off the next-door neighbour’s back lawn. What would a 550 square metre piece of land go for in the Wairarapa Mr Hayes? Probably—I do not know—$50000 $60000 $70000 or $80000. At that particular auction that small pocket of land the size of a handkerchief in Auckland went for $1 million—$1 million—and it did not go to a New Zealand buyer. It did not go to a New Zealand buyer. It did not.Melissa Lee: How do you know they’re not New Zealanders for God’s sake?ANDREW WILLIAMS: It did not go to a New Zealand buyer. Furthermore the second and the third bidders on the property were not New Zealand buyers either. They were not. And all the people in our neighbourhood asked “How on earth will our own children and our own families ever be able to stay in our own suburb?”. We have lived there for 30 years Ms Lee and our friends in the neighbourhood who have lived there for 30 years all asked how our families are going to be able to afford to stay living in our own suburb. How are they going to stay living in our own suburbs? The answer Ms Lee—Melissa Lee: Xenophobic racist.ANDREW WILLIAMS: No I am not. The answer is to stop selling our houses and our land to foreigners. Put a stop on it. New Zealand First is going to do it. New Zealand First is going to bring a halt to selling land if you are not a resident here or you are not a citizen here. We do not want you coming here and buying our houses. We do not want you coming and buying our houses because what that is doing is making New Zealanders tenants in their own country.At the same time it is interesting that this building supplies bill is going to have an effect on local manufacturers. It is going to cause concern for some of our manufacturers of goods. It is also going to have questions about whether inferior products building materials of inferior quality will start to replace New Zealand - manufactured products. Questions are already being asked by some manufacturers aboutwhether those products will come with the same level of warranties guarantees and longevity of product and the source of those materials. Today on the stock exchange Fletcher Building the largest company in this area in New Zealand dropped 11c. Its shares are down 11c today. It has gone down 1.2 percent in capitalisation. That is about $75 million knocked off the Fletcher Building capitalisation. That is the first effect of this—Fletcher Building. If that is one indication then I am sure that many of the other businesses involved in construction and that sort of thing in New Zealand will equally be going down.So the effect of this is a trifling $3500. It is a fictitious contrived figure on a saving on a house that cannot be quantified. It is probably another one of the back-of-the-cigarette-packet formulas that the Government has worked out—$3500. The Government should really get stuck in and say: “We’re going to have a land register in this country. We’re going to work out who owns the property who owns the land. We’re going to work out how we can control it. We’re going to take the heat out of the housing market and we’re going to help good Kiwi New Zealanders get back into houses.” The Government has done nothing absolutely nothing in this Budget for first-home buyers. It has done nothing for young working families—nothing at all—in terms of helping them get into houses and the Government’s answer to it is to try to knock off the price of a few nails and a bit of gib board. Well New Zealand First will not be going along with that.