Mackey Moana: Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMackey Moana: Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 16 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10071. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MOANA MACKEY (Labour): Alfred Ngaro the member who has just resumed his seat found one affordable house in Auckland so now there is no housing crisis in Auckland. Apparently there is no housing crisis because he went on TradeMe and found one house that he thought poorer families could afford. So we do not need to do anything—problem solved. That probably explains why we do not see more action from this Government on affordable housing. Government members do not believe that there is a housing crisis because their voters can afford to buy houses in Auckland and around the country so they really do not care about the rest of New Zealand who are struggling to get into their first homes.We had an extraordinary performance from the former Minister of Housing Phil Heatley before the dinner break. We all love the court jester routine we really do but I am afraid I need to correct some of the things that Mr Heatley said. We spent 9 years undoing the damage of the 1990s National Government. We rebuilt 9000 State houses when that lot sold 14000. They did no maintenance the entire time they were in Government. We started that maintenance programme up again. We managed to go a long way to repairing the damage of the 1990s National Government.So what did the National Government do when it came in? When it came into Government we had the global financial crisis. A sensible thing would have been to have housing as a major part of an economic stimulus package. That is what Australia did. It had $5 billion for housing. It kept people in work. It kept income tax flowing. It kept GST flowing and it built a resource that it was desperately short of just like New Zealand was.What did National do? Nothing. It repealed Labour’s affordable housing bill. That was one of the first things it did. It got rid of Labour’s shared equity scheme because of low uptake when the housing Minister Phil Heatley instructed Housing New Zealandnot to advertise it. He said: “Don’t tell anyone about the shared equity programme.” and then National was surprised when there was low uptake. We tend to take it for granted that schemes are more successful when people know they exist but apparently that is not obvious to National.As my colleague said there should be 500 affordable homes and 500 State houses going into Hobsonville out of 3000. There is no social housing because the Prime Minister of this country who trades on his State house upbringing every chance he gets shamefully said there should not be State housing in Hobsonville because it is economic vandalism to have poor families living on sections that have sea views—because God forbid poor children get to look at the ocean as well. That is our Prime Minister. How many affordable houses have there been? A handful because the National—Hon Maryan Street: 17.MOANA MACKEY: Seventeen—seventeen when we promised 500.Hon Maryan Street: And they’re not affordable.MOANA MACKEY: They are not affordable because they were done through the Government’s Gateway Housing Assistance scheme. The wonderful thing about the Gateway Housing Assistance scheme is that the only people who could afford to access it were people who could afford a market home on the day that they entered into the scheme. So it was an affordable housing scheme for people who could already buy a house in Auckland. I know a young woman who is one of those 17 people. The only reason she got into that Gateway Housing Assistance scheme in the Hobsonville development was that her parents put their house up as collateral against the loan. That is not an affordable housing scheme it is an embarrassment for the Government.We had the Kāinga Whenua scheme for Māori housing where the former Minister of Housing Phil Heatley got up and said he had fixed the Māori housing problem—he had fixed it—and the scheme was going great guns. The problem was that the scheme had not actually started yet. When it did start no one qualified for it because the way it was set up did not recognise that the individual families who were applying could not qualify for a Kiwibank loan. And Kiwibank was mightily annoyed that it was being required to turn people away from the scheme because they just simply did not meet the lending criteria while National members were out there talking it up.Then we had charitable status being revoked for the Queenstown Lakes Community Housing Trust. If this Government really cared about community housing organisations it would have moved to relegislate to make it clear that the provision of affordable housing does qualify under the Charities Act. What did Minister Phil Heatley do at that time? He did absolutely nothing. Now every community housing organisation in this country is potentially under threat because of that precedent to have their charitable status removed which means that money that should be going to build affordable and social housing would be going into paying tax that they were not paying before.We need to build affordable homes. As Duncan Garner said tonight: “There is nothing in this Budget for affordable housing.” If you look for it—Maggie Barry: Is he a member of your party too?MOANA MACKEY: No he is not a member of the party Maggie Barry. And you might want to listen to this because it is true. The fact is that we need to build more homes and they need to be affordable homes. The community housing sector which is now being required to be Housing New Zealand on behalf of the Government is where the expertise lies. They are the people who have the expertise and experience in building affordable homes and instead they are going to take over being the social landlord for this Government. Use that sector wisely because it knows what it is doing. It has the ability to make a real difference. It is not there to do the Government’s job forit but as we see in the next piece of legislation that is exactly what the Government is going to have it do.