Walker Holly: Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWalker Holly: Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 03 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13205. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]HOLLY WALKER (Green): I do not often take calls on the title and commencement clauses in the Committee stage because to be honest sometimes it feels a little bit silly making up new titles for a bill. But I did want to take a call tonight on the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill and propose four alternative titles. They are four alternative titles that speak to serious issues both of process and content with this bill.The first alternative title I would like to propose is the “Quick Let’s Cobble Something Together to Announce in the Budget Bill” because that is indeed what this bill is. I have had a look at the Budget papers that were released in association with this bill. What is very clear from those papers is that this is not a bill that has been a long time in production in policy development in consideration in consultation with departments and related Government agencies or in consultation with affected local authorities. In fact it was cobbled together very quickly so that the Minister of Finance could make housing a centrepiece of Budget 2013.In fact what this Minister wanted to announce was an urban development agency right up until as recently as March of this year. That is what he was hoping to announce to be the big centrepiece of housing in the Budget. I am disappointed he did not get to do that because I think it is a very interesting idea and one that has a lot more potential depending on how it is designed to address the crisis of housing affordability than what we ended up with in this bill. But evidently he was not able to get that over the line so something was drawn up very quickly instead and that was this bill that we are debating in the Chamber tonight the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill. But it could equally have been called the “Let’s Cobble Together Something to Announce in the Budget Bill”.That poor process that was followed for the development of this bill has followed through with other stages of the bill. We have heard speakers on other parts of the bill talking about the very limited time that was allocated for submitters to make their views known on the bill and the very limited notification of affected territorial authorities and potential stakeholders about the opportunity to make those submissions. Many of the submitters who came before us at the Social Services Committee spoke of their concern about the process—that it is a very substantive bill making very substantive changes that had a big effect on them but they did not have a lot of time to progress. Indeed in the select committee it was very pressured for officials for members of the committee and for the Parliamentary Counsel Office to draft and make the changes to the bill that were required in the time that was allocated for the committee to consider it. That again is a reflection of the rushed way in which the bill was put together. The fact that such substantial changes were required after the select committee process speaks to the fact that the bill was drafted in rather a hurry and needed to be clarified and significantly amended at the select committee. It is not an ideal process.The second title I would like to suggest for the bill is the “Housing Accords and Urban Sprawl Areas Bill”. As my colleague Eugenie Sage set out in her contribution a few moments ago on Part 2 that is in fact what the special housing areas are likely to create particularly because there is no requirement that they include a particular percentage of affordable housing and that is what we have largely been debating in the Chamber tonight.What is likely to happen is that housing developers and property investors will build largeMcMansion-style houses just as they do currently in greenfield developments on the urban fringes because that is what is profitable for developers. We heard from a number of submitters that to make a profit in the construction industry you need to build large houses with large footprints so that you can recover all those variable costs of building and make a profit. Because there is no requirement that those developers build affordable houses they will not. They came to the Social Services Committee and in fact they told us that themselves. They do not expect to see any increase in the provision of affordable housing and the bill is likely to result in more of the kinds of development that we are seeing already. As we have heard they are likely to be in greenfield areas on the urban fringes.As my colleague Eugenie Sage has pointed out there are a number of hidden costs associated with those types of development which actually mean that yes although the cost of land perhaps on face value may seem lower—