Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): I think that sometimes in public policy debates we are perhaps subject to a bit of historical amnesia and perhaps we imagine a past that never really was. The great Labour narrative that came out is that just like we are selling all the old tea towels and all the old crockery for fund-raising on the Labour website if we could only hark back to the past it has got to be better than Labour's present. Almost anything would be better than Labour's present but sadly the past was not that good either and it is important to understand one's own history.If the Labour Party members were to read the excellent Gael Ferguson book Building the New Zealand Dream one of the first things they would learn is that Michael Joseph Savage the first Labour Prime Minister said he would not trust the Ministry of Works to build a fowl house. The interesting thing is that when the Labour Party says the Government will build houses it never means that the Government is going to build houses; what it means is that the Government is going to contract the building of houses out to private enterprise.Then you have to ask what the role of Government actually is. Does the Government have some magic ability to override all of the constraints on building new homes that have been currently identified as leading to a limitation on housing supply in New Zealand high prices and homelessness? Labour members have no such prescription in this amendment that will solve the problems of a limit of land that councils will allow anybody including the builders contracted by the Government to build upon. There is no solution in this amendment to solve the very real problem that infrastructure funding incentives are too weak for councils. There is nothing in this new part that will solve either of those problems or in any of the other new parts if we are allowed to mention those. The interesting thing is that when one starts to investigate one's history the facts become terribly clear and from the Labour Party's point of view it is terribly depressing. This idea that there was once a golden age when the State built all the houses in reality never ever was.Let us take building consents for 1961 for instance—a very good year for home building in New Zealand. There were 24397 residential consents issued in our country in 1961 when only 2 million people lived here. That would be a little bit like issuing something like 55000 or 60000 consents for the current New Zealand population today. How many of those houses were built by the Government or at least contracted by the Government to be built in 1961? Well the number you might be interested to know was 2749. How many houses does that leave? The Labour Party members are trying to do quick mental arithmetic. How many houses were built by the private sector in that year 1961? There were 21648. Even in the heyday of Labour's State home - building halcyon period the truth is simply that the private sector built almost 10 times more houses than the State ever could.Why it is believed that this history that never was is going to save us I cannot understand. But what is very clear is that there is nothing in this new part that is going to solve the real underlying problems in the housing market. The fact is that those problems were never solved. The Government never built houses; it always contracted out to Fletcher's. Even in some of the best years of home building in New Zealand the State was a bit player—a 10 percent player at best.We could have anticipated the porosity of this argument from the way the Labour Party members have behaved in the last 24 hours. The first half of the debate was all about due process and rushing through complicated far-reaching reforms under urgency without due process. Then in the second part of the debate—oh wow we are now going to introduce three new parts that are far more far-reaching in their implications in the Committee stage with no public consultation whatsoever. Well I guess that is just politics. I guess that is the Labour Party for you—rudderless and ignorant of its own history.