Turei Metiria: Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTurei Metiria: Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 05 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13336. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green):Tēnā koe. Before I begin this contribution on the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill I want to just acknowledge the passing of Dennis Hansen who has been named as the man who was killed in a car crash yesterday. Koro Hansen is akaumātua of significant standing not just in Auckland and withNgāpuhi but around the country and so we want to just acknowledge his loss and the loss to hiswhānau hishapū and his iwi. Kia ora.Now to the bill. This bill is not about housing affordability. That is not what this bill addresses. It is actually about urban sprawl. It is about undermining the Resource Management Act and about usurping the role of local government in making decisions about housing provision in its local area. I will talk in this contribution about housing affordability and my colleague Eugenie Sage will discuss the Resource Management Act and the local government aspects of it because this is a very serious attack on the right of local councils to make decisions for themselves.There is no doubt that we need legislation to improve the affordability of housing. There is a nationwide housing crisis. My colleague Holly Walker who is responsible for this bill on behalf of the Greens has talked in previous contributions on this bill about the fact that the average house price in Auckland is over $700000. There is a crisis in Christchurch as a result of the lack of housing following the earthquake. The average price of housing across Aotearoa as a whole is well over $400000. It is simply unaffordable for most New Zealanders to purchase their own home. So absolutely housing affordability must be a priority for this Government but this bill clearly shows that housing affordability is not because this bill does not deal with it in any way. This bill identifies housing affordability as a problem but it deals in fact with land supply.Land supply has been a major political issue for this Government but is not actually the major issue when it comes to providing more affordable housing for anyone even in Auckland. It is certainly true that there may be some issues in Auckland but there are also issues with land barons for example—people holding on to land that could be used for housing now but are waiting for it to improve in its value. So there is an element of I think greed in the way that housing has been treated and the way that the Government supports housing being treated by the private market. The Property Council has said that land supply is at most half of the problem around housing affordability and that land supply certainly is an issue that does not affect the rest of the country outside of Auckland to any great extent. To the extent that this bill deals with land supply it is dealing with only a small proportion of the problem in some specific areas not about housing affordability across the country.There is no requirement in this bill for the houses that are to be built to be affordable. There is no legislative provision that makes affordable housing core to this legislation. The Government has acknowledged that that is the case. In fact the only reason that housing affordability is even in parts of the bill as it isis that Auckland Council has required that to be the case as part of the accord. That is great from the council’s point of view but if the Government does not make it a priority for itself it simply will not be a priority for others elsewhere. The Minister of Housing has also confessed to the Social Services Committee that this bill will not increase the numbers of affordable houses for New Zealanders to buy. The Minister has agreed that the bill will not result in the provision of more affordable housing so it really is a farce from the beginning.All the evidence shows that the issue of housing in New Zealand is that there are too few affordable homes being built and the private market—private industry—cannot really be expected to fill this gap. There is too low a return for it building these homes. So who ought to fill the gap? Well of course the State has to be a part of this. The State needs to treat housing as core infrastructure. It is no less important to our economic and social well-being as roads are as power provision as water and as internet or broadband and they get treated as infrastructure whereas housing does not. Unless the State takes on housing as core infrastructure we will continue to see this problem because it cannot expect the private sector to take up the space.The Government is not being asked to do it on its own. It is being asked to do it in partnership with a whole range of organisations that are prepared to help and take on a huge part of the burden. Community organisations housing organisations iwiorganisations and councils for example are all prepared to engage in a partnership with the Government to improve the numbers of affordable homes being built. But this Government is not interested in those partnerships. It wants to leave it to the private market and keep its hands off. The fact is that the suburbs of this country the towns of New Zealand were not built by private industry; they were built by the State. They were built by the State because the State believed that in order to protect our economic base in order to provide stability for families and for workers and to ensure that children had the best chance of a good life and a fair future a stable warm dry affordable home was essential. That is why housing has been in the past some decades ago now core infrastructure but in more recent times abandoned and therefore that neglect has left thousands of New Zealand families especially the very young who are just starting out on their journey of having children and building their life together from being able to access homes.Let us just have a look at some of the statistics. Half a million New Zealanders now rent. There will always be those who want to rent but there are half a million New Zealanders who rent many of whom are trapped into the rental market because there simply are not enough affordable homes. We are seeing a decline in homeownership particularly in the middle deciles. It is among middle-income New Zealanders actually where we have seen the greatest decline in homeownership over probably the last 5 years. So we see that this is not about necessarily State housing for the very poor although that has to be part of the solution; this is about housing for the middle classes. Actually the middle classes are the ones who are suffering from the greatest decline in homeownership. We just need to look at the statistics around new dwellings. In 2003 there were 10 times more homes being built that cost less than $250000 than those that cost more than $250000—10 times more affordable homes being built in 2003. After a sharp and steady decline we are now in a situation where there are only half as many. So only half as many affordable homes are being built as unaffordable ones.There needs to be a significant shift in the way that the Government is treating housing because nobody else can do it. Nobody else has the infrastructure the funding and the low cost of borrowing to be able to do this. So the Greens are proposing a number of solutions to deal with the housing crisis. Yes we must engage in a State house building programme in partnership with a whole range of other organisations and treat it as an investment not as a burden. These are assets on the Government’s books. We must have products like the progressive ownership system for example which we have proposed in our Home for Life proposals which do not require a family to have a mortgage and do not require a deposit but are means by which families can enter into and own affordable homes while paying them off over a long period of time to create stability for them as workers and to create stability for them as families and for their children. We need a comprehensive capital gains tax on all but the family home to just help take the heat out of the market; a warrant of fitness for rental properties again to help take the heat out of the rental market; and more secure tenure for renters so those who will be locked out of homeownership for long periods of times can still have the benefit of secure affordable warm dry homes. These are not radical solutions that are untested. These are all sensible policies that will address the housing crisis and will treat housing like the core infrastructure that it is. Unfortunately this bill does nothing. We are opposing this bill.