Ardern Jacinda: Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeArdern Jacinda: Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 22 August 2013. Volume:692;Page:12783. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JACINDA ARDERN (Labour):You will notice that neither the chairperson of the Social Services Committee Sam Lotu-Iiga who has just resumed his seat nor the Minister of Housing himself actually gave any sense of how many affordable homes would be built off the back of this bill the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill. And why is that? Because they have absolutely no idea. One reason for that is that there is actually no requirement that any affordable homes be built as a consequence of this piece of legislation.Hon Dr Nick Smith: Read the bill.JACINDA ARDERN: I am happy to—later on in my speech in fact I will read the bill to the Minister because he seems to have forgotten that he left those provisions out.The chair of the select committee said that the case has been made for this bill. Look there is no question that the case has been made for action—no question whatsoever. We have dipped in Auckland alone in homeownership to 60 percent a new low for New Zealand—a record if you will. There has been a 30 percent increase in house prices since that Government took office. Auckland right now—right now—needs 30000 new homes in order to plug the housing supply issue.That Government claims that it has a large suite of options available to try to improve the situation and what are they? Well it is going to let first-home buyers draw down a little more of KiwiSaver but oh by the way the threshold for how much you need for a loan has gone up at the same time so that pretty much nullifies any advantage from that. Welcome Home Loans—I would like to see some of the numbers around Welcome Home Loans and whether they are making a dent in this massive issue.Then we have this bill. Let us absolutely acknowledge that supply is an issue. There is no doubt that in Auckland supply is in issue but it does matter what kind of supply. The Minister of Housing will be able to tell me how many affordable homes have been built in say the last year and what percentage of homes being built is affordable. Well if he does not give the answer I can tell him: 5 percent. Five percent of new builds are affordable. So how will this bill change the proportion of houses that are being built that will be affordable? Well it simply does not. It assumes that the only problem is land supply and planning regulations—and it is part of the issue. We have never questioned that that is part of the issue nor have we ever suggested that it represents the biggest part of the problem.Let us get down into the nitty-gritty of the content of the bill because Nick Smith seems so convinced that this bill stipulates that everyone who builds in a specialhousing area must build an affordable house. First though before we have a special housing area the Government must negotiate with a council a housing accord. It says in the bill at clause 11(2): “A housing accord may” “(a) provide for the Minister and the territorial authority to work together across a range of housing issues according to the matters that they may identify as relevant to improving housing supply and affordability”. It may—there is no requirement. There is absolutely no requirement and we need to keep in mind that that is just for the accord. So that is just to establish the grounds on which a council and the Minister may say: “In future we might create a special housing area.” But in reality it is functionally the way that the special housing area is set up that really matters because that is the thing that determines specifically where houses are going to be built and where they will have the special consenting process apply.So let us get down to the nitty-gritty of what is included in a special housing area and what a qualifying development is. The bill clearly sets out in clause 14 that a qualifying development is predominantly residential—yep—mostly has to be less than six storeys contains no fewer than a prescribed number of dwellings to be built again predominantly residential—blah blah blah. There is nothing about affordability.A qualifying development does not have to be affordable. The Minister knows that this is in fact true because I asked him at the Social Services Committee. I asked him why he has not required that a qualifying residential development has to be an affordable development. His response was that he did not want to be too prescriptive because of course someone who goes and builds a new house that might be worth say $700000 might be vacating a house that might be worth say $300000 so why would we want to prescribe that the new building has to be affordable because at least they might leave an affordable house behind them. Trickle-down housing—trickle-down housing is what the Minister has presented to us. It is an absolute farce for him to now claim that he required affordable housing because he admitted at the select committee that he has not and he even tried to give us a rationale for why he had done this.Secondly this bill assumes that the council is the barrier to this particular set of issues that this bill addresses. Even the chair of the select committee claimed that the council were all gung-ho and on board with this bill because of what it allows them to do. Let us be frank. Of course the mayor wants to try to speed up housing development. That is what he tried to do in his Auckland Unitary Plan. But when he presented to the Government his intention around housing development he said: “In order for me to progress what I need to do now for housing I need legal weight of my unitary plan from notification.” And what did that Government say? It said: “No way.” No way. But suddenly Nick Smith sat back and thought to himself: “It is election year and I’ve got a housing issue. I will go back to the council and tell them that on my own terms I will let them do what they want to do anyway but I will do it whilst being able to veto all of their rights if they do not do it in a way I want to.”It is a complete fallacy for the chair of the select committee to claim that the council is all on board because this is a great new idea. It is the only way it could do what it wanted to do in its own unitary plan. If that Government was serious it would have listened to the council when it first said: “Give us legal weight.” That is what it initially asked for. This is just about trying to negotiate an election sweetener so that the Government could look good at the end of it and it is absolutely appalling. [Interruption ]The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): The phrase “Tell the truth.” is out of order and unparliamentary. We will not have that for the rest of this debate.JACINDA ARDERN: Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. The fact is that in doing so it had to build in override provisions that further erode the ability—and I say“further erode” because that seems to be a mantra of this particular Minister—of the council to govern in the best interests of its citizens. Of course the council wants housing. Of course it wants housing and it has tried to achieve that on its own terms. But it is not just the council that the Government rides roughshod over; it is also riding roughshod over existing law like the Waitakere Ranges Heritage Area Act.Advocates from the Waitakere Ranges came and said that they fought long and hard to get special legislation to protect the area of the Waitakere Ranges and to make sure that their legislation takes primacy over any other legislation to protect those ranges. This bill dilutes that. Now the Waitakere Ranges Heritage Area Act will only have to be given due regard. The Government could have strengthened that and it did not.We have always said that we need a complete solution but we have never just said it; we have also demonstrated what we would do. Part of the problem at the moment is scale in the building industry. We know that it is scale and the Minister of Housing knows we do not have enough housing developments of the scale we require. Labour has said that it will build 100000 houses. We know that it is possible. We have already talked with the building industry in order to develop it.A second issue is the lack of competition in building materials. You need only compare us with Australia to know that that is the case. Again our KiwiBuild programme will address that. We know that tax treatment encourages speculative investment and the capital gains tax that Labour will introduce will resolve that. We know that overseas buyers are reducing supply and leading to greater speculative activity. So we will address that. We know that quality matters and that is why we have a Healthy Homes guarantee. We will work with the council—with the council—to deliver housing in the areas where we need it most. Labour does not believe in tinkering in this area. We believe in step change and that is exactly what a Labour Government will do.