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:13190. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]HOLLY WALKER (Green): I just want to take a short call in the debate on Part 2 of the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill. I want to address one of the key issues in the debate so far about this idea of having a minimum prescription of affordable housing as a criterion for a qualifying development. Then I also want to talk about the regulation-making powers and the transitional powers that are set out both in Part 2 and in schedule 2 of the bill which we are also debating this afternoon. First of all can I thank the Minister of Housing for being here and for being in the chair and taking some calls on this. It is good to have the Minister responsible for the legislation present through the Committee stage and actually engaging with the debate. I wish we saw it happen more in this Chamber. I want to address what he spoke about when he got up most recently and quoted from the bill looking at the minimum provision of affordable housing.To give some credit to the Minister it is true—and I can see here in Supplementary Order Paper 351 the tracked changes version of which has been put on the Table of the House—that there is now an ability through Order in Council for one of the qualifying development criteria to be a minimum provision of affordable housing or a percentage of affordable housing. So that is good to see. But my question for the Minister is this:why not go the whole hog? Why not put it in the legislation as a requirement for a qualifying development rather than putting it in as something that can be done through an Order in Council? If the purpose of the bill is to increase the supply of affordable housing—and we have established in earlier debates on earlier parts of the bill that it is—then why would you create a special housing area if not to improve the supply of affordable housing? If you want to improve the supply of affordable housing why would you not include a minimum percentage in that special housing area? If you can if the powers are going to be inserted into the bill why not make it a standard criteria that applies to all special housing areas if indeed the purpose is to increase the supply of affordable housing?I want to use the example of Hobsonville because Hobsonville is really what this bill could have enabled. Under the previous Government as we have heard from other speakers it was a very good model of using Crown land to establish a new housing development that was a mixed development with a proportion of affordable housing and a proportion of social housing. In fact that is another question that perhaps this bill fails to address—that there is no requirement for any minimum provision of social housing in any special housing areas. That is also a very important part of the housing affordability question—social housing. There is no provision for that either. What Hobsonville could have been and was intended to be when it was set up was indeed a special housing area of a sort with a mixed provision of housing with a provision of affordable social and private housing.What happened with the change of Government was that we had a Prime Minister who happens to be the local MP who said it would be “economic vandalism” to have State houses in his nice comfortable electorate. So those provisions were removed from the requirement for the development at Hobsonville. It is a good development. I have been and had a look at it. It is exciting. There could be great prospects for other such developments but it is a great shame that we allowed a Prime Minister to say that it would be economic vandalism to have social housing in that area and that we allowed the provision of the Gateway Housing Assistance loans to be reduced so that only 17 families got to use one to purchase a house in that development. If we put into this bill a qualifying criterion for qualifying developments so that there had to be a minimum percentage of affordable housing in new special housing areas then what we could see are a lot more areas like what Hobsonville was supposed to be when it was first mooted. It is a great shame that we have not done that. I do not think that putting it in as a possibility for an Order in Council as this Supplementary Order Paper does is enough.I want to turn my attention to the regulation-making powers and the transitional provisions in the bill because we heard from a number of submitters at the Social Services Committee and indeed from the Regulations Review Committee that in addition to the unpopular override provisions in the bill the bill delegates a high level of regulation-making powers to Ministers that may not be justified. We in the Green Party very much share those concerns although it is true that the select committee did to the best of its ability take the concerns of the Regulations Review Committee into account and did take them seriously. There are some changes recommended by the select committee to modify those regulation-making powers and those transitional provisions. Yet we remain concerned at the level of power that this bill concentrates in central government over local decision-making.It is something that we have seen only in recent years in emergency legislation and the model of course is the legislation around the Christchurch earthquake recovery. I have been concerned for some time—and this legislation plays out that concern—that having established that precedent through the Christchurch earthquake recovery legislation for that extensive use of regulation-making power that extensive use ofOrder in Council and that extensive use of transitional provisions we would begin to see it creep into other legislation in non-emergency situations. Indeed I believe that we have in this Chamber seen the increasing use of those kinds of provisions by this Government in various types of legislation and this is another example.Although New Zealand is absolutely experiencing a housing crisis—and many speakers have spoken about that in the debate so far this afternoon and I would concur with all of those who have done so—it is not yet a national emergency. We could get there and I doubt that this bill will help to prevent that coming catastrophe but we are not yet at the point where we can call the housing crisis a national emergency. Therefore that high level of ministerial power and intervention that high level of delegated regulation-making power and that excessive reliance on transitional provisions are not justifiable in our view.Instead what the Green Party believes is that we need a more considered national plan to tackle housing affordability. Such a plan would treat housing as core national infrastructure. It is a debate that I think we need to have as a country to actually turn our way of thinking about housing away from it as a solely private and personal asset and good to national infrastructure because it has some of the most significant bearing on the health and well-being of our population much more so than roads or other things that we currently consider core national infrastructure. Our housing stock has a huge bearing on the health and well-being of our population. So we need to start seeing it as core national infrastructure and develop a concerted plan to treat it as such. That would focus on the increase in supply of affordable housing both social housing and affordable rental housing and housing to buy and it would need to be developed in true partnership with relevant territorial authorities not with the kinds of provisions in this bill that override them. The Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill unfortunately is no such plan.What we would like to see is a national housing infrastructure plan that looks at things like a capital gains tax exempting the family home; a systematic Government build programme that is not just building and knocking down Housing New Zealand Corporation houses at the same rate that they get built which is what the Government is doing at the moment; a progressive ownership or shared equity scheme that helps families into their own home without having to go through the conventional route of a deposit and a mortgage; secure tenure for renters; a rental warrant of fitness; and restrictions for non-residents and non-citizens for purchasing homes in New Zealand. Those are the kinds of measures that we could put into a national housing infrastructure plan which would truly tackle the crisis of housing affordability and housing quality that we have in this country before it gets to national emergency status.As it stands we cannot support this bill. We are not convinced that the regulation-making powers and transitional provisions are warranted at the present time and we cannot understand why if you think that affordable housing is an important criterion and if you think that a minimum percentage of affordable housing is an important criterion those criteria have not been written into the bill. Thank you.