Wood MichaelMICHAEL WOOD (Labour—Mt Roskill): I rise to speak to the Vote Building and Housing appropriation and to oppose the appropriation put forward by the Government in this area. The Labour Party does not oppose the appropriation because there is something wrong with the amount of money; we oppose the appropriation because despite the amount of money that is there despite all of the talk despite the multiple volumes of reports from the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment this is a Government that is singularly failing to do anything useful when it comes to providing decent building and housing for the people of New Zealand. I want to work through some of the specific appropriations that speak to that massive failure.When we are talking about failure what really I guess grinds our gears on this side of the Chamber is hearing members from the Government benches celebrating what is happening in this space in respect of this appropriation. We hear daily in this House the Government celebrating the fact that it is building 10000 houses a year in Auckland and we are supposed to go Wow!" at the same time as we know that Auckland actually needs 13000 houses per year. So the best that this Government can do—its point of celebration—is to build 3000 fewer houses per year than we actually need. That is a failure of its policy. We heard it today from the Minister in the chair Alfred Ngaro and we hear it from other Government speakers every single day. They celebrate spending $300 million in their plans on emergency housing to deal with the awful homelessness crisis that has arisen on their watch.So instead of providing the decent affordable safe warm and dry houses and services in the first place to prevent homelessness we have a sticking plaster at the end that we are supposed to be grateful for. We heard it from the Minister in the chair today when he celebrated some worthy but incredibly tiny partnerships with community groups—10 and 20 houses here and there. They are good projects—nothing wrong with them—but we need hundreds we need thousands of decent affordable social and public houses to be built in Auckland and all around New Zealand. Yet we have 3000 fewer of those houses at this point in time than we did at the beginning of this Government's term in office.There is $386 million appropriated in Vote Building and Housing. Let us work through some of the key appropriations within that. The KiwiSaver HomeStart scheme which my colleague Aupito William Sio spoke about—it is pretty incredible that while this is trumpeted by the Government it was underspent by $11 million last year. Let us actually delve into what it does. What it provides for your average couple who might go into that scheme is up to $10000 to buy an existing home. The average grant as Aupito William Sio said is actually $5100. So $10000 when your average house in Auckland is $1 million and based on the loan-to-value ratio restrictions most of those couples will need about a $200000 deposit. Again we are supposed to be celebrating that according to the Government. It is a drop in the bucket. It is a token measure when what we actually need is a comprehensive approach to solving this housing crisis starting with Labour's KiwiBuild plan to build 100000 affordable homes for first-home buyers in our country.Let us move on to the supply of land for social housing which is mentioned in Vote Building and Housing. This was an extraordinary section of the report. Various underspends are documented in the report. This part of the appropriation appropriates $167 million. We are told that there are eight sites for building for the vacant or underutilised Crown Land Programme but no one could actually tell the Social Services Committee where those sites were. We know from Nick Smith's shambling efforts over the past few years that they could very well be on motorways or cemeteries—another example of the Government's total failure to have a thought through response to the housing crisis. Instead what we get are gimmicks to make it look like it is actually doing something. It is a total failure.The Auckland vacant or underutilised Crown Land Programme—let me quote directly from the report. "None of the $100 million appropriation for the 2016/17 Auckland Vacant or Underutilised Crown Land Programme was spent."—not one dollar of it spent. Instead what we have got about 3 or 4 months ahead of the general election this year is another splurge of money that has popped out of the Budget to make people think that this Government is actually interested in doing something in terms of building the social affordable and public houses that our people will need. This record and this vote show that this Government has singularly failed over 9 years. What we are going to get after this September is a new progressive Government that will use this money to actually build the houses that people need and to stop the homeless dying on the streets of our city. I oppose this vote."