Twyford Phil: Financial Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTwyford Phil: Financial Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 04 March 2014. Volume:696;Page:16299. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—TeAtatū): I want to address the question of why this National Government has so completely failed to address the housing crisis. I think that is the interesting question. Everybody knows that there is a housing crisis. It is affecting first home buyers. It is affecting State house tenants. Government agencies are routinely referring people to live in campgrounds. There are 285000 children growing up in cold damp homes and who are constantly sick because of the state of our housing stock. The country knows that there is a housing crisis. The National Party knows that there is a housing crisis. That is why Nick Smith runs around like a jack-in-the-box every 2 days. He would turn up to the opening of a door handle. He has got some half-baked scheme he announces every couple of days like the one where he was flogging off broken-down old State houses in parts of the country where there is no housing crisis. He was flogging them off at knock-down rates to make it look as if he is doing something. We know that there is a housing crisis. The National Party knows it. But why has it not done anything about it? That is the interesting question and that is what I want to address.Let us take the issue of these loan-to-value ratio lending restrictions. They have had the effect of locking out a generation of young New Zealanders from the dream of homeownership. Over the last week I have visited a number of cities around the North Island and some of those places are cities where first home buyers have been the worst affected in New Zealand by loan-to-value ratio lending restrictions. I am talking particularly about Napier Wanganui and Palmerston North. These are places where first home buyers have basically had the drawbridge pulled up. They have been told to go away—do not bother do not come back; you are not going to be able to buy your own home.I met a young family in Hamilton. They had moved from Auckland to avoid Auckland’s high property prices. They were a young couple with kids. They moved to Hamilton to avoid the skyrocketing house prices in Auckland. They told me that now because of loan-to-value ratio restrictions that have been broadened by this Government and because of the 20 percent minimum deposits they are 3 years away from being able to summon up a deposit. This is a family with professional well-paid jobs so imagine the stretched lower-middle and middle income people who believe that they should be able to own their own home. They are utterly locked out.Let us look at healthy homes. The Minister of Housing announced the other day a pilot scheme—he re-announced last year’s Budget commitment—involving 500 State houses to see whether the Government could make a warrant of fitness scheme work. The State houses are all already insulated. They have been retrofitted and insulated. They do not need a warrant of fitness pilot scheme. What they need is for the Minister to pick up the phone and tell the chief executive of Housing New Zealand that he wants those houses built to a certain standard so that they are warm and dry. So instead of doing the thing that is necessary—tackling cold damp homes in the private rental sector—this Minister is doing more busywork with a trial warrant of fitness with his own State houses.The third example of this Government’s total failure to address the housing crisis is its mismanagement and incompetent neglect of the State housing asset. We currently have 4000 empty State houses in New Zealand—4000. By coincidence there are about 4000 people languishing on the waiting lists and that is after Phil Heatley narrowed the eligibility criteria so tightly that hardly anybody these days qualifies to get a State house. In the last 12 months the number of State houses in New Zealand has decreased by 700. Under this National Government there are fewer State houses than ever before.Iain Lees-Galloway and I were in Palmerston North last week. We visited Highbury in Palmerston North. Palmerston North has about 90 vacant State houses. In Highbury they are boarded up they are covered in graffiti and they are a magnet for vandalism and crime. Such is the neglect of the State housing. It is the single most valuable publicly owned asset. We have $46 billion worth of State housing and all over New Zealand in every provincial city you can see them rotting boarded up and covered in graffiti. This Government has brought downtown Detroit to Napier to Palmerston North to Hamilton to Gisborne to Wanganui—you name it.