Woods MeganHon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Minister of Housing): Tomorrow marks the 12th anniversary of the devastating Canterbury earthquakes—22 February is always a complicated day for Cantabrians. It is a day where we reflect on the 185 lives that were lost on that day 12 years ago but it's also a day where we reflect on over a decade of going through the process from disaster right through response recovery and how it is that we can take the best lessons to rebuild and to shape something that is fit for our future. It is a day where we grieve for what we have lost—our city is unrecognisable today from what it was this time 12 years ago. Many of the landmarks of our childhood were simply wiped away that day.But this year as we gather together as Cantabrians to mark the anniversary of that day 12 years ago it will be especially poignant knowing there are other parts of the country that are now going through a very similar set of circumstances to what we as a set of communities went through 12 years ago. It is a day that we can reflect on the things that worked well and the things that didn't work well in terms of responding to a disaster. It's a day where we can see what matters as you go through this process. And what we can see is that the response that our Government is putting together is taking the lessons of what happened in Canterbury making sure that those hard hard days that we went through as a community are being looked on as something we can learn from and something we can use to help further communities in New Zealand—something that locals always wanted.We reflect on the fact that local leadership matters that involving local communities and local leadership and having local voice from right in the days of the response is absolutely critical. We reflect on the fact that we can never underestimate the mental health impacts of natural disasters that sometimes it is the people you least expect not to cope. There are no indicators necessarily for who will cope and who will not cope. I know that some of the people that I would have thought were the most resilient people I knew were the people that simply did not cope with the fact that they had lost control of their lives and what was happening around them. It's a time when we reflect on the fact that checking in with your neighbours and your friends and being there to support each other is absolutely critical. It's also a day on which we absolutely acknowledge that the effects of natural disasters reveal very unequal power relationships whether that be the ability to access resources—but one of the things that you can see that our Government has already moved on and a lesson that we took from the Christchurch earthquakes is that one of those very unequal power relationships can be individuals dealing with insurance and trying to work their way through the maze and the trauma that that can inflict on people. Why? Last weekend we took a service that when we came into Government we set up—the Greater Christchurch Claims Resolution Service which managed to actually break the deadlock and get claims settled that had sat on the books for seven and eight years—and we've put a service like this in place for communities where there will be insurance tangles to work through. It is important that we do that because recovering from Cyclone Gabrielle will be one of the major areas of focus for our Government over the coming weeks and months. We know that this is something that we have to put our focus on and we are utterly committed to working in partnership with the business community and with iwi while we do that. We need to learn those lessons. But standing here today I want to acknowledge all of those that have been affected by these devastating effects. It is hard it is a slog and it can be a very anxious and a very scary time for many people and I don't think we can ever lose sight of that. I want to take a couple of minutes to talk about some areas in the response that I have ministerial responsibility for. In the energy sector we heard the Prime Minister today in his statement talk about the tireless efforts of many within our electricity system to restore power. This time last week 225000 people in the North Island were without power. Today that number is down to 11000 and that has not been a simple task to get those numbers down. That has taken commitment and that has taken a huge amount of work from a number of people.But most significantly and what I am so proud of is what it has taken is collaboration. We've seen crews coming up from the South Island being flown up by the New Zealand Defence Force to work on restoring the lines in Northland looking to see what they can do in other parts of the country. I know that Orion the lines company from Christchurch and a part of their group Connetics—they very much thought of the days when people came from other parts of the country to help them following the earthquakes and they very much wanted to be part of a combined and coordinated response of how it is that we could help people all over the country. So I'd like to really thank those companies that have done that.We also know that the cyclone has displaced many people from their homes that it has devastated people's place where they feel most secure—their home—and we are working through that. The Temporary Accommodation Service is scaling up to respond to the housing demand felt in Auckland. This is no small task. There simply are not empty houses sitting around waiting for the day after a disaster where we can put people in them. But I think we are seeing some innovation some agility and some good pragmatic solutions coming through. One of the Government's priorities of course has been housing since we came into Government. It is a housing crisis that is decades in the making. We simply have not had enough houses built in New Zealand over a series of decades. And I'd like to acknowledge the team of housing Ministers that are working on this. We've just heard from Marama Davidson an Associate Minister of Housing with responsibility for homelessness. Barbara Edmonds has joined the team of housing Ministers as an associate and so has the Hon Willie Jackson with responsibility for Māori housing.We see the complexity of the issue of housing and how large it is and how much resource we need to put into it and we are starting to see the green shoots of change. We are seeing that we are closing the gaps on the number of homes that we were short of in this country. We can see that very much in Auckland where we have had massive increases in supply. We can also see that in the area of public housing. It is a great source of pride to us as a Labour Government that we can sit here and see that one in seven State houses that stands in New Zealand today was built by this Government. In five short years we have embarked on the largest State-house building programme of any Government since the 1970s—and we had to do that because there had been a decade of neglect when it came to public housing. We had a decade that ended up with fewer public houses than it started with which is a disgrace—the first time we had seen that in New Zealand's history and one of the many reasons why we are experiencing the waiting lists and the housing crisis that we see today. But we have a commitment to keep going with that public housing plan to not only keep building them but to keep funding our community housing providers to make sure that they can also deliver.There are more than double the number of houses offered by community housing providers today than when we came into Government only five years ago. So we have doubled that in the time we have been in Government. We have increased four- or fivefold the funding that goes into our community sector and housing because we will solve the housing crisis by working together. That is our commitment that we take to how we will approach continuing to make sure that we are not a Government that neglects these long-run issues. We need to as the Prime Minister says crack on with this and we will.