Parker David: Social Housing Reform (Transaction Mandate) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeParker David: Social Housing Reform (Transaction Mandate) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 17 February 2016. Volume:711;Page:9084. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour): The housing market for people in New Zealand—if you exclude the people who are in collective housing; for example intellectually handicapped people who might be living in a sheltered house—is broadly broken down into three sections. There are people who own their own house people who rent a house in the private sector and people who rent from the community sector including in that broad definition the State. It is clear that we have got problems in all parts of that at the moment in New Zealand in every sector. We have got overpriced housing in some of our markets. We have got increasing concentrations of wealth meaning that we have got more people owning a lot of houses and a fewer number of New Zealanders being able to own their own homes. We have got problems that are so entrenched now that we have got the lowest rates of private homeownership since the 1950s. So we have got problems in that part.In the private sector in the rental sector I think as a country we have rested on our laurels in that we had a relatively young housing stock. When I was a kid most of the houses that were in the private rental stock were no more than 50 years old. There was not much of a need to regulate for a minimum standard. As a consequence of the passage of time over the next 50 years those houses are now 100 years old. They are well out of date in a technological sense. A lot of them are rundown. They can have gaping holes in them and still be legal to rent. So we need a minimum standard in that private sector. We have obviously got problems there that need to be addressed which are not being addressed by the Government.But then you come to the community sector which is what the Social Housing Reform (Transaction Mandate) Bill is about. You have got to reflect on what has happened here in the last couple of decades. You know what happened the last time a National Government was in power was that it sold down that capital stock by 13000 houses. It left fewer State houses at the end of its 9 years in Government. The last Labour Government built some more. We did not build as many as we probably should have.Phil Twyford: More than 9000.Hon DAVID PARKER: It was more than 9000. We actually increased the total stock substantially but not enough to meet the need. The current Government is selling it down again. It is reducing the number of State houses. There are a number of reasons why this is in my opinion wrong. The first reason is an intergenerational one. This Government takes the assets that have been built up by generations of New Zealanders and then sells them for the benefit of that one Government. National ran down the number of State houses in the 1990s and what did it do with the money? It spent it on something else so as to keep itself in power and fund things like tax cuts. What is the National Government doing this time? It is actually something similar. Despite the fact that we have got unprecedented housing need at the moment the Government has been taking dividends out of Housing New Zealand and in respect of the houses that it is selling it is not replacing them with other houses that are owned by the Government. The Government is renting houses. The stock of houses that are under the control of Housing New Zealand is now no longer owned by Housing New Zealand. Often it is renting them.Members of this House very frequently get approaches from people in the community who are in need. What has the Government done in order to suppress the ability of MPs to deal with that need? Do you know that MPs now cannot deal with Housing New Zealand? The doors are shut. We cannot deal with—we have the saddest cases coming to us. We have people who are living in cars we have people who have exited abusive relationships and who have got no income and we have people who have got kids whom they cannot accommodate and yet we cannot actually use the wisdom of MPs and experienced electorate staff to phone up Housing New Zealand and say: “Hey this is a case of serious need. We need to do something about it.” Those systems are not able to be recorded in a rule book and they rely upon trusting relationships between the Government department and MPs’ offices in order to winnow out the cases of real desperate need.Annette King just said that those issues of need arise in every part of New Zealand. What the Government is doing at the moment in Southland which is the first of these areas that is going to have its houses sold off is it is saying: “Your need is not as great in Southland as it is in South Auckland. Therefore we should sell off the Southland houses and rent a few more in Auckland.” That is essentially what is happening there. That is because the baseline for eligibility for a Housing New Zealand house has become so deprived that most of those who are at the extreme level of deprivation do actually live in South Auckland. So by weight of numbers they do exist in Auckland but the answer to that is to do more in Auckland not to do less in Invercargill because there is a social need in Invercargill for social housing.While I am on my feet I want to respond to one of the issues that is often raised by the National Government which is to say that the state of some State houses is inadequate. Well that is true—there will always be more maintenance that needs to be done. It does gall me when I hear the National Government claim credit for the work that has been done on retrofitting insulation in respect of a lot of Housing New Zealand houses. It is true that that has happened during the course of the last 6 or 7 years but in truth it was done because Jeanette Fitzsimons promoted that as a Budget bid for the Green Party when the Labour Government was in power. I was involved in this and Jeanette Fitzsimons did that very wisely because she knew that until the Government put its own housing stock in order it would not be willing to regulate for a minimum standard for every rental house. It was Jeanette Fitzsimons who raised that with the Labour Government—and I actually backed her in that Budget bid. But it was a Budget bid from the Green Party that it use its political entitlement if you like as it was part of the Labour-Green Government of the time—I forget what the proper terminology was. The National Government has continued with the implementation of that and I thank it for that because it is a good thing that has been done.Can I return to the regulatory impact statement? It starts with a summary. At the second paragraph it provides an analysis of options to ensure the Crown has the authority to transfer Housing New Zealand houses without impediment or delay. Well that is actually what this bill is about—it is actually another of these dictatorship clauses. It is effectively taking power away from the department and giving it to the Minister to do as the Minister sees fit in what I think is quite a dictatorial way without the checks and balances that come if that is done through Housing New Zealand. I think for all of those reasons this is wrong.Can I also say that there is this unfairness between regions because the regions are going to get less out of this. There is unfairness between generations because what has been built up over many generations is just being squandered by this Government inside a 3-year period and it does not in my opinion do anything substantial to meet this always-present need in society to be able to house your most vulnerable people in social housing that has long-term tenure. I think that the Government should be owning those houses rather than just leasing them.