Walker Holly: Building Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee 
Walker Holly: Building Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee 
[Volume:678;Page:820] 
HOLLY WALKER (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Chair. Tena koutou e te Whare. I am pleased to take a call on Part 1 of the Building Amendment Bill (No 3). It is my first call as the Green Party spokesperson on housing and the first of many in this area I hope. I would just like to begin by addressing the context for Part 1 of this bill and it is fair to say that the context for this bill is that we have a crisis in housing in New Zealand. It is both a crisis in the affordability of housing and a crisis in the availability of housing. The amendments that this bill makes to the Building Act are relevant to how we are going to address that crisis of affordability and availability. 
On the affordability side I think we have a situation where homeownership and indeed the privilege of being able to build one’s own home is a distant dream for more and more New Zealanders particularly those New Zealanders of my generation who are starting families and looking for the security and stability that often comes along with homeownership but finding that it is out of their reach. We have a housing affordability crisis especially in Auckland. I note that new figures from Statistics New Zealand prepared for the Auckland Council show that up to 85000 households in Auckland are currently paying unaffordable rents. That is partly a consequence of the unaffordability of homeownership as well. So that is 85000 households who are in what we would describe as housing stress and that is when you are obliged to spend more than 30 percent of your income on your housing costs on your rent or your mortgage. Statistics New Zealand estimates that 45 percent of Auckland households are in this state of housing stress and pay more than 30 percent of their income on rent or mortgage. So it is extremely problematic. 
On the other side of the coin we have a crisis of housing availability. We have over 10000 people on the Housing New Zealand Corporation’s waiting list yet we have a narrowing of the priorities of who is considered for social housing. We have a Government talking the talk on expanding the social housing unit within the Department of Building and Housing but no action yet and some concern about the direction that that is going when we have an extreme need to increase the availability of social housing in New Zealand. We have the absurd decision of the Housing New Zealand Corporation not to see its clients in person any more despite this crisis of housing availability and the long waiting lists that they face. We have Housing New Zealand Corporation stock being demolished and not necessarily replaced to meet the needs of local communities. 
We have the Christchurch rebuild effort which we are facing. An estimated 10000 new homes need to be built and this legislation is very relevant to that effort. And we have an estimated 70000 homes required in Auckland in order to meet the housing availability crisis simply in Auckland alone. So I think it is fair to say that this bill and the context for the building of new homes that it sets is very important when we consider how we are going to deal with the crisis of affordability and availability in housing. 
Obviously building new dwellings is part of the solution to the crisis of affordability and availability and in that context the Green Party supported the Building Act review that was initiated by the last Labour Government. However like our colleagues from Labour we find that we cannot support this bill as a response to that Building Act review when it takes such a piecemeal approach. 
Our concern is that a major thrust of this bill is about loosening up regulation ostensibly to expedite the building of new dwellings but as we have learnt from the leaky homes crisis this is an extremely dangerous approach to take. I think it is important that in considering Part 1 of this bill and indeed the rest of the bill the Committee takes into account the conclusions of the Hunn report on leaky homes in 2002 which concluded that the deregulation of the building industry undertaken by the National Government in the 1990s represented a major systemic breakdown across the whole industry. Our view is very much that we must take an extremely cautious approach and ensure that this does not happen again. 
We note that there is another building amendment bill—the Building Amendment Bill (No 4)—on the Order Paper. I heard the Minister suggest that those recommendations from the Building Act review that are not covered in this bill will be covered in that one. So to that extent we tentatively support that and I understand that that bill will deal—