Goff Phil: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8250. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): That speech by the Hon Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga would have been one of the sleepiest deliveries of any introductory speech that I have heard during my entire time in the House. I know that we are under urgency that we have been meeting since 9 o’clock this morning and that it is a quarter past ten and probably past the Minister’s bedtime but I thought that he could have put a little bit more enthusiasm in the speech than that. The Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill is a bill that is supported by the Labour Party. In fact it has been requested and supported by Auckland City and this party is certainly supportive of Auckland City and the desire to make that a great city. I hope that this bill is a sign of a change of heart by the Government a new readiness to cooperate with Auckland City in the future because in the past it has seemed that that has not always been the case. In fact Auckland City and the central government often seem to have been working down different paths. I am sorry that the Minister who is in charge of the bill the Hon Nick Smith is not here to say this to directly—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order!Hon PHIL GOFF: —but I regret that some of the time when the Minister makes comments about problems that Auckland faces he is scapegoating Auckland as the cause of the very problems that his central government refuses to address. So I hope that this bill working to implement something that Auckland City wants is a sign of a better future in the relationship between central government and Auckland City. I hope that the Minister realises coming as he does from a smaller town that with 36 percent of the population of the country and 36 percent of the production of the country for New Zealand to succeed Auckland has to succeed and for Auckland to succeed we need a decent unitary plan. That is what this bill is designed to help facilitate.Actually the bill does two things. First of all it corrects mistakes in the principal Act the Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Act of 2010—and I will get to those errors because we have had a couple of days of urgency where all this House seems to be doing is correcting mistakes made by a Government that has been hasty and has ill-considered the legislation before it. Urgency is never a good way to correct mistakes because when you force a bill through under urgency in the middle of the night when the Minister is barely awake and you do not send it to a select committee you do not get a chance for the public to have scrutiny of the legislation nor the committee to have scrutiny nor the experts who could have corrected the mistakes that led to our doing this now under urgency. It is a vicious cycle but the Government never seems to learn from its mistakes.The first thing this bill does—and I will come back to it later—is to correct errors that were made in the principal Act and because those errors need to be corrected we are from the Opposition and we are here to help the Government. The second thing and the most important thing that this legislation does is to facilitate the processing of submissions on the draft Auckland Unitary Plan. This plan is the most complex and far-reaching of any plan that has been considered probably in the history of this country. It is incredibly important. The unitary plan brings in 13 different district and regional plans and it brings them together into one. And it means that we will have a resource planning mechanism for Auckland that is less complex less fragmented and hopefully better able to facilitate sound development sustainable development and housing affordability in Auckland.Towards the end of my speech I want to focus on housing affordability because the Minister in his comments about this bill has emphasised that this is a way to help address Auckland’s housing crisis. Well it may but it will not come anywhere near the need to address the level of crisis in Auckland’s housing where house prices are now on average over $900000 where they have gone up in a year by $180000 where rents are increasing by three to four times the rate of overall inflation and where homeownership has dropped to its lowest level in 64 years. Although the Minister may be optimistic that the unitary plan can address all of this I have got news for the Minister: he is going to have do a whole lot more than this and he needs to do a whole lot better than this in order to address that problem. The unitary plan is one aspect of the solution for Auckland’s crisis but it is only one aspect and a lot more needs to be done.What the principal Act did was instead of relying on the Resource Management Act to bring together these 13 different plans—that would have taken a decade—it brought in a streamlined process whereby the unitary plan could be notified submissions could be heard on it by the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel and then that panel report back to the council. A statutory deadline for that report back to the council with recommendations has been set it is 22 July 2016 and there is a huge amount of work still to be done—it has heard thousands of submissions but it has another 5000 submissions to be heard on site-specific issues. There was a real risk that this unitary plan was not going to be completed by the statutory deadline would not be considered by the council before the council elections in October next year and as the Minister said the council would not have the new unitary plan in place at the time that the special housing areas legislation is due to expire.I am not quite sure why the Minister should be worried about the impact of the special housing areas legislation being due to expire because the Minister set a target for Auckland of 39000 extra houses. Does that not sound good—39000 extra houses for Auckland over 3 years? Even if it achieved that it probably would not resolve the imbalance of supply and demand but it would go some way towards it. But the special housing areas legislation the expiry of which the Minister is so worried about was due to facilitate that and what did it do? Well here is the business section of the New Zealand Herald. You know 2 out of the 3 years now having passed towards the goal of 39000 houses how many houses have been built in the special housing areas?Phil Twyford: Let me guess.Hon PHIL GOFF: Let us have some bids. How many houses out of the 39000 that were needed by Auckland have been completed?Phil Twyford: 10000.Hon PHIL GOFF: 10000—do I hear something a bit better than that? That is very optimistic from Phil Twyford.Phil Twyford: 5000.Hon PHIL GOFF: 5000—he has halved it but he is still not there—nowhere near there. Do you know Mr Assistant Speaker how many houses have been completed in the special housing areas?The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): No.Hon PHIL GOFF: No you do not know. Well let me tell you. It is 102—102 whole houses completed under the special housing area legislation but the Minister says that we have got to rush this legislation through under urgency for fear that the special housing legislation expires. Well I welcome 102 houses but 102 houses when the goal was set by the Minister himself of 39000 extra houses is not good. Although I have made a little bit light of it it is a serious problem. It is a serious problem because Aucklanders no longer can achieve the Kiwi dream of owning their own home. Aucklanders can barely afford to rent their own homes. In fact the Government is spending $2 billion a year in subsidising rentals because people cannot afford to make their rental payments—$2 billion a year and a lot of that is going into Auckland.So let us come back to the question of the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel and how this Government is trying to facilitate it getting through the workload it has in front of it. It does it by three mechanisms and we are in favour of those. Firstly the bill reduces the quorum for hearing sessions from three to two members. That might have a marginal impact in terms of the quality of the input but I think the impact would be just that: marginal. I think two members can cope with that particularly on the very specific nature of the issues that they will be hearing from January next year. Secondly it allows an increase in the possible number of appointed hearings panel members from seven to 10. That is a good thing because there will be more people available to serve on the panels. And thirdly it enables the hearings panel to make its recommendations in stages rather than in one final report. So it will make its recommendations after each point is reached in the hearings rather than as one. So we support those three measures. We support the measures to correct the mistakes of the past but we are utterly disparaging of the Minister’s claim that even if we get this unitary plan right—and I hope we do—that that is going to solve the massive housing crisis of availability and affordability in New Zealand. It will barely touch on that. Much more needs to be done.