Robertson GrantGRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): I feel like the parent who has to do the thing that they never ever want to do—to sit their child down and say: I am sorry there is no Santa." So for David Seymour's benefit this is the ACT Party equivalent of the difficult parental conversation: the market is broken. It is completely broken. It is not delivering housing to the majority of New Zealanders who want to buy it. It is broken—it is completely broken—so standing up and making semantic arguments about the difference between affordable housing and housing affordability is just perpetuating the purist model that I know David Seymour believes in. I know David Seymour believes in this as an article of faith but Mr Seymour actually needs to look around and realise that the market is broken. It is not delivering housing affordability; it is not delivering affordable housing.Bill English the Minister of Finance stood up straight before the Budget and said that in the last 10 years only 5 percent of new builds have been affordable. He acknowledged it. It was interesting that while Mr Seymour gave his first intervention this evening Nick Smith was in the chair saying things like "He absolutely is right." and "Hear hear." when David Seymour said that there was no place for an affordable housing requirement within special housing areas which seemed a little odd to us on this side of the Chamber because it is already in the Government's law. In fact they have got a requirement for 10 percent affordability in Auckland now so it is a little odd for Nick Smith to do that.He then followed it up brilliantly with another intervention—I think it might have been when Iain Lees-Galloway was talking—saying: "It won't work. It doesn't work." Well it is in his law. Why is it in his law if it does not work? The point is that it is not working because the whole special housing area process is not working. That is the problem. We have got only 57 of the 154 special housing areas with anything actually happening—even remotely close to happening—on them so the problem here is that the market is broken and it requires an intervention. That is the problem that David Seymour has.It is surprising that the Minister is not prepared to back the Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) in Metiria Turei's name because he himself has already started the ball rolling here. We need these special housing areas to be delivering a range of housing because what we want in New Zealand are communities to develop that are not ghettos that actually do provide opportunities for people to live in cities close to where they work and that are not only for those who are the very very wealthy. That is not what New Zealand was built on. If David Seymour has got a big problem with all of this he needs to go to any public meeting in New Zealand which are mostly attended by slightly older New Zealanders and say "Who in this room got their first house through a State Advances Loan?" or "Who got their first house by capitalising the family benefit?". Successive Governments have intervened in the housing market to give New Zealanders a fair go at the Kiwi Dream of owning their own home and that is what needs to happen here. Here is an opportunity to do that.The ultimate way to do this Mr Seymour is actually a programme where we really intervene in the market to fix it which is KiwiBuild—where the Government leads the housing development programme of affordable housing where we do not just leave it up to the private developers and where we actually say: "Here is a chance for the Government to show some leadership and develop affordable housing." For the special housing areas we do not know what the counterfactual is in terms of how many of these areas would have been developed anyway. I know here in Wellington when you look at the list of special housing areas most of them are ones that were already under way or would have been developed anyway. But we are prepared to give it a go. We are prepared to say: "Yep let's get in behind the special housing areas and see whether we can make them work a little bit better." But they are not going to work to deliver affordable housing unless we actually commit as a Parliament to making that happen.That is what this SOP is about. That is what the Government should be delivering on. It has already got it in the legislation for Auckland so let us make it possible for everyone around the country."