Hughes Gareth: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHughes Gareth: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 03 May 2016. Volume:713;Page:10715. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GARETH HUGHES (Green): Kia ora. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou kia ora. Around the country tonight there are couples sitting around their dinner tables in their rented kitchens going over their household budgets and wondering how they are ever going to own their own home. They are probably not reading this Social Development and Housing Sector report. They are probably more likely watching reruns of The Block or Mitre 10 Dream Home. Kiwis we sure do love our home renovation TV genre. But the fact is that for too many Kiwis this is not reality TV—this is fantasy TV. These are people who work hard who want to raise a family in a home of their own. They are working they are saving but they are finding the deck is stacked against them. These people also have a name—these people are now called Generation Rent. This is a generation stuck in poor quality rental accommodation with out-of-date tenancy law.It is not an accident. It is not a force of nature. This is the result of deliberate policies—deliberate policies skewing to screw the scrum deliberate policies that benefit and profit property investors over first-home buyers. These are policies that discriminate against Generation Rent and present clear economic and social risks to New Zealand. It is no way to run a country—to reward property speculators over people investing in productive enterprises and employing new workers. It is clear that something is out of kilter when a house can earn more in a matter of months than someone can earn working over 1 or 2 years.Simon Bridges last week said that the country does not have a housing crisis. But Mr Bridges say that to someone working on a minimum wage paying the 12 percent before-tax compulsory student loan repayments trying to save 20 percent for a loan-to-value ratio deposit—someone who is told they have got to start saving for retirement too. Mr Bridges says that there is no housing crisis but say that to someone in Auckland where house prices have risen by $100000 since January this year. Try saying that to someone in Ōtara where 80 percent of people buying houses there are in fact estimated to be investors. Try saying that to someone stuck in a cold damp rental house when the official estimates say that we are seeing 1600 extra deaths and 40000 child hospital admissions because of our poor quality housing. Try saying that to the couple who do not go to Bali twice a year do not drive a BMW on lease do not have a 42-inch plasma screen and do not spend 200 bucks at the bar on a Friday night but are told in the media that it is their fault that they are not disciplined enough to buy a house.There are thousands of New Zealanders locked out of homeownership Kiwis and families living in the holiday parks and living in the garages and thousands of Kiwis literally sleeping on our streets. Anyone who says that is not a crisis has their head in the sand and they are completely out of touch. In this country we used to be called the half-gallon quarter acre pavlova paradise. Since those days our homeownership rates have now dropped to where they were in the early 1950s. Homeownership used to be called the New Zealand dream. But today it is just that: a dream.For my generation—we are called Millennials or Generation Y or Generation Rent—housing unaffordability is in fact one of the highest-profile symbols of the wider generational inequities we see. My generation and the broader generation could in fact be the first generation that is worse off than their parents’ generation. This is a generation that is burdened with $15 billion of student debt gifted from a generation that had free education. This is a generation working in an imbalanced and indebted economy whose glory days were in fact 50 years in the past. This is a generation facing and inheriting unswimmable rivers species going extinct and the very real possibility of runaway catastrophic climate change. For my parents’ generation there was State support to get into a house free education and a job as good as guaranteed for life. Today a good job an affordable education and a house to call your own are considered luxuries.These are some pretty big issues facing the country but what is the Government focused on? Well its flags and its foreign trusts. A great president once said that a house divided against itself cannot stand and what we have seen in New Zealand in 2016 is generations divided by housing. I believe in fair and affordable housing as a basic human right for all New Zealanders. If you work hard and you save you should be able to get into a house for yourself even in our biggest city. The solutions are not rocket science: (1) we need the Government to build a lot of new homes like we used to; (2) we need a comprehensive capital gains tax excluding the family home to remove the unfair tax incentive to invest in property; and (3) we need restrictions on foreign property as we see in other countries.