Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHousing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 03 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13162. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas BillIn CommitteePart 1 Preliminary provisions housing accords and special housing areasPHIL TWYFORD (Labour—TeAtatū):Tēnā koe Mr Chairman. Let me make some opening comments as we set off on Part 1 of this bill the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill. I want to make it very clear from the beginning that Labour supports the notion of housing accords. We support the idea of special housing areas. There is a housing affordability crisis not only in Auckland but in many of our other bigger cities particularly the high-growth parts of the country. It is a crisis that is having huge economic and social effects on the people of New Zealand. The Kiwi dream of homeownership is slipping further and further out of reach under this Government. A generation of New Zealanders now finds it nigh on impossible to purchase their own home. A generation ago that was considered to be part of the Kiwi birthright. Now the numbers the very high rate of homeownership which we treasured for so long and were so proud of are plummeting. In the last 5 years we have seen precious little action or seriousness by this Government in addressing that problem.As well as the dream of homeownership slipping further out of reach the housing crisis has had a massive negative effect on the health and well-being of the poorest and the most vulnerable New Zealanders who are driven into the private rental market in huge numbers where they live more often than not crowded into substandard housing. It is not uncommon particularly in the centres where housing is at its most unaffordable for families to be living cheek by jowl squashed into the spare rooms of their friends neighbours and relations and for people to be living in caravan parks in a quality of accommodation that no one in this country in this day and age should have to inhabit. Children—too many of them—are being hospitalised for preventablerespiratory diseases because they are living in cold and damp homes. A major factor for that relative social hardship is an overall housing crisis that has driven prices up beyond the reach of ordinary Kiwis that has denied so many people a shot at homeownership and that has had the knock-on effect of pushing New Zealanders further and further down the chain to face often substandard inadequate housing. It is high time that the Government did something serious about this housing crisis.But I am sorry to say that this bill the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill does not measure up to any kind of benchmark for a serious concerted well-thought-through response to the housing crisis. What it isis the fast tracking of the elements of the Auckland Unitary Plan that will bring in more greenfield land than would otherwise be the case and some fast-track consenting to deliver special housing areas. As I said Labour is not against the idea. There is a housing crisis. In Auckland because of the historical legacy of the old metropolitan urban limits that are now about to be replaced by the rural urban boundary in the Auckland Unitary Plan there is a land supply problem that has been responsible for driving up land prices and as a knock-on effect driving up residential property prices. This bill is premised on the notion that if you open up extra greenfield land somehow it will magically flow through into affordability. In the course of this debate we will unpick the shonky thinking and poor logic that underpins this bill.As my colleague Jacinda Ardern commented in the Social Services Committee when the Hon Nick Smith came along as part of the estimates and was quizzed about his housing policies the Minister explained his thinking that underpins this bill and it is essentially that—Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister of Housing): Let us firstly get some facts about housing affordability on the record at the beginning of this Committee stage debate. The first thing we know is that during Labour’s 9 years house prices went up by 100 percent and incomes went up by 40 percent. So housing affordability went backwards by 60 percent under Labour’s reign.Phil Twyford: Five long years.Hon Dr NICK SMITH: Let us look at the figures under our 5 years. Under our 5 years average house prices in New Zealand have gone up by 14 percent and household incomes have gone up by 19 percent. So I say to Labour members and challenge them at the very beginning: when are we going to hear an apology from the likes of Phil Goff and Phil Twyford for their appalling record on housing affordability during their 9 years in office—Hon Annette King: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. I rise to correct the Minister’s pronunciation. It is Phil Twyford not “Triffid”.The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): Thank you for that. I think that is most appropriate. The Minister will make sure that in future he tries to use the correct pronunciation for the member’s name. All members are honourable.Hon Dr NICK SMITH: The second point I want to make is that the member Phil Twyford highlighted the case of cold damp homes causing disease. How many homes has this Government gone in and insulated? The answer is 326000—326000. How many times more is that the number than what the previous Labour Government did? It is 10 times the number—10 times the number. So I am not going to take a lecture from Labour members on the issue of home insulation and making our homes safer drier and warmer.The Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill is about addressing the issue of land supply but never has this Government said that the issue of land supply alone is a solution to housing affordability. We have announced initiatives around getting the development costs which went up by threefold during Labour’s time under control. Wehave announced initiatives around materials costs around apprenticeships around expanding KiwiSaver first-home deposit grants around Welcome Home Loans. We have announced initiatives around keeping interest rates low—all are factors.Phil Twyford: Tinkering—it’s tinkering.Hon Dr NICK SMITH: The member has just said that it is tinkering. Well I will check the record. What did Labour do during its 9 years? How many bills did we have before this Parliament that would make houses more affordable? The answer is absolutely zero diddly squat zip.Then let us look at the substance of this bill. This bill is about increasing land supply and doing so quickly. Who confirms that we need to do that? The Productivity Commission. What did the Labour Party say when the Productivity Commission report came out? It said that it was an ideological burp and it opposed it—an ideological burp and it opposed it. On people like MurraySherwin one of our most respected public servants the Labour Party says: “Forget it. We don’t believe it.” When the IMF says it when the OECD says it and when the Reserve Bank says it Labour rejects it all. The reality is that increasing land supply is critical to housing affordability and unless we address it nobody in this Parliament can pretend they are serious about dealing with the issues of housing affordability. That is why this afternoon is an afternoon of shame for the Labour Party—shame—shame that it has gone out and pretended that it was about housing affordability and then wasted the time of this Parliament by opposing the very bill and the very agreement with the Auckland Council that will actually make progress.The last point I wish to make is this. The member mentioned the issue of affordability. Affordability is specifically addressed in the accord and specifically addressed in the bill. It is specifically addressed in both. You cannot address affordability unless you address land supply. What we know—Dr Rajen Prasad: Oh!Hon Dr NICK SMITH: —for the members who reject it—is this. The average price of a section in Auckland has gone up from $100000 to the latest average of $325000. So my challenge to members of Labour is this. They say they are going to build 10000 homes at $300000 each. What sort of home is it going to be when the section costs $325000? I tell you what it is. It is a hole.PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—TeAtatū): I wanted to continue with my recounting of Nick Smith’s appearance at the Social Services Committee. He came along and he was asked how the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill would result in improvement in housing affordability given that it only allows for an immediate increase in the supply of greenfield land and some fast-track consenting. It was pointed out to him that given the state of the Auckland property market and given the strong market incentives it is very likely that builders will build expensive houses—houses for instance that are being sold for $700000 or $800000 or more in Auckland—bearing in mind that only 5 percent of houses that are currently being built are in the affordable range. Mr Smith came along to the select committee and when this was pointed out to him he agreed that yes it is quite possible that this bill would result in expensive houses being built.When he was asked how this would help the stated objectives of the bill his explanation was: “Well if builders build expensive houses as they may well do then someone is going to buy those expensive houses and when they buy those expensive houses they will move out of their existing houses thereby freeing up some houses.” We do not know how expensive the houses that they were living in before were but this is as my colleague Jacinda Ardern pointed out pure trickle-down housing economics. What we will go to debate in this Committee stage is that there is nothing in this bill that provides any assurance—and I will quote Auckland Council’s own publicstatements to the Minister about this—or will guarantee the building of any more affordable housing.The Property Council came along to the select committee as did the Salvation Army Todd Property Tauranga City Council and Auckland Council and they all told the select committee under direct questioning that this bill would not necessarily result in any more affordable housing being built. All we have is Nick Smith’s fairytale economics that if some more expensive houses are built somehow that increase in the supply—no matter how expensive those houses will be no matter how intractable the cost drivers of housing are in the Auckland market and no matter how powerful the market incentives are for builders and property developers to build $800000 houses—and somehow this bill by bringing a little bit more greenfield land into the system are going to result in an improvement in housing affordability or affordable housing. It is nonsense it is a hoax and unfortunately it fits within the tinkering approach that this Minister has made his hallmark in this portfolio.It would not be such a bone of contention that this bill was inadequate in this way if the Government had a comprehensive package on housing but it does not. It does nothing to deal with the problem of speculation in Auckland. It refuses to take the advice of Treasury of the OECD of the IMF and of virtually every mainstream economist in this country who says that there should be a capital gains tax in order to take the speculative heat out of the housing market. For some reason the Government has made a decision and John Key has made a promise that they are not willing to step away from. No matter how sound that proposition is they are not willing to consider a capital gains tax. They are not willing to go along with the two-thirds of New Zealanders who believe that offshore speculators should not be able to buy housing in New Zealand that New Zealanders should have first crack at buying a house and that it is unacceptable for real estate agencies to be going to Hong Kong and Singapore and marketing New Zealand residential property as some kind of international bargain-basement offer because there is no capital gains tax no stamp duty and no restrictions on offshore speculators. In fact the Government actively encourages offshore speculators to come into this market and bid up the prices of New Zealand houses and outbid Kiwi first-home buyers at auction.The Government is not willing to build affordable houses it is not willing to crack down on speculators and it is not willing to comprehensively reform the Resource Management Act to facilitate affordable housing. All we have is this tinkering inadequate bill which is a short-term measure and even then—even then—there is no assurance that it will result in any more affordable housing or any better affordability in the housing market. So this bill is a great disappointment.DENIS O’ROURKE (NZ First): When the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill was originally introduced in the House we in New Zealand First thought: “Thank goodness! Finally the Government is moving on the housing crisis.” We thought it was high time that it did because it had waited at least 5 years doing absolutely nothing while a housing crisis developed in New Zealand. So we thought: “Thank goodness! Something is going to be done.” Then as we began to study the bill and understand it we realised that actually not very much was going to be done at all especially for low-income people seeking their first homes and especially in terms of addressing the issue of affordability. So now New Zealand First is regretfully going to vote against the bill.We are not going to now vote against the bill because we are opposed to the concept of housing accords with local government—we welcome that; we think it is appropriate that central government and local government should work together on addressing the housing crisis in New Zealand—and neither are we voting against it because we areagainst the concept of special housing areas as we think that that is also a good concept and is one good way of moving forward and making sure that adequate land is made available for housing in New Zealand. Those are not the reasons we are voting against it. The reason is that this Government is actually not doing nearly enough about the housing crisis that has developed.It is not doing nearly enough about affordability. I heard what the Minister of Housing just said about affordability but I am one of those New Zealanders who are totally unconvinced by what the Minister says and who see what this Government is failing to do in fact about the problem of affordability of housing in New Zealand. We do not accept that simply flooding the market with land available for housing will actually solve anything very much at all especially affordability and especially making it possible for first-home owners to achieve their first home in this country which is now something that is so far beyond possibility for those people that you could call it virtually impossible.There are additional problems. Planning instruments are to be compromised by this legislation and local democracy will be sidelined as well because of some of the particular provisions in the bill.I want to specifically refer to PhilTwyford’s Supplementary Order Papers 342 343 and 344. Supplementary Order Paper 342 has a provision that provides that “No plan change or variation to a proposed plan” would be able to be permitted that is “inconsistent with the Waitakere Ranges Heritage Area Act 2008.” In fact it is a much wider issue than that. It is a wider issue of consistency with plan changes altogether. This highlights how the bill would compromise district and city planning instruments and set local democracy aside. The bill is a pretty blunt instrument when you look at it. It is something of a panic measure. It is a measure that is unbalanced and in favour of a quick-fix attempt for a problem that has been years in the making and we are very concerned that some of the good work done in planning by many local authorities will in fact be compromised by the bill.Moving on to Supplementary Order Paper 343 New Zealand First will support that as well. It would seek to “remove the override provisions in the Bill …”. We in New Zealand First believe that that is appropriate. The amendment requires that there must be a housing accord if an order for a special housing area is to be made. We in New Zealand First believe that the Government should negotiate and negotiate and negotiate until in fact it reaches an agreement and there should not be the ability to set that process aside and to simply impose an accord on a local district or city. That is not appropriate and that should not be happening.We do not believe that if the provision for the override were not there that would unduly constrain the Government. That is simply because local governments are just as keen as central government is to reach agreement on special housing areas and to make sure that in fact those local councils can act to ensure through the negotiating process that their good work and planning processes are not compromised and set aside. The problem with that override provision is just this: the Government if it is just tired of the process or does not believe in the sincerity of the local government or simply does not agree with it can just brush it aside and impose a special housing area or an accord of its own—or rather do what it likes effectively—and that is simply not appropriate in the circumstances. That is the reason why we will support Supplementary Order Paper 343.Turning to Supplementary Order Paper 344 it would enable housing accords to require a minimum proportion of housing that is affordable. That as I have already said is a very important issue for New Zealand First. We think that provisions along these lines are very very much needed indeed. In fact we think that that is one of the mostimportant issues of all. You see the profit motive for developers causes them to favour large sections and large houses to make larger profits. I have looked around Christchurch with a friend looking for a smaller home on a smaller section. Do you think we could find one in all those subdivisions that are happening now around Christchurch? It is very very difficult indeed to find a smaller home on a smaller subdivision and that is a significant problem because those properties are very expensive—much too expensive for too many people especially first-home seekers.So if there is to be a Government lead in terms of special housing areas then the Government also needs to lead to make sure that people needing smaller homes on smaller sections are catered for. We do not believe that the current provisions of the bill and the current intentions of the Government are actually to address the needs of those people at all. We believe that there needs to be a good mix of smaller homes on smaller sections as a mandatory requirement of all developments taking place as a result of special housing areas under this bill. In that way we can make sure that at least some of the properties that will be made available will be more affordable and in that way we can indirectly start to address the issue of affordability.But affordability of course is a much wider issue than that. In fact we in New Zealand First think that the Government should be making assistance directly available to first-home seekers in terms of ways to assist them to find the deposit that they are now going to need—20 percent—for a first home. The Government is not doing that. That is a glaring omission and we think that that is something that it needs to do. Just fiddling with retirement savings—KiwiSaver—is not going to address that problem. We all know that. The Government seems to think it will; it will not. Much much more needs to be done.Governments of the past have done much more. I bought my first section many decades ago now admittedly with a homeownership account—a very good system for assisting people to save for their first home by giving tax refunds to help them to do that. That is the sort of thing that New Zealand First adopts as its policy approach and we would like to see the Government consider it as well.So for those reasons New Zealand First will be supporting PhilTwyford’s Supplementary Order Papers. But in the end with regret we will be voting against this bill.Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour): I rise to speak to the second reading of the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill.Hon Dr Nick Smith: It’s the Committee stage.Hon MARYAN STREET: Sorry the Committee stage is what I meant. Thank you. I quite agree with the Minister of Housing that affordability is not a new problem. It was a problem when we were in Government between 1999 and 2008. It was indeed a problem but I have to say that since December 2008 the average residential property price in Auckland has gone up from $496000 to about $645000 in July of this year. So it has increased by about 30 percent in the time since the Government has been in office. The average residential property price in Christchurch has increased by 25.6 percent since December 2008 when it was about $345000 to $433000 in July of this year. And on we go. We can see that although it is not a new problem it is a worse problem.We spent much of our 9 years in office—and again I agree with the Minister that this is not a single-solution problem—devising a menu of options that we could put together that would address housing affordability. I would not for a moment say that the Minister was lying but I will say that the Minister was profoundly mistaken when he said that there had not been any other legislation addressing housing affordability. I remember it well. I was the Minister of Housing who introduced it. I was the Ministerwho ushered it through the House against the protestations of the people who are now in Government. It was called the Affordable Housing: Enabling Territorial Authorities Act or some other difficult name. That is what it was designed to do. It was called the Affordable Housing: Enabling Territorial Authorities Act and it was one of the first pieces of legislation that this Government repealed on coming into office which was rapidly followed by abolishing our shared equity scheme. That was another way in the menu of things—the menu of solutions—that we had devised to help particularly young people get into their first home.The Minister said in his peroration earlier that there had been no previous legislation. Because he said it loudly and got red in the face about it does not make the Minister right. He was completely wrong on that score. So I just want to set that record straight to begin with.Secondly I would be inclined to support this bill if it did anything. Our Act our law by contrast actually gave local authorities the legislative ability to require that 10 percent of any residential development be set aside for affordable housing—10 percent. So what does this bill do? The bill says in clause 4 that ‘The purpose of this Act is to enhance housing affordability by facilitating an increase in land and housing supply in certain regions or districts listed in Schedule 1”. Well the only one listed in schedule 1 is Auckland and I will come back to that shortly. So this is the intention and purpose of this bill and at clause 11 we get to the guts of it. That is about the form and content of a housing accord. What does it say? I go to look for something concrete like “10 percent of a residential development must be put aside or may be by legal means put aside for affordable housing” and what do I see? I see that “A housing accord must—(a) be in writing;”—whoopee—and must “(b) set out the parties’ agreement about how they will work together to achieve the purpose of this Act …”—mmm getting warm. It has got to “(c) set out agreed targets for residential development …”—talk about lacking ambition. It does not even say “10 percent”. It does not even suggest an amount of any residential development that should be set aside for affordable housing.In fact under that clause it talks more about how to dissolve a housing accord and how to resolve disputes around a housing accord than it does about housing affordability. In fact housing affordability is not mentioned—not mentioned. There is a reference to the purpose of the bill but it does not say that there must be affordable houses. It just says that there must be more—there must be more—and you know we will work that out between us. This is more flimflam than you can—Hon Annette King: Shake a stick at.Hon MARYAN STREET: I was going to say “shake a stick at” but it sounded a bit colloquial for the Committee. It is more flimflam than you can shake a stick at as my colleague Annette King says. The point about this is that this Government has done nothing on affordable housing in 5 years. If this is one of its great pieces of strategy to address housing affordability which is chronic and has become worse under this Government then I am sorry about it. It is pathetic. It does not specify housing affordability in any of the housing accord clauses.The things that our Government did—just to refresh the Minister’s memory—were that we brought in the Welcome Home Loans which this Government has chosen to keep. Yes because it was very difficult for it to repeal it. Secondly we brought in KiwiSaver deposit-matching where the Government would incentivise new homeowners by matching what they could save if they saved a certain amount over 5 years. That is now coming to maturity. The shared equity scheme is the one where I think the Minister misses the boat entirely. Land supply of course is important but what about Crown-owned land? This is what Hobsonville was about and the Whenuapai Air Base was about. The Crown land was set aside by a Labour Government for 3000houses—500 of them to be social housing 500 to be affordable houses and the other 2000 the Minister and his mates could buy at market rates. That was not ghettoising anybody. It was not going to pull down the values in John Key’s electorate. It was going to address housing supply by freeing up Crown land.One of the other things that was important was that in freeing up Crown land—by a Government that cared enough to do it—we could couple that with a shared equity arrangement and say that the Government can own the land and the new homebuyer can buy the house and then it becomes entirely possible for young first-home buyers to get a foot on the ladder. They can buy the house and the Crown keeps the value of the land. They can either buy the Crown out over time—this was our plan—or they can onsell the house and whatever profit they make from that can then go into buying their next property. Freeing up Crown land is not something we hear this Minister talk about. He talks a lot about land supply. In the National Government’s terms that simply means urban sprawl. Urban sprawl is not the only way to address housing affordability. In fact it is the least efficient way to deal with housing affordability. Higher density is much more sensible than moving metropolitan urban limits and just creating sprawl and setting people up in houses where they have no access to amenities or transport nodes or anything of that kind.The other thing I want to say very briefly is that schedule 1 applies only to Auckland. People in Wellington Christchurch the Minister’s own electorate of Nelson and Queenstown live in the most unaffordable parts of the country. In fact Tauranga is now up there amongst the top half-dozen least affordable places to buy a house. So if this is going to be one of the panaceas for housing affordability that the Minister says it should be it should be expanded. Not only should it have some real teeth to it but it should be expanded to all of those areas that have high housing costs. This does not even touch the surface. Thank you.Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister of Housing): I am just going to cover very quickly a few points where that member Maryan Street was just so wrong. No. 1: does this bill the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill cover only Auckland? Of course not. Anybody who has read it knows and members on the Social Services Committee will know that other districts and regions can be added. No. 2: the member said that this Government has done nothing of substance to help housing affordability. Well let me give you an issue of substance. When we came into Government interest rates were 9 percent. Today they are 5 percent the lowest ever. What does that mean? That means that New Zealand households this year will pay $7 billion less in interest payments.Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga: How much?Hon Dr NICK SMITH: $7 billion. The member said that that is insignificant. She said that $7 billion in costs for households is insignificant. I say she is wrong she is out of touch and what worries me is that if you have got three contestants for the Labour leadership going down the track of spending money wildly it will only drive interest rates back up again.This is the funniest point that I found in the contributions from the Opposition. Some have said that this bill is Draconian.Hon Member: That’s right.Hon Dr NICK SMITH: Others have said—and the member says that is right—is it tinkering. Well can a bill really be “Draconian” in one breath and “tinkering” in the next? Perhaps they are arguing that it is Draconian tinkering.Actually this is a really balanced bill. Yes it does go quite a long way. Yes it will increase the supply of housing by tens of thousands of additional houses.This is the very last point and when they hear this last point it should send shivers down the spines of young people aspiring for a new house: the Opposition says that supply makes no difference to the price of housing. Did you hear that? Was that not extraordinary? It said that supply makes no difference to the affordability of housing. If that is really the Opposition’s point it knows absolutely nothing about how markets operate and it knows nothing about what this bill will achieve which just reinforces the view that we need to get this bill through to increase the supply of those houses to get those 39000 new houses built in Auckland and to make sure that Kiwi families can get their homes soon.HOLLY WALKER (Green): I am pleased to take a call straight after the Minister of Housing to talk about the issues of supply and how they relate to affordable housing. But to situate my comments first of all I say—and I think it is agreed probably across the Chamber—that we do have a crisis of housing affordability in New Zealand and also a crisis of housing quality. There are three statistics that I like to quote and they all involve the number seven. First of all over $700000 is the average house price in Auckland which is completely unaffordable for your average first-home buyer. Secondly it takes 70 percent of the average income in Auckland to service the mortgage on a lower-quartile house. On a lower-quartile house—that is the cheapest quarter—it takes 70 percent of the average income in Auckland to service that mortgage. And finally 70 percent of the children living in poverty in New Zealand are living in poor-quality private rental houses. These are three statistics that clearly illustrate the crisis of affordability and quality in our housing in New Zealand.If we turn to Part 1 of the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill we look first at the purpose. Clause 4 says that the purpose of the bill is “to enhance housing affordability” and it does that by increasing “land and housing supply” in those areas “identified as having housing supply and affordability issues.” Well so far so good. I agree with the Minister that supply is very important in the question of housing affordability—that is the supply of affordable houses is very important in the question of housing affordability. But I am not convinced by the Minister that land supply is actually the primary problem in the provision of affordable houses and that is the first problem with this bill. There is a fundamental mismatch between the problem it sets out to solve which is housing affordability—it says “enhance housing affordability” right there in the purpose clause—and the solution that it prescribes which is about increasing land supply.Land supply and affordable housing supply are not the same thing and that is a very important distinction to get clear in this debate because apart from Auckland which is the only region in the schedule currently land supply is primarily not the issue in housing affordability. We heard that at the Social Services Committee time and time again as submitters came before us from other parts of the country to say that this might be a good prescription for Auckland though there are some issues with it but in their part of the country where yes they have a housing affordability problem the problem is not caused by a lack of supply of land; it is caused by other factors and therefore this bill will not address the housing affordability problems in those other regions. So the prescription in the bill does not work to solve the problems that it sets out to solve. The select committee had to amend clause 9(3) to insert land supply as one of the criteria for deciding whether to put a region in the schedule in recognition of the embarrassing fact that it actually was a mismatch. So it is very important that the House in Committee understands that crucial distinction and the fact that the bill is setting out a prescription that does not solve the problem that the bill tries to solve.I want to look at the specifics in Part 1 and they are set out in Subpart 2. There are three areas I want to look at—first of all housing accords and how they will be arrivedat; second of all what is the definition of a “qualifying development” and what should be the definition of a “qualifying development”; and finally the provisions around the actual conduct and the establishment of special housing areas. First of all I will look at the housing accords. This part of the bill sets out how the Minister and the territorial authority may enter an agreement to work together to address housing supply and affordability issues. That is great. It sounds really good. It is absolutely right that local government and central government should work together on housing affordability issues. It sounds very good until you read the fine print. The problem with this whole provision as my colleague the Hon Maryan Street set out in her last contribution around what can go into a housing accord is that it does not actually address the fundamental issues of affordability but worse than that it gives a huge amount of power to the Minister to override the work that local councils are doing on this issue and to come in over the top of them and set up a special housing area without their consent and without a housing accord.It gives the Minister the power to terminate an accord. That has been agreed. So they can sit down and negotiate one and work it out but if there is something about that accord that is not working for the Minister he can terminate that and go ahead anyway under the conditions that he would like to see. It means that effectively it is impossible for councils to enter into good-faith negotiations with the Government to set up housing accords because all of the power resides in the Minister and in central government. They have the ability if the negotiations for the accord break down to just go ahead and set up a special housing area and set up the commissioners to make the decisions about resource consents without any recourse to the territorial authority.So if one was part of that territorial authority sitting down to negotiate with the Minister there is a fundamental power imbalance before the negotiations have even begun. That was a point made to the select committee by countless submitters and many many councils from around the country including the Auckland Council with which an accord has already been negotiated but which is very worried about what this legislation will mean for that accord and including from Local Government New Zealand the umbrella group for local councils and including many members of the public who are very concerned about the heavy-handed power that is accorded to central government in these housing accords in the way that they are negotiated which effectively makes good-faith negotiation impossible.Secondly I want to speak about the conditions for a qualifying development because there are a lot of very technical conditions set out in the bill about what a qualifying development has to do. We spent a lot of time in the select committee talking about what the definition of “predominantly residential” was for a qualifying development which is absolutely important to get correct. But it is bit like not being able to see the forest for the trees when we are bogged down in details about the height of the storey of a building and what it means to be predominantly residential as we talk about what is a qualifying development or a housing accord. There is nothing in the bill about the requirement for affordability or to require a percentage of affordable housing in a special housing area yet that is the problem that the whole bill has set out to solve. Again it is a fundamental mismatch between what the bill says it is out to do and what it actually does. So it is a major problem. It was pointed out by numerous numerous submitters that there is no requirement for affordability to be one of the criteria for a qualifying development in a special housing area and you would think it would be when that is the whole purpose of the bill.When we had the second reading the Minister addressed this point and he said: “Well look at the Auckland Housing Accord. There is a minimum requirement for affordable housing in there. So it’s all good.” And I imagine if he gets up to takeanother call he will probably say the same thing. But the only reason that that minimum requirement is in the Auckland Housing Accord is that the Auckland Council pushed very hard for it. If it was up to the Minister it would not be there at all and the provision is not there in this bill for future housing accords in other areas. It is not enough for the Minister to say that Auckland Council managed to get it in there. There is no guarantee that it will be in any other housing accords negotiated under this bill.This issue of having a minimum requirement for affordable housing in a special housing area is addressed by my colleague PhilTwyford’s Supplementary Order Paper 344. The Green Party will absolutely be supporting that Supplementary Order Paper because we think that at the very least the first criterion you should set out for a special housing area under this bill which seeks to address housing affordability should be that there is a requirement of affordable housing in that area.Finally I want to look at the special housing areas and the rules that are going to be created for them. This is where the override powers that are given in the bill to the Minister really kick in and where there was a lot of the concern from submitters at the select committee. In a special housing area once it is established if a housing accord is not negotiated or if one breaks down this part of the bill gives the Minister a huge amount of power to appoint the commissioners who make decisions under the Resource Management Act to set the terms of those decisions and to approve and fast track consents that override the provisions of the Resource Management Act. I imagine that my colleague Eugenie Sage when she takes a call later on will talk a lot about the provisions of the Resource Management Act and how this bill undermines them.But suffice for me to say at this point that some of the concerns about the override provision for councils are addressed in another Supplementary Order Paper in the name of Phil Twyford Supplementary Order Paper 343. The Green Party will also be supporting that because this is a fundamental overriding—it is indeed an override provision—of local democracy and it is entirely consistent with moves that we have seen from this Government in terms of local government on a number of fronts beginning back with the sacking of the Environment Canterbury councillors. But evident in this bill as well is a lack of respect for the authority and the autonomy of local government where if central government does not like what local government thinks says or does it will just come in and override it and that—Hon ANNETTE KING (Labour—Rongotai): Just a short while ago the Hon Maryan Street gave the Minister of Housing Nick Smith a lesson in history and in honesty because the Minister in what he thinks was an attack on Labour really gave us more sound and fury than a substitute for real policy. You see some of us remember the Minister’s track record in the last Government and the Government we are in now. First of all he became the Minister for ACC. He said there was a crisis. He cut the funding for women who had been sexually abused so women did not get the services they needed.The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): Come on.Hon ANNETTE KING: No Mr Chair.Hon Dr Nick Smith: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. Those claims are incorrect but more important they are outside the scope of the part that we are discussing which is Part 1 of the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill.Hon ANNETTE KING: Speaking to the point of order if you had been listening to the debate the first contribution—The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): Order! I take exception to the way in which the member started that. I will give the member another opportunity.Hon ANNETTE KING: Earlier in the debate in the first call the Minister took he made a very wide-ranging contribution around the previous Labour Government’s rolein housing—what the previous Labour Government had done. It was way outside this bill. He was not called up on that and I am just setting the scene for this Minister having taken over housing in this Government.Hon Dr Nick Smith: My comments were directly in response to the claims of the very first speaker on the part and were entirely on housing. They were about the history of housing and why this bill was needed. In my contribution I never strayed away from the core issues and the purpose of Part 1.The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): I understand what the member is attempting to do but this debate should be confined to issues of housing and in relation to this bill.Hon ANNETTE KING: Just speaking to that—The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): No I have made the ruling now.Hon ANNETTE KING: Normally you have about 30 seconds to be able to set the scene and I had 10 so I would just like to say—The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy):1 minute.Hon ANNETTE KING: —to the Minister that his history that he gave of housing and what had gone before was totally wrong and he misused facts. He gave up-to-date facts he said of the increase in the cost of housing under Labour and then forgot to mention that the cost of housing under National has gone up by 30 percent in Auckland alone. The cost of housing under National in Christchurch has gone up by 25 percent. I think it is important to get it on record that he was wrong about legislation. He said that no legislation had been passed by Labour when it was in Government. Maryan Street set out the legislation that had been passed including a clause that put aside 10 percent for affordable housing. He said that nothing had been done by Labour. In fact we brought in the Welcome Home Loan and funding for the Welcome Home Loan was cut in the Budget this year. We also brought in a shared equity scheme which has been cut by this National Government. So let us put on record that Labour in Government did a lot about housing because one of the things we understood was that there was a need for more housing in New Zealand.Now we have had 5 years of a National Government. Do you know that until very recently we were told over and over and over again that there was no crisis in housing? Bill English stood in this House and told New Zealand that there was no crisis in housing because of low interest rates which meant that New Zealanders were getting into affordable housing. He could not be further from the truth. There may well be low interest rates and they are certainly very beneficial for those who own their own homes who see their interest rates drop and their ability to pay off their houses faster but they have done nothing—absolutely nothing—for first home owners. The unfortunate thing about this bill is that it does nothing for first home owners wanting to buy an affordable house.I have no problem with the Minister’s housing accord. I do not have a problem with his special housing zones. They sound very sensible. But unfortunately they do not follow through and produce the outcome he wants. In fact he addresses only two factors out of the many factors that go to the heart of housing. He picks out the crisis in the supply of land. I ask the Minister how this bill releases land that is locked-up land owned by private developers. How does it make them put land out for affordable houses to be built on?Hon Dr Nick Smith: It removes the MUL.Hon ANNETTE KING: It does not make them do anything but hold on to it till they can get the best possible price. There is nothing in this bill for those banking land in the hope that they can get an even bigger price for their land to say: “Oh that sounds like a great idea. Let us get it at a cheaper price.” I mean the Minister is kidding New Zealanders by saying that this bill does that. That is not true.He also talks about planning regulations. Of course we need to streamline planning regulations but they are not going to build a single house unless you address some of the other factors which this Minister has failed to do. Those factors include the lack of scale in the building industry the lack of competition in the supply of building materials and the uncertain access to capital. Where in this bill and where in the Government’s policy does it help in terms of access to capital? After all for first-home buyers—for those who want to own their first home—they have just had the tightening of access to finance for them. They are going to have less access. It is not just the Opposition that is saying that. Our bankers and commentators those who are professionals are saying that there is less access for people who want to buy their own homes.Then the Minister said in his contribution that there were those who were saying that the bill is Draconian. Minister did you read what the Regulations Review Committee wrote? It is a committee of Parliament. This committee I believe has a majority of National members on it. That is unusual because usually there are equal numbers of members on the Regulations Review Committee but in this case it actually has a majority of National members on it. What did it say about this bill? It said first of all that there have been only 2 weeks for public submissions on this bill. That is a very short time in which to hear submissions on any bill. In addition the committee raised concerns about the bill containing excessive regulation-making powers which reflects a poor legislative approach. That is not any old person saying that it is Draconian; those are the words of the Regulations Review Committee. Is it credible or is it not? As I have pointed out the majority on this committee are National members.I say to the Minister that this bill is too little it is too late and it is self-serving for political gain because in 5 years if this Government really cared about affordable housing it would have done something about it. It would have brought in measures. To give him credit it was not until this Minister came in that we actually saw some action. As nice as Phil Heatley is he was unable to make any traction. However Minister your idea of affordable housing can be seen in Hobsonville. That was an area of Government land where you could have had the land at an affordable cost. In the programme for Hobsonville the housing accord would not even have been needed. You would not have had to have a special housing zone as you have in this bill. You could have built affordable housing. Do you know the size of the so-called affordable housing being built at Hobsonville? Sixty square metres up to 80 square metres—in other words a shoebox. In other words it is not affordable housing for a family. Does the Minister know how few houses are being built? It is a token gesture to affordable housing. He is shaking his head. Those are the facts Minister.You talk about land being released. If the Government wanted to release land in Auckland for example it could do that tomorrow. Who owns most of the land that could be used in Auckland? The Government. You do not need a housing accord. You do not need to have a special housing zone. You can release land. You can release Government land. And you can do it at an affordable cost. You could look at a range of ways of doing it.Hon Maurice Williamson: What about the Treaty of Waitangi?Hon ANNETTE KING: You could look at shared equity. You could look at whether the land is actually owned or not. Of course there are Treaty claims and we have that on many many occasions Mr Williamson. But we got through it at Hobsonville did we not? We have got through it in other areas. Look the truth is that you do not actually need an accord. You actually do not need a special housing zone if the Government seriously wants to address these issues.There have been 5 long years no progress has been made and nationally only 5 percent of new residential construction is affordable. This bill will not give us one more affordable home. So the only conclusion that you can make—to those who are listening—is that that is not the aim of this bill at all. That is not the aim. You can certainly build very big houses. You can build ones with en suites and many bedrooms and they cost between $800000 and $1 million. You can build those. People are buying them. But this bill will not provide a single affordable home to New Zealanders.Hon Dr Nick Smith: Of course it will.Hon ANNETTE KING: “Of course.” he says. Name how many. Tell us once and for all—Hon Dr Nick Smith: Thousands.Hon ANNETTE KING: —because this has been asked in this Parliament week after week. How many affordable homes will be built? I do not want to hear this “Thousands.” and “Heaps.” That is what the Minister is saying. This is our Minister paid the salary saying “Heaps.” and “Thousands.” Tell us how many houses that are affordable will be built—Peseta SAM LOTU-IIGA (National—Maungakiekie): It is an honour to speak in this debate this afternoon. We have heard so much misinformation from across the aisle that we have got to set the record straight. Members opposite ask “How many affordable homes?” and they have not yet defined what “affordable” means. What does “affordable” mean? Miss King what does it mean? Tell us right now what “affordable” means. No answer—no answer.Hon Annette King: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. Do I get another call to answer that? He is asking me a question.Peseta SAM LOTU-IIGA: That is not a point of order. [Interruption]The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): Order! I think we will put that down as a rhetorical question.Peseta SAM LOTU-IIGA: I ask Miss King what does “affordable” mean because in the 10 minutes that she stood up—Hon Annette King: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. It cannot be rhetorical when he is saying it for the fourth time. It has to be a serious question.The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): I have ruled it a rhetorical question.Peseta SAM LOTU-IIGA: Cannot handle the truth—cannot handle the truth. Let me give some facts. On TradeMe this afternoon the biggest property website in the country there are 4699 homes that are $500000 or less—4699 homes I say to members opposite. What I do not understand is how they can come in here and say that every new home should be affordable. Well when I grew up in South Auckland people went into old homes. They did not go to new homes. They went into flats in Mount Wellington. So I say to members opposite that in Mount Wellington in my electorate there are 34 homes under $500000. In Onehunga there are 26. In One Tree Hill there are eight. I can go right across my electorate and say that there are numbers of affordable homes in my electorate.But what the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill does is breach the problem of housing supply in Auckland as well as around the country. Over the next 3 years 39000 homes are required to meet demand—39000. How many sections are available for development right now? I ask members opposite how many. Silence—silence. Well I have got 1900. That is not going to quite cut the mustard is it? So land supply as has been recognised by the Minister as has been recognised by Treasury and as has been recognised by the Productivity Commission—Phil Twyford: And me.Peseta SAM LOTU-IIGA: —is one of the biggest factors in bringing about—no not you—a solution to some of the issues around affordable homes in Auckland. But what is Labour’s solution? Mr Twyford says: “What about me? What about me?”. Well I will tell you what they want to do. They want to ban foreigners from purchasing homes in New Zealand. What are the facts around that? The facts say that foreigners are only 4 percent of those purchasing homes. So they want to attack 4 percent. But in Auckland—Dr Rajen Prasad: Four percent is a lot.Peseta SAM LOTU-IIGA: Mr Prasad you should know as well as I know that 40 percent of Aucklanders were born overseas like me. So when I go to an auction under the Labour regime they are going to ask me for a passport. The xenophobic tendencies of that Labour Opposition sadly have come to the fore. Because when it comes to winning votes they will play the race card. I and 40 percent of other Aucklanders who look like foreigners might turn up to an auction and we will be asked for passports. So I ask members opposite how they are going to implement that. Mr Jones is saying one thing—Phil Twyford: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. I am worried that Sam Lotu-Iiga believes that he would be affected by the proposed ban on overseas speculators.The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): What is the point of order? That is a debating point.Phil Twyford: If he is a non-resident he cannot be a member of Parliament.The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): Order! That is hardly a point of order. I am not the Electoral Commission. We have had some reasonably florid examples from either side and that is a debating point.Peseta SAM LOTU-IIGA: I will take it as a badge of honour that there have been three points of order. They are attacking me because they do not know the truth. Coming back I say that members opposite do not understand. They should talk to developers talk to those on the front line talk to nurses talk to educators but in the housing sphere talk to those who actually do the building. When I spoke to two developers who want to build affordable homes in Manukau and inMāngere and—Hon Annette King: You said we don’t need them.Peseta SAM LOTU-IIGA: —I asked them: “What are the issues?”—Miss King should come and I will introduce her to them. They said to me that the delays around the Resource Management Act and the costs of council around delays are factors in terms of getting more houses built. These are not small developments. One is a 1500 house development inMāngere. I challenge members opposite to come and have a look at these developments.What I object to as well is that we heard the former Minister of Housing and the list MP in Nelson Annette King talk about freeing up of Crown land.Hon Dr Nick Smith: She’s not from Nelson.Peseta SAM LOTU-IIGA: Well she lives in Nelson but she is a list MP down there. She is freeing up land. Well I ask her because she was the Minister who came toTāmaki and I thought she understood at the time what that development was about. It was about using Crown land and getting in more social housing as well as community housing and private development. It is about leveraging the Crown land that we have in our possession. I ask members opposite what is going on at Maria Street and Yates Street in Onehunga. That is another development where there is pepper-potting of mixed housing of social housing of community housing and private developments. So when the member opposite asks the question: “What are we doing with Crown land?” I say that we are developing it in order to house more people.I seriously object to the notion that those homes are not warm and dry. As the Minister has quite clearly laid out over 300000 homes have been insulated by this Government. That is one of the proudest achievements that we have done as a Government and there have been many by my own admission but that is one of our proudest achievements. I am proud that people particularly in my community whom I have seen across Maungakiekie are now living in warmer drier homes. For that they are thankful and for that I am thankful for what the Government has done.But the Minister also said that one of the biggest costs when purchasing a home is interest rates. Unlike under the Labour Government when tax and spend policies led to some of the highest interest rates in the Western World and one of the highest interest rates in New Zealand’s history—9 percent—now the interest rates are at around 5 percent for a mortgage. What does that equate to? I think the people of New Zealand want to know what that equates to.Phil Twyford:LVRs have just gone up.Peseta SAM LOTU-IIGA: For Mr Twyford that equates to $300 a week on a $400000 mortgage—$300 a week on a $400000 mortgage.Hon Annette King: That’s if you’ve got a house.Peseta SAM LOTU-IIGA: Sadly Opposition members scoff at it. Mr Twyford laughs and Miss King jokes around about those people who do not have houses. Well I empathise with those people.Hon Annette King: You talk rubbish.Peseta SAM LOTU-IIGA: I side with those people Miss King. You might laugh at those people but I actually want to see those people in homes. I come back to the bill. This is about one of the measures that this Government is putting in place to bring about more affordable housing in this country. It is about opening up land supply because we know that the evidence the research supports the fact that land supply is one of the critical things when going about addressing the housing shortage in our country. For that I think New Zealanders are happy that we are making these moves.It saddens me today that members opposite right across this Chamber choose not to house more Aucklanders and more New Zealanders because across the Chamber it is about political ideologies. I commend the Minister. I commend those in our Government who are prepared to reach out to our local councils to work together to unite and to bring about solutions that are going to be workable for New Zealanders in the future. This bill is certainly to be commended.Su’aWILLIAM SIO (Labour—Māngere): I have never heard so much rubbish as I heard from that particular member there Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga. For 5 years that Government there has sat on its hands and has made things difficult for New Zealanders trying to get a home. He asked a question that I am going to pose to the Minister of Housing the Hon Dr Nick Smith. Minister what is the price of an affordable home under your Government? Will somebody who is on the individual median income of $20000 be able to afford a house to be built based on the measures in this particular bill the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill? Will a family with a combined household median income of $40000 the likes of which we have in Manukau City be able to afford a home under the bill that you have here? Minister those are the questions that rightfully you should be answering.Hon Dr Nick Smith: Happy to.Su’aWILLIAM SIO: I hope you do. I hope you do take a call Minister to answer that because that is particularly important.Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson.The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): No that is exactly what we had over there before. It is a rhetorical question.Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga: He brought the Chairman into it. That member has been around long enough—to bring you into the debate.The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): No hang on. The member objected when he got a similar response from the Opposition over here. There will be other calls.Su’aWILLIAM SIO: Can the Minister guarantee that someone in Manukau earning a median income of $20000 will be able to buy an affordable house under this bill? Can the Minister guarantee that a household on a median income of $40000 will be able to afford a house? And how many will be able to buy a house based on the measures in this particular bill?For 5 years the Government did nothing but when Labour started announcing our policy that we would address the problem and that we would build 100000 houses over 10 years and when we started talking to the industry to ensure that the price would be affordable all of a sudden in this Budget the Government came up with this particular bill. The shame of it is that it did not even have the decency to talk to the Auckland Council—The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): Order! Would the member Brendan Horan please leave and get properly dressed. SorrySu’a William Sio.Su’aWILLIAM SIO: It did not even have the decency to negotiate in good faith and to give the Auckland Council a heads-up. The introduction of this bill was a surprise—guaranteeing powers by this Government to simply override local councils and the ability to make decisions on behalf of their particular communities.There is a housing crisis in New Zealand. There is a housing crisis because there is a shortage of rental property. The quality of the rental property in the private sector is appalling in some instances. There is a housing crisis because it is becoming very very difficult for first-time homeowners to get into a home. So if we come to an agreement that there is a housing crisis then we should also be prepared for the Government side to accept some of the sage advice that people like Maryan Street and Annette King are offering that particular Minister. I think that unless this Government recognises that that is a real problem then it is not going to be able to solve it.Look at the bill and look at what we have in this bill. Clause 4 says that “The purpose of this Act is to enhance housing affordability”—enhance housing affordability! All it offers up is “facilitating an increase in land and housing supply”. That does not guarantee it. If the Minister is so confident that this bill is going to guarantee that then I would like him to state that he can guarantee that there will be more people getting into affordable houses. Recognising that in the community that I represent the median income is $20000 for an individual and $40000 for a household I asked the Minister the other day whether there was any consideration given to what income levels a first-time homeowner should be earning in order for them to be eligible for a mortgage to buy one of his so-called affordable houses. Here is the answer: “The accord is about increasing supply of homes. It does not determine the criteria for eligibility for a mortgage. This is an issue for the banks.” So guess what folks? The banks have turned round and made it really really difficult—under the Government’s watch extremely difficult—for the 70 percent of New Zealanders who do not own their own home.I want to point out also the reason why it is important to highlight the median income for individuals and the $40000 median income for households. If you look at clause 9 it states that before the Minister makes a recommendation to insert the name of a region or district in Schedule 1 “the Minister in determining whether a region or district experiencing significant housing supply and affordability issues” in clause 3(a)(i) must have regard to whether “the weekly mortgage payment on a median-priced house as a percentage of the median weekly take-home pay for an individual exceeds 50%”. Well I put it to this Committee that with an individual median income of $20000 when youconsider the current prices at the moment inMāngere of $300000—I think that last week houses that were normally $300000 were going for $500000 or $700000 and this is no BS Minister. It also says “based on a 20% deposit”. May I ask the Minister how his bill guarantees that somebody on a median income of $20000 is going to be able to raise a 20 percent deposit on a house that is either $300000 or $500000 or $700000? Those are the kinds of prices Minister in the South Auckland region.I have to say that given the context from which this bill springs I do not have confidence that this bill addresses affordability issues. I do not have confidence at all in simply enabling greater supply if you are not going to also attack the issues around those who speculate on houses and the issues around those who bring in foreign capital and are speculating on houses unless the Minister is prepared to address that and include that particular package in this bill. I can tell you now that nobody in South Auckland believes that this bill is a guarantee for those who want to own their own home—first-time homeowners. Nobody in South Auckland believes when the Minister says that this is going to provide a certain number of thousands of houses that they will be able to get a house simply because under your watch the banks have made it virtually impossible for many workers to raise 20 percent as a deposit. Unless you are going to provide much more than simply saying the supply of land and the supply of houses is going to ensure that there is affordability of houses I can tell you now that that is just pie in the sky. That is pie in the sky—pie in the sky.I think that it is an appallingly bad kind of politics where you have raised this issue just because your polling would have shown that the rest of New Zealand and the rest of Auckland were captivated by the policy that we in Labour announced: the need to build 100000 houses to address the housing supply the need to address the way that house prices have been inflated by speculators the need to try to move that kind of investment into more productive investment and the need to be able to stop overseas speculators coming in and inflating the prices of houses. How on earth can somebody earning $20000 median income be able to get a 20 percent deposit on a $300000 house? There is no answer.I rest my case that despite the rhetoric and despite the spin around this particular bill this bill is not going to provide affordable housing. This is spin to try to interfere with the captivation of the rest of New Zealand when my colleague here Phil Twyford stands up and talks about 100000 houses the need to build more houses the need to reduce the prices and the need to be able to exempt first-time homeowners from the loan-to-value ratios that the banks have now imposed. That is what is needed. That is the kind of leadership that is needed. That is the kind of leadership that we need as a country if we are going to address the issue of ensuring that people who want to own their own home are able to get into a home.PAUL FOSTER-BELL (National): I moveThat the question be now put.EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Even though the Minister of Housing thundered from the chair that the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill is going to be the solution to housing affordability this bill is not that at all. It is all about the Government being seen to be doing something about our housing affordability crisis. It is a bill to get media headlines but it is not about tackling the substantive issue in a comprehensive policy way that is based on good evidence. That has been obvious by the fact of the very short time that was allowed for submissions and because it is a very short-term measure.Clause 19 of the bill I think it is provides that the Order in Council that establishes special housing areas will be revoked 3 years after the bill becomes an Act and receives the Royal assent. That shows that the Government is not interested in working with local authorities to develop a solution that endures. It is more interested in just the short-term hit that this bill will provide by freeing up the process and making it easier for urban sprawl by allowing property developers to get consent for applications that are outside urban limits. That is because the Government sees the problem of housing affordability largely as one of land supply and says that that is the major influence on house prices. The Government is all about providing a charter for property developers through this bill and also through the changes that it is making or is proposing to make to the Resource Management Act where it will reverse the presumption on subdivision by permitting it unless a plan specifically provides otherwise.It is a complex set of factors that influence housing affordability. It is not just land supply; it is about building materials. It is about the cost of finance which the Minister did refer to. It is about the cost of insurance. If we were really looking a comprehensive package we would have measures that address that—things like a capital gains tax on homes other than the family home to make it much less attractive to have residential homes as an investment. We would have things like shared equity schemes. We would have the Government working with councils—working on a genuine accord—rather than what this bill provides.The Wellington City Council for example had a very detailed submission and it set out the other factors that apply to housing affordability. It is things like geography and employment patterns and how they influence the price of houses. That is why because you have got a lot of high-paying jobs in the centre of Wellington you get house prices in central Wellington that are over $500000 whereas ones in Porirua are around $370000. It is issues like that and the cost of building materials that influence affordability not just land supply.This bill also will not work because of thestandover tactics that the Minister proposes to employ through the special housing areas and his override powers. Local Government New Zealand said on behalf of all of the councils in New Zealand that it wanted to work with central government to address the issue of housing affordability but the override provisions cut across that whole spirit of partnership. They cut across any genuine accord because they take the power away from councils to make decisions about new development and to control the pace and the location of residential development and they give that power to the Minister. The override provisions mean that there is not a good-faith basis for working on housing affordability because if the Minister cannot negotiate an agreement with the relevant district or regional council he can then designate a special housing area.Then we have the chief executive of the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment making decisions about where development will occur. What capacity what authority and what experience does a central government agency—the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment—have to do this rather than councils?If the Minister was genuinely interested in partnership then these override provisions would have been removed from the bill. Again the Wellington City Council said that it would not enter into any negotiations on a Wellington housing accord unless those powers of ministerial intervention were removed. It is those powers that cut right across the Resource Management Act and the Local Government Act whereas decisions on how and where residential development should occur should be made by territorial local authorities.My colleague Denis O’Rourke called the bill a panic measure and we certainly agree. If you look at what is happening where councils are doing good planning—and again at Wellington where the council changed the Wellington City plan in 2009—MIKE SABIN (National—Northland): I moveThat the question be now put.Dr RAJEN PRASAD (Labour): It is a pleasure to take a call on Part 1 of the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill. Really the clause that tells us whatthis bill is about is very clearly stated. It says it is about housing affordability. The rest of the bill is not about that. In fact I would have thought that the two members of the Government who have taken calls so far which includes the Minister of Housing would have justified these provisions and explained to us how they are going to achieve the objectives of this bill. The Minister has not done that and neither has the chairperson of the Social Services Committee. In fact what we have heard really is filibustering. Not filibustering but really—Darien Fenton: Blustering.Dr RAJEN PRASAD: —blustering. It is blustering. The Minister understands perfectly. The Minister is doing what he has done in his other portfolios to wit ACC: create such a sense of crisis with the figures and expect everybody to believe it. Then in a very short period of time like in ACC there is not really a problem but the damage had been done. It is the same kind of approach here. Other Ministers have used it in social development as well. But we know that what is being designed here is the very thing that has failed. It is the housing market that has failed. It has not worked. It has not produced the number of houses required. The Minister can say as much as he likes about the previous Government etc. but I am not particularly interested in that Minister. I am interested in your performance Minister over the last 5 years in this particular area. No affordable housing has been built. What the Minister has done is preside over a crisis. So the housing market is failing.There are only two things that the Minister has addressed—the availability of land and regulations around buildings. There are only two things. But the Minister ought to know and I am sure he does that there are a whole bunch of other things that actually contribute to making housing affordable and they have not been addressed. How do loan-to-value ratios address housing affordability? The Minister has not answered the questions posed by the member forMāngere in terms of what is affordability and whether that family from his electorate on $20000 a year will be able to afford a house. These things will not work and the Minister knows they will not work.So here we are presiding over a time when house prices in Auckland have gone to $700000 and upwards—a 30 percent increase. The Minister’s rather cynical explanation during the first reading of this bill around affordability was that of course the new developers will build the $700000 houses so that people in the $300000 houses can move into them. Well that is what the Minister said. I think that is a cynical approach to take. But what should be happening here is addressing the whole range of things that contribute to housing development and that is not happening. This is failing Kiwis I say to the Minister in terms of getting them into houses which is the very thing that contributes as we know to their well-being. So here we are.The housing shortage is rife affordability is a problem and costs are high but those things are not being addressed here. How is it Minister that by making land available at the periphery of Auckland which is what the provisions will provide for—that is actually in the short period of time that people need houses—those houses will be built? They will not be built. The reason why the Minister has addressed this problem in this way is that that approach favours the developers. It favours those who want to build expensive houses in those subdivisions in those areas outside like Hobsonville. That member was part of a Government that would not let affordable housing be built in Hobsonville. I remember very well the Prime Minister saying: “Not in my backyard”—not in his electorate. That is still the context within which these provisions are built. I do not live very far from Hobsonville. Every now and again I have gone and seen the little ones that have been built.Hon Maryan Street: All seven?Dr RAJEN PRASAD: Is it that many? On that note I think some very very good Supplementary Order Papers have been put up by my colleague Phil Twyford. He is beginning to address the notion of affordability. In these particular areas there ought to be—BRENDAN HORAN (Independent): Thank you Mr Chairman.Mike Sabin: Nice tie.BRENDAN HORAN: Thank you. It is nice to be able to show some sartorial elegance. I am speaking to the Supplementary Order Papers on the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill. I wonder how this Government can build affordable houses when it cannot even build a decent bill. If we look at Part 1 and at all the changes in this bill it is like all the other bills that this Government seems to be putting forward. It is full of changes. There are changes to 90 percent of this bill. How can anybody have any faith in it?Let us talk about affordable housing and how we are going to achieve that. Developers look at a ratio of 2.5 people to 2.6 people per dwelling. There are approximately 500000 dwellings in Auckland and there are 1.5 million people. The shortage is actually 100000 dwellings. How then is this Government going to build affordable houses? We have heard Government members speaking about building 39000 houses. Well who is going to fund that? Who is going to develop it? But most important how many town planners have been employed? How many advertisements have gone out for town planners? Because to build one house you need a town planner and all the Auckland town planners are up to here with what they are doing at the moment with consents.This bill works on the mushroom principle where you keep people in the dark and you tell them a whole lot of manure. It is unbelievable. Here we have the super-city that this Government gave us. This Government wants to take over the super-city and tell it how to build its own houses. Why not leave it to the super-city to do that?But what this Government should do is create an infrastructure so that we can have affordable housing. I would suggest that with the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill this Government invest in fast rail from Auckland—the beautiful city of Auckland—through to Tauranga through Hamilton and then we will have affordable housing areas all the way along that line if we could get a line. It is 1¼ hours from Tauranga to Auckland. That would solve the housing problem. That is a very doable solution. But for this Government to come up and say “We’re going to give affordable houses.” when the housing shortage is so drastic—it is just not going to happen.I am taking just this very short call. I cannot support this bill. It is rubbish. Look at the changes in it. The last bill I spoke to had spelling mistakes in it from 5 years ago. I would suggest this Government do its homework and put forward a bill that does not have changes to 90 percent of it so that the rest of us in Parliament can actually read a proper bill and then we can vote accordingly. Thank you very much.MELISSA LEE (National): I moveThat the question be now put.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the question be now put.Ayes63New Zealand National 59;Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes 57New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Motion agreed to.The question was put that the following amendment in the name of the Hon Dr Nick Smith to the proposed amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 351 in his name to clause 6 be agreed to:replace in new subclause (1A) “unless otherwise prescribed” with “unless otherwise provided in regulations made under section 88”.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the amendment be agreed to.Ayes 63New Zealand National 59;Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes 57New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Amendment to the amendment agreed to.The question was put that the amendments as amended set out on Supplementary Order Paper 351 in the name of the Hon Dr Nick Smith to Part 1 be agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the amendments as amended be agreed to.Ayes 63New Zealand National 59;Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes 57New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Amendments as amended agreed to.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): We move to PhilTwyford’s amendment as set out on Supplementary Order Paper 344. This is now out of order as being inconsistent with a previous decision of the Committee.The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 343 in the name of Phil Twyford to clause 16 be agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the amendment be agreed to.Ayes 57New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Noes 63New Zealand National 59;Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Amendment not agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat Part 1 as amended be agreed to.Ayes 63New Zealand National 59;Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes 57New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Part 1 as amended agreed to.Part 2 Resource consents plan changes and variations to proposed plans relating to qualifying developments in special housing areasHon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister of Housing): This is the really grunty part of this Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill. It is a real test for this Committee as to whether it is serious about increasing housing supply. [Interruption] Members may laugh but let us hear what it does. At the moment it takes between 3 and 4 years to get consent for a subdivision and to bring in new land to supply. This bill will reduce that period to just 6 months. At the moment if you want to do a brownfield development it takes over a year to get through the process. This bill will enable it to be done within 3 months.I challenge members of this Committee who beat their chests around housing supply and affordability as to why they would oppose measures and provisions that will make it easier for those who actually build the houses and provide the sections.Andrew Little: Welcome to Abbotsford. We’ll have another Abbotsford within the year you watch. Poor geotechnical engineering.Hon Dr NICK SMITH: I put it to you Mr Little that it is solely politics. Those who are opposing this part of the bill cannot look in the mirror and pretend they are serious about helping Kiwi families get a home. I have been aghast at how all over the paddock the Opposition is around housing affordability. I listened to the speeches on Part 1 from members of Labour New Zealand First and the Greens who pretend that they are an alternative Government taking completely opposite positions about what the solution is to housing affordability.I also want to challenge members on bad faith—bad faith. I will tell you why. When I became the Minister of Housing members of the Opposition said that they wanted action on housing. When we get action on housing they oppose it. They said they wanted agreement with councils. We deliver agreement with councils and they still oppose it. In the first reading I heard speeches about Hobsonville.Hon Annette King: Yes let’s hear the facts.Hon Dr NICK SMITH: Let me give you the facts on Hobsonville Ms King. Labour announced 1000 houses at Hobsonville—and Hobsonville will be affected by Part 2 and I will come to that—in 2002. How many houses had been built in Hobsonville by November 2008? How many had been built Annette King? How many had been built Maryan Street? How many houses of the 1000 that you had announced in 2002 had you built? Not one. Not one. How many houses have been built by this Government on that land at Hobsonville? Answer: over 400—over 400.Why is it relevant to this part? Let me tell you why. Let me tell you why. The chairman of the Hobsonville Land Co. has put on record that if Parliament passes Part 2 the company will be able to bring 1000—Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga: How many?Hon Dr NICK SMITH: One thousand more houses to market next year—1000 more houses to market next year. So I challenge again members opposite that they need to look in the mirror. They need to ask whether they are serious about improving housing supply because any member of this Committee who is serious about housing supply and serious about housing affordability will support this part.The last point that I make is this. Members from Labour have challenged me with the question of what price the houses will be. What price will the houses be? I have a very simple response. Any member of this House who claims that they are going to set the price of housing fails to get to first base on understanding the housing market.Dr Rajen Prasad: He’s given up. He’s given up.Hon Dr NICK SMITH: The member interjects. Can I say to this member is Mr Choudhary telling me that a Labour Government will set the house prices?The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Prasad.Hon Dr NICK SMITH: Is Mr Prasad telling the Committee that a Labour Government will set the house price?Dr Rajen Prasad: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. I would not ordinarily stop the Minister but after I have been here for almost 5 years he might have known that Mr Choudhary is somebody else.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): He did correct it.Hon Dr NICK SMITH: My simple challenge to the member: are members of Labour seriously suggesting that this Parliament sets the house price? Do they really believe that if we just pass a bill—because they have challenged me and asked where in Part 2 is the price of the house. Do members of this Parliament seriously believe that all we need to do to make houses affordable is to put in a provision of this bill that says: “House prices will be $300000.” and magically that will be the case? Well I am concerned that members opposite believe that. I have heard Labour members out on the hustings saying that magically if you just pass a law that says the wage is going to be $20 an hour—or why stop there?Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga: $30.Hon Dr NICK SMITH: Let us make it $30 an hour. Let us just pass a bill and say: “Wages in New Zealand are going to be $30000 a year and house prices are going to be $20000.” That would be a good bill. Is that seriously what Labour members actually believe—actually believe?The answer is this. House prices are determined by a market. What we need to do is get the materials price more competitive. We need to get the section price more competitive. We need to get the infrastructure price more competitive. We need to deal with the issue of compliance costs. We need to do the work that Maurice Williamson is doing to improve the competitiveness and productivity of the building sector. We need the 1000 more apprentices that we are getting. They are the things that will make a material difference.I go back and challenge the Labour spokesperson on housing to answer the challenge that was given bySu’a William Sio. He said this: how many houses and at what price are you going to build for people on $20000 a year? Well I have not heard that answer from the Labour Party because actually members of this House do not set the house price. They never have and they never will. What we have to do is get the market conditions right.Kris Faafoi: Oh!Hon Dr NICK SMITH: That is right. The member interjects. Does the member think this is acceptable? We have got a block of land in Flat Bush that is zoned for housing. It was purchased for $800000—$800000. It is now on the market for $113 million—$113 million.Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga: Disgraceful.Hon Dr NICK SMITH: That is disgraceful. But that is the product if you put in a very tight metropolitan urban limit. If we want to stop that sort of land banking and if we actually want to get sections at an affordable value they are the differences that we in this Committee need to mark and that is what this part is about.The last point I wish to make is this. If we are serious about addressing house price section price is critical. I will tell you why. If a section price as it averages in Auckland is $325000 you are not going to build an affordable house on that section. If it is a $325000 section the incentive is actually to build a very expensive house on that. This Government is saying that actually getting the section price down is really critical to making it affordable for us to be able to build a house in the range that average Kiwi families can afford. And I say to members opposite that if you block this bill and blockthis part you are voting against land supply and greenfields being consented in 6 months. That is what this part will do. And they are proposing against brownfield developments being consented within 3 months. I say to them again look in the mirror. You are part of the problem not part of the solution.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Just before the member starts we are having some problems. You just have to give me some flexibility. We are having a problem with the timing.PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—TeAtatū): A longer call is fine Mr Chairman—it is fine.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): I have got my watch.PHIL TWYFORD: OK. Now we are getting to the nub of the problem. Now we are getting down to brass tacks because on that side of the Chamber the view represented by the Hon Nick Smith is basically to trust a failed market and blame the councils. That is the National Government’s housing policy: trust a failed and failing market and blame the council. That is all—that is all—that the National Government is willing to do. It washes its hands of any responsibility any obligation to actually roll up its sleeves like previous Governments have done over the decades and do something substantial to build affordable houses. As far as Nick Smith is concerned no the Government has no control whatsoever about the price of houses. The Government has no ability to deliver affordable housing to the people of New Zealand. The Government has washed its hands it is putting all its faith in a failed market and it is not prepared to intervene to fix a failed market. That is the difference.We on this side of the Chamber will not stand by while speculators outbid first-home buyers. We will not stand by and watch a failed market drive first-home buyers out of the market. We will not stand by as another generation of New Zealanders is denied the dream of homeownership because all that the National Government is willing to do is tinker with the Resource Management Act and blame local government for a problem that is largely the fault of the economic settings that this Government has refused to tackle. That is hands-off government from National.We do not subscribe to that philosophy. We are willing to use all the powers available to us when we are in Government to build 100000 affordable homes. We will reform the Resource Management Act by producing a national policy statement on affordable housing. We will intervene in the market. We will use Crown land as we would have at Hobsonville to deliver a high-quality new urban development that includes social housing affordable housing for first home owners and open market housing.Minister you and your Prime Minister chose to drive out social housing and affordable housing from the biggest finest opportunity for urban development in decades in Hobsonville Auckland and you bear responsibility for that. It will always be the Minister of Housing and the Prime Minister who will bear the shame of having said that it would be economic vandalism to allow State housing or affordable housing in Hobsonville. Low to middle income New Zealanders according to this National Government should never have houses on land that has a view of the sea. That is the operating principle of the National Party. Well we do not subscribe to that.We believe that it is the role of the Government to improve people’s lives and we will intervene in the housing market. We will use the balance sheet of the Crown which will be fiscally neutral over 10 years to stimulate the building of 100000 affordable homes. We will break the cartel. We will use procurement arrangements to drive down the cost of building supplies. We will use all the powers available to us to do that. Mr Smith people believe us. The public believes us. By two to one they do not believe in the Government’s policies. They understand that this bill the Housing Accords andSpecial Housing Areas Bill is tinkering with local government and the Resource Management Act.I want to go back to the issue of affordability and the failure in this bill to actually deliver any affordability. Mr Smith’s view on this issue and what he told this House is that he notes the complaint that the bill does not specifically refer to the building of affordable houses. He says we are being too cute. His reply is: “The bill specifically mentions the Auckland Housing Accord. The Auckland Housing Accord very specifically”—and I am quoting the Minister—“has provisions for ensuring that the houses that are built include a portion that are in the affordable range.” Let us be very clear about what the Minister told this House. He said that the Auckland Housing Accord has provisions for ensuring that the houses that are built under this accord include a portion built in the affordable range.Well let us talk about the wording that is in the Auckland Housing Accord. This is the best it gets. This is Nick Smith’s idea of requiring affordable housing. The Auckland Housing Accord says: “All Qualifying Developments are … required to give consideration to the provision of affordable housing …”—all qualifying developments are required to give consideration to the provision of affordable housing. That does not mean that they are required to build a share of affordable housing. It says: “Conditions of consent may include requirements for a proportion of the development to include affordable housing ...”—conditions of consent may include requirements for a proportion to include affordable housing. That is the best the Government can do and we know from the reported comments from Auckland Council and from the mayor and the deputy mayor that they tried to negotiate with Nick Smith holding a gun to their heads. They asked for stronger language allowing a proportion of affordable housing to be included in qualifying developments. That Minister and his officials stonewalled and blocked it. They would not allow affordable housing.The Minister is shaking his head but that does not tally with all the reported commentary on this issue and that is why the very party the Minister negotiated the first housing accord with Auckland Council is on record in a news report from Radio New Zealand National from 1 August saying: “Auckland Council says it’s not yet clear that new housing accord legislation will require genuinely affordable homes to be built.” That Minister is from your partner the party you negotiated with for 6 weeks to produce the Auckland Housing Accord and it says that it is not yet clear that the new legislation will require genuinely affordable homes to be built. The council says further that the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill “shows nothing to support the affordability focus.” That Minister is being utterly misleading in this House.There is nothing in this bill and the language in the Auckland Housing Accord is weak. It is diluted from what Auckland Council required and Minister if you were honest and candid with this Committee you would admit to this Committee that you blocked stronger language requiring affordable houses in the negotiation of the Auckland Housing Accord. The Minister cannot come to the House and pretend that his bill includes any kind of requirement for affordable housing because it does not and it would be misleading to suggest otherwise.After 6 weeks of negotiations and in the last 2 months of this bill being before Parliament Auckland Council which was party to the very first housing accord came along to the Social Services Committee and under questioning told the members of the committee that it did not believe that any more affordable housing would be built as a result of this bill. And in only the last 3 weeks it told Radio New Zealand National that it is not clear that this legislation will require genuinely affordable homes to be built. So Minister I invite you to get up and tell us what language there is in the bill and what language there is in the housing accord. Unless I have missed something Minister andunless you have got something better than the language that says that they are required to give consideration to and that qualifying developments may include a share of affordable housing then I challenge you to withdraw the comments that you have made before this House that have given the clear suggestion that this bill could require affordable housing. I do not believe that that is the case.It is a hoax to bring this legislation to the Committee pretending that this Government is doing something substantial about affordable housing when all this Government is doing is bringing in some extra greenfields land and fast tracking consenting—stuff that could have been achieved by fast tracking the Auckland Unitary Plan and giving it legal weight on notification as Auckland Council requested. That could have been achieved and much more. All of the other provisions on affordable housing in the unitary plan could have had legal weight from now but Minister you refused to do that. For some weird political reason because of some hang-up that you and your colleagues Minister have with Auckland Council you refused to do that. You have brought this tinkering bill to the Committee.Let us clarify something else. The Minister asked before how it could be both tinkering and Draconian. Well I will tell you that it can be tinkering and Draconian. It is tinkering in that it achieves very very little to give Aucklanders any assurance that it will increase the supply of affordable housing or make housing generally more affordable. It is Draconian in that it takes democratic rights and freedoms away from local government.Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister of Housing): The member Phil Twyford has challenged me and said there is absolutely nothing in the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill referring to affordable housing. He is letting his side down quite seriously. Let me read it and I quote it very specifically: “one of the criteria that must be prescribed is the percentage of dwellings that must be affordable dwellings according to the affordability criteria specified in the Order in Council for the special housing area or part of the special housing area.” Labour members you are being badly let down by your housing spokesperson.Phil Twyford: How many affordable houses?Hon Dr NICK SMITH: No no. See? He has changed his tone now. The simple point is this: why is it—Phil Twyford: There is no requirement to provide affordable housing.Hon Dr NICK SMITH: Well let me just—well no he is wrong. I have quoted specifically from the bill. But let me go just one step further. Does this bill require that every single qualifying development include a proportion of affordable homes? The answer is no it does not. Let me explain to the member why.Phil Twyford: So why does Auckland Council say that?Hon Dr NICK SMITH: No hang on a second. I am giving the member the courtesy of debating with him. I could just sit in the chair and ignore him. I would rather have an intelligent debate if that is what he is interested in.Why do we not require an affordable home criterion for every single development? Well let us say that in one of these special housing areas somebody comes along with a development of just four houses—quite possible quite right. So how do you get 10 percent of four? It is a nonsense. Is the member really suggesting—is this where the Labour Party is at—that every single development has to include a share of affordable housing? Is that the Labour Party position? Is that the Labour Party position?Phil Twyford: These are weasel words.Hon Dr NICK SMITH: I see the member interjecting. Is that the Labour Party’s position—that every single qualifying development has to include a proportion of houses within the affordable price range?Phil Twyford: No. We are saying there should be a mechanism—Hon Dr NICK SMITH: Oh! See? When you test Labour members they are all over the paddock and that just exposes that the Labour spokesperson on housing is not doing his job. What he said about the bill is wrong and it is not practical to require affordable housing in every single development.Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour): I feel that I must rise to respond to some of those points that the Minister of Housing has just raised. First of all about the latter point if we work backwards through his speech our position in 2008 was as it is now that there should be legislation that legislates for affordable housing. We are opposing this Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill because it does not. It simply sets up accords that are ill-defined that have no particular target and that judging by the words on these pages will not advance affordable housing one jot in New Zealand or at least in Auckland which is the only part that this bill applies to at the moment despite the fact that there are housing affordability pressures in many other parts of New Zealand including the Minister’s own electorate.Just to correct the Minister again—although I am getting a bit tired of having to get up and correct him—the law that we passed on affordable housing was not mandatory. It was voluntary and it did allow councils to take up a legal option that was not previously available to them. We did not mandate it. This is nonsense this kind of approach that the Minister takes where he says: “Oh well does the Labour Party want us to legislate for house prices and legislate for affordable housing or not?”. Well we did that and we did it in a way that was much more effective and worked in concert with other measures such as shared equity in Auckland Wellington Christchurch Nelson and Queenstown which were at that time the top five most expensive places to live in.So there is no ambiguity about our position at all Minister. The position in our legislation had been that here was a tool that was available to local authorities to use.Hon Michael Woodhouse: And none of them used it.Hon MARYAN STREET: Queenstown did. Queenstown—Hon Michael Woodhouse: No Queenstown didn’t.Hon MARYAN STREET: The member opposite says nobody took it up. Well in fact Clive Geddes who was the Mayor of Queenstown Lakes District at the time did take up the use of that legislation. So it is not true to say that nobody took up that legislation. Certainly that far-sighted mayor at the time in Queenstown did.The other thing relating to this that I want to pick up on is that the Minister says this is—what did he say? Grunty. He said it is the grunty part of this legislation. I wish it were. I just wish it were and I wish that it did something that was a bit more detailed than it is. We had the usual complaints about the Resource Management Act. The Minister does what he does really well and that is isolate one example and talk about it as if it is the norm. He takes one example of a consent difficulty—and I must say that he has managed to pass this disease on to the Minister for the Environment as well who tends to take the exception and project it as the norm for consenting.This is relevant to Part 2 because speeding up consents to 6 months may not be in anybody’s best interests. When consents under the Resource Management Act take a long time they usually take a long time for a good reason. It is possible to get past objections that are frivolous and vexatious. It is entirely possible to get past those and the Environment Court has now set down 22 years’ worth of case law to avoid those objections happening. What we have got here is something that risks consents being so rushed at 6 months that they will deliver an imperfect result. I do not want to see another Abbotsford as the people from Dunedin will know well occur because this Minister has decided that we need to speed up the process. Never mind if theengineering reports have not been done accurately. Never mind if the geological reports have not been done adequately or if the right people have not been consulted or if the nature of the soil or the rock bed or the susceptibility to natural disaster have not been sufficiently gauged. Never mind that—what we will do is say that we delivered consents in 6 months. I would rather the Minister delivered safe affordable housing than consents in 6 months.One further point I wish to make relates to a point the Minister made earlier where he took sole and personal responsibility as far as I could tell for the drop in interest rates for the lowering of interest rates. Never mind that there has been a global financial crisis and a period of reasonably prolonged recession around the world never mind that the United States is printing money to keep down interest rates artificially and never mind that there is cheap money available around the world; the Minister says that it is he and his Government that have caused interest rates to drop.I just wanted to give one story. I bought my first house in 1985. I was a young teacher and I had two mortgages. The house cost $66000. It was half a house. It was a terraced house in Auckland Central and it cost me $66000. I had a $20000 deposit because my parents had died and I borrowed the money my sisters got. We clubbed together and put down a deposit. Can I just say that I had to get two mortgages. First of all the banks were not that keen on lending to women alone. Never mind we got over that hurdle. My first mortgage was on an 18 percent interest rate and my second mortgage was on 23 percent. I remember it vividly. I remember it vividly because it took every part of my $35000 or whatever I was earning as a young teacher at that time and it was difficult. It was really difficult. Interest rates are all relative. If the prices of houses are out of the reach of anybody who is on a median income or below then it does not really matter what the interest rates are if they do not have the income to sustain borrowings of $360000 or $380000. It is all relative.So for the Minister to get up and crow about low interest rates as if it was all his own work—I think that if it was all his own work there are things we should be a bit cross with him about. If that is the case then what the Government is failing to recognise is that it is low incomes that prevent young families from being able to finance the prices of houses these days. My first house was $66000 and it was still hard work because of the interest rates. Now the interest rates are low but the house prices are hugely high. So we are in fact worse off now Minister even with low interest rates than we were years ago. Thank you.HOLLY WALKER (Green): I just want to take a short call in the debate on Part 2 of the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill. I want to address one of the key issues in the debate so far about this idea of having a minimum prescription of affordable housing as a criterion for a qualifying development. Then I also want to talk about the regulation-making powers and the transitional powers that are set out both in Part 2 and in schedule 2 of the bill which we are also debating this afternoon. First of all can I thank the Minister of Housing for being here and for being in the chair and taking some calls on this. It is good to have the Minister responsible for the legislation present through the Committee stage and actually engaging with the debate. I wish we saw it happen more in this Chamber. I want to address what he spoke about when he got up most recently and quoted from the bill looking at the minimum provision of affordable housing.To give some credit to the Minister it is true—and I can see here in Supplementary Order Paper 351 the tracked changes version of which has been put on the Table of the House—that there is now an ability through Order in Council for one of the qualifying development criteria to be a minimum provision of affordable housing or a percentage of affordable housing. So that is good to see. But my question for the Minister is this:why not go the whole hog? Why not put it in the legislation as a requirement for a qualifying development rather than putting it in as something that can be done through an Order in Council? If the purpose of the bill is to increase the supply of affordable housing—and we have established in earlier debates on earlier parts of the bill that it is—then why would you create a special housing area if not to improve the supply of affordable housing? If you want to improve the supply of affordable housing why would you not include a minimum percentage in that special housing area? If you can if the powers are going to be inserted into the bill why not make it a standard criteria that applies to all special housing areas if indeed the purpose is to increase the supply of affordable housing?I want to use the example of Hobsonville because Hobsonville is really what this bill could have enabled. Under the previous Government as we have heard from other speakers it was a very good model of using Crown land to establish a new housing development that was a mixed development with a proportion of affordable housing and a proportion of social housing. In fact that is another question that perhaps this bill fails to address—that there is no requirement for any minimum provision of social housing in any special housing areas. That is also a very important part of the housing affordability question—social housing. There is no provision for that either. What Hobsonville could have been and was intended to be when it was set up was indeed a special housing area of a sort with a mixed provision of housing with a provision of affordable social and private housing.What happened with the change of Government was that we had a Prime Minister who happens to be the local MP who said it would be “economic vandalism” to have State houses in his nice comfortable electorate. So those provisions were removed from the requirement for the development at Hobsonville. It is a good development. I have been and had a look at it. It is exciting. There could be great prospects for other such developments but it is a great shame that we allowed a Prime Minister to say that it would be economic vandalism to have social housing in that area and that we allowed the provision of the Gateway Housing Assistance loans to be reduced so that only 17 families got to use one to purchase a house in that development. If we put into this bill a qualifying criterion for qualifying developments so that there had to be a minimum percentage of affordable housing in new special housing areas then what we could see are a lot more areas like what Hobsonville was supposed to be when it was first mooted. It is a great shame that we have not done that. I do not think that putting it in as a possibility for an Order in Council as this Supplementary Order Paper does is enough.I want to turn my attention to the regulation-making powers and the transitional provisions in the bill because we heard from a number of submitters at the Social Services Committee and indeed from the Regulations Review Committee that in addition to the unpopular override provisions in the bill the bill delegates a high level of regulation-making powers to Ministers that may not be justified. We in the Green Party very much share those concerns although it is true that the select committee did to the best of its ability take the concerns of the Regulations Review Committee into account and did take them seriously. There are some changes recommended by the select committee to modify those regulation-making powers and those transitional provisions. Yet we remain concerned at the level of power that this bill concentrates in central government over local decision-making.It is something that we have seen only in recent years in emergency legislation and the model of course is the legislation around the Christchurch earthquake recovery. I have been concerned for some time—and this legislation plays out that concern—that having established that precedent through the Christchurch earthquake recovery legislation for that extensive use of regulation-making power that extensive use ofOrder in Council and that extensive use of transitional provisions we would begin to see it creep into other legislation in non-emergency situations. Indeed I believe that we have in this Chamber seen the increasing use of those kinds of provisions by this Government in various types of legislation and this is another example.Although New Zealand is absolutely experiencing a housing crisis—and many speakers have spoken about that in the debate so far this afternoon and I would concur with all of those who have done so—it is not yet a national emergency. We could get there and I doubt that this bill will help to prevent that coming catastrophe but we are not yet at the point where we can call the housing crisis a national emergency. Therefore that high level of ministerial power and intervention that high level of delegated regulation-making power and that excessive reliance on transitional provisions are not justifiable in our view.Instead what the Green Party believes is that we need a more considered national plan to tackle housing affordability. Such a plan would treat housing as core national infrastructure. It is a debate that I think we need to have as a country to actually turn our way of thinking about housing away from it as a solely private and personal asset and good to national infrastructure because it has some of the most significant bearing on the health and well-being of our population much more so than roads or other things that we currently consider core national infrastructure. Our housing stock has a huge bearing on the health and well-being of our population. So we need to start seeing it as core national infrastructure and develop a concerted plan to treat it as such. That would focus on the increase in supply of affordable housing both social housing and affordable rental housing and housing to buy and it would need to be developed in true partnership with relevant territorial authorities not with the kinds of provisions in this bill that override them. The Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill unfortunately is no such plan.What we would like to see is a national housing infrastructure plan that looks at things like a capital gains tax exempting the family home; a systematic Government build programme that is not just building and knocking down Housing New Zealand Corporation houses at the same rate that they get built which is what the Government is doing at the moment; a progressive ownership or shared equity scheme that helps families into their own home without having to go through the conventional route of a deposit and a mortgage; secure tenure for renters; a rental warrant of fitness; and restrictions for non-residents and non-citizens for purchasing homes in New Zealand. Those are the kinds of measures that we could put into a national housing infrastructure plan which would truly tackle the crisis of housing affordability and housing quality that we have in this country before it gets to national emergency status.As it stands we cannot support this bill. We are not convinced that the regulation-making powers and transitional provisions are warranted at the present time and we cannot understand why if you think that affordable housing is an important criterion and if you think that a minimum percentage of affordable housing is an important criterion those criteria have not been written into the bill. Thank you.Hon ANNETTE KING (Labour—Rongotai): I think it is obvious that the parties on this side of the Chamber believe that there is a problem with the lack of affordable housing but I am unsure as to whether the Government believes that there is a lack of affordable housing because what we have had today is a whole lot of conflicting statements and contradictions in terms. We have actually had that for the last 5 years because we were told year in year out that we did not have a housing problem. And then when the Labour Party came out with a very popular housing policy and more to come suddenly the poor old Minister of Housing Phil Heatley got the heave-ho and theGovernment brought in the new Minister of Housing with a flurry of activity and bills that were going to fix the problem—only they do not.What I cannot get to the bottom of is what the Minister is saying when he says that you cannot set the price of affordable homes. We know from announcements by Government members and things that they have said about Hobsonville that they are telling New Zealanders that the Government is building affordable homes and then it sets the price at between $400000 and $480000 for around a 60-square-metre box. So on one hand the Government says that you cannot set the price for an affordable home and then tells people: “Yes yes we are building affordable homes at Hobsonville. This is the price of them.” So what is it Minister? Can you say what an affordable home is? Can you say that you can set the price? Because that is exactly what the Government is doing with its so-called affordable homes in Hobsonville which is to tell us that they are affordable homes and then set the price of those affordable homes.The Minister also said that the cost of land is over $300000 for a section in Auckland. What is the cost of the land for the affordable houses at Hobsonville? What is the cost of each of those sections? If the Minister was being upfront with this Committee he would tell this Committee—as we learnt from the Social Services Committee—that the land at Hobsonville for the so-called affordable homes is being subsidised. It is being subsidised from the unaffordable homes that most New Zealanders cannot buy. So if it is possible to have cheaper land prices subsidised even though that is hidden by this Government then it is possible for any Government to put up Government land and say that it is affordable and to have prices on that land that are affordable. That is the truth but that is not what we are hearing from this Government about Hobsonville.This Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill does not provide a direct way of providing affordable houses. The Minister stood up and said: “Oh yes it does. There is an Order in Council.” What will that Order in Council say? Tell this Committee tonight. Tell New Zealanders who are listening what the wording of that Order in Council will be. You see the sneaky thing to do is to put in legislation that you are going to have an Order in Council to achieve something that everybody says we need. The poor people of South Auckland whom you heard about fromSu’a William Sio said: “We can’t afford houses at the moment but we are hoping we can.” And the Minister said: “Yes yes there will be affordable housing. I am going to have an Order in Council in this bill.” So tell the people what the wording of that will be. How will it be defined? What will it say? Otherwise it is hot air and false promises. The Minister has stuck in an Order in Council which does not have a date and we do not know when it will be done—this year next year 10 years never. You see it is just a ploy an underhand ploy because that Minister knows that there is real concern about affordable housing in New Zealand. Be upfront Minister. Get to your feet and tell us what that Order in Council will say when it will be brought in how long it will be in place for and how many affordable houses will be arising from your Order in Council which you told us about today. The Minister did not answer one of those questions.You see I find this whole bill rather shonky because I have always been a strong believer in regulatory impact statements. We saw the regulatory impact statement that came out of the last bill the Minister had when he was Minister of Local Government. It was the most appalling regulatory impact statement I have seen because it challenged all the assumptions the Minister had made about local government. There has been only one worse and that was the redacted one that went with the bill for those parents who were trying to look after disabled adults where the Government actually took out most of the information. But let us look at the regulatory impact statement on this Minister’s bill. I read it and I thought: “Wow! The Minister has not mentioned this.” It says:“Insufficient information on land supply restrictions across local authorities to allow precise views to be formed on the urgency of the problem or the extent to which land supply is a problem outside of Auckland”—insufficient information—“Insufficient information on the specific detail and operation of each of the options to allow for a more precise analysis of how each option might impact on the behaviours of commercial decisions of land owners and property developers”.In my last contribution I asked the Minister how he was going to make private landowners and property developers give up their land at an affordable price for houses to be built on it right now because of this bill. They are the ones who have land banked their land waiting for a good deal when it is the right time to put it on the market. The Minister’s own regulatory impact statement says that there is insufficient information on the specific detail and operation for each option to allow precise analysis of how each option might impact on behaviour. So if the Minister knows something more than those from the housing affordability programme and the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment he should get to his feet and tell us why this regulatory impact statement where it says that the ministry never got sufficient information is wrong. He did it on the local government one of course and then was shot down in flames by the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research which came out and showed that all his assumptions were based on false assumptions. He made an absolute fool of himself.This regulatory impact also says: “The development of the option under budget secrecy rules which has meant that options have not been consulted on with stakeholders and affected parties outside of government”. That Minister is from your own regulatory impact statement. When he put his bill together he put it together before he spoke to the Auckland Council and he had it set in place in his mind before he ever went to talk to the council. So Auckland Council actually did not really get a fair go at all and that is why it came to the select committee and why it said that it could not see anything in this bill that was going to make housing affordable. That is why it was worried that it was not going to do what the Minister said.So Minister there are some questions that I believe that you must answer in this Committee tonight. He is saying he will not answer them. Did you see that? He said he will not answer them. I give him credit for sitting in the chair which is more than some of his colleagues do. But tell us about the Order in Council Minister. Do not sit there smiling like a crocodile. Tell the people what will be in the Order in Council. When will it be introduced? How long will it be in place? Come on Minister. That is your responsibility. This is the only chance this Parliament has to debate these issues and for the public of New Zealand to know—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair.Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): Well it was pretty extraordinary listening to the debate this afternoon and before dinner particularly as more was being revealed about this bill that is called the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill which purports to be about affordable housing. We have got to the bit where there has been an extra clause added in right at the end which is trying to give a justification for and putting in a way of providing so-called affordable housing. This bit is going to be in clause 15. It was referred to by the Minister of Housing in his speech in this last part of this debate on Part 2. It is clause 15(2A) in Supplementary Order Paper 351 where an Order in Council gets to declare a special housing area and prescribes as one of the criteria for qualifying developments in the special housing area or part of it “the percentage of dwellings [in the development] that must be affordable dwellingsaccording to the affordability criteria specified in the Order in Council”. What does that mean? What does that mean? It is like a circular sentence. I have read that about five times. I think it was debated by Annette King before the break and before her the Green member Holly Walker debated it as well. It is actually an extraordinary sentence. It looks like a load of bunkum which is ultimately what this bill is.I would like the Minister if he is willing to take another call tonight to actually get up and tell us what an affordable house is what affordable housing is and what sort of percentages we are going to be looking at for this Order in Council that is going to prescribe the percentage of dwellings in a development. Are we going to be looking at the sorts of percentages that were called for by a number of submissions? For example I would like to refer to the submission by the University ofOtago’s department of public health which specifically asked for the bill to “direct decision-makers to grant consents for housing developments with a minimum of 20-30% social and/or affordable housing.” Well at least it mentions a percentage of dwellings in a development in this particular add-on Order in Council circular clause which has been a last-minute tack-on. But it would seem to me that if you are going to actually have a bill that is devoted to the principle of affordable housing then you would actually have a definition of affordable housing and you would have an explanation of how much affordable housing in the body of the bill. This seems to me to be an enormous gap.This whole bill is what you could describe as being a classic Orwellian bill because it is a bill that says it is about affordable housing but is not actually. It uses the term “accord” which in my book means partnership or more than one body working together in an equal manner. But when you actually read the bill and you debate the bill it is actually a power-grab by the Minister taking power and using that power in an inappropriate way with local authorities. We have heard earlier tonight the rather—and I hope you will excuse the Chaucerian reference—choleric contribution from the Minister. He really had a go at this side of the Chamber for what he saw was a discrepancy because we describe the bill on one hand as Draconian because it is around that power-grab and the local authorities really get to have very little say but on the other hand there is a tinkering around the edges of this so-called problem of affordable housing which this Government has not defined. It cannot define in the bill what is actually meant by “affordable housing” how many people will be able to get affordable housing or what percentage of an accord or special housing zone would actually need to have affordable housing.There have been numerous submissions as I understand it during the process—the very short process—of this bill going through the House. Submitters were not able to be given the time to properly consult and provide submissions and have the discussions that needed to be had. Instead there was a very short consultation period. During that time as I understand it most submitters asked for there to be an assurance that developments within this bill would be affordable or that there would at least be a percentage of affordable housing. Unfortunately what we have ended up with is this last-minute tack-on clause in Supplementary Order Paper 351 that says that a “percentage of dwellings [in the development] that must be affordable dwellings according to the affordability criteria specified in the Order in Council”. What are the affordability criteria? I think that probably one of the most important questions to be asked during the debate on this bill is what the affordability criteria are.The other issue that I just want to point to is the establishment of a procedure that gives some sort of cover: a dispute resolution process that must be followed before the housing accord may be terminated which is also specified in the bill. Again we go back to what this bill must do and what this bill may do. I think that it is really important that people listening to the debate tonight know again that many of thesubmitters argued very strongly that there needed to be some sort of mitigation between the power-grab of the Minister who is able to determine and make all these decisions and the ability of local authorities to have some sort of say in the process. Again it seems as if there has been a late change that institutes a dispute resolution process. But it is not something that must happen; it is something that may happen. It is very clear. People must realise that around these housing accords these so-called partnerships that in my mind should be equal because that is what the word “accord” means as far as I am aware. It is not an imbalance; it is actually more of a balance between parties. Instead of it saying that there must be a dispute resolution process what this bill does is say that there may be a dispute resolution process—so there only “may be”. As to who determines whether there is a dispute resolution process well it appears that under this bill that is really ultimately up to the Minister. Yes if there is a dispute resolution process then that must be followed before the housing accord may be terminated but the fact that there is one is not actually a true mitigation if there is a problem between the parties. I think what it highlights is that ultimately there is a true imbalance.There are many imbalances in this bill. The major thing that must be done tonight before the debate concludes on this is to determine just what the criteria of affordability are that have been inserted so late in this process. We have seen 5 years of inaction by this Government on housing affordability and the housing crisis in this country—5 years under this Government. What we have ended up with is a bill that tinkers around the edges in terms of addressing the real substantive issues and as we are seeing with so many other bills in this House—MIKE SABIN (National—Northland): I moveThat the question be now put.EUGENIE SAGE (Green): I certainly agree with the Minister of Housing that Part 2 of the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill is the grunty part of the bill. That is because it deals with the planning process resource consents plan changes and variations for qualifying development in these special housing areas that have been identified by the Minister or by the Minister and the relevant council through the housing accord. I join with Holly Walker in expressing the Green Party’s appreciation for the Minister in the chair being active in that role and for taking a number of calls on the bill.But although the Minister is proud of the fact that this bill fast tracks consent processes and promises a 6-month time frame for greenfield developments and a 3-month one forbrownfields development that comes at quite a high cost. The costs are to local democracy—the cost of development not necessarily being well planned and integrated with the council’s district plans and the cost of reduced public participation and reduced appeal rights to the Environment Court. I would like to comment briefly on each of these issues.As Holly Walker also noted we have a crisis in terms of housing affordability but I do not believe we have a national emergency that justifies that ability of the executive through the Minister to override the decision-making powers of councils and to cut across how they have planned where development should occur through their district and city plans working with their communities. So we strongly object to the provisions in the bill that would remove territorial local authorities as the consent authority for these qualifying developments in special housing areas where there has not been an accord agreed and where the Chief Executive of the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment has that role. We think that if we want sound planning that looks to the future—not just the next 3 years—we need to have councils retain their role in regulating land use and making decisions on these planning consents. The Minister and the bill are silent on how councils are going to have to deal with the extra costs of allowing development that is not well integrated with existing infrastructure.The problem that this part of the bill creates is that because the Minister and the Government are wanting to speed up decision making the bill is ostensibly establishing an alternative planning regime to what exists in the Resource Management Act. Although it takes ingredients of the Resource Management Act it also changes some of the criteria for making decisions that would exist under the Resource Management Act and the processes for making those decisions. As a number of submitters on the bill said creating this alternative system may result in unnecessary duplication and costs. There is also a very real risk that it will lead to decisions around the location the scale and the design of new subdivisions and new residential developments that have not been anticipated planned for and agreed to by the local community in conjunction with their council as would normally occur through the district plan process.When you read through Part 2 and you try to consider how the provisions here work how the ones in the Resource Management Act work and how they mesh it is very complicated. So you would certainly need to be a planner or a lawyer to understand them. But my particular concern in terms of this lack of meshing with council plans is in clause 14 which is in Part 1. Those criteria there for special housing areas are very narrow because they do not include factors such as the proximity of the area where special housing developments are going to occur to existing retail employment and social services. They do not include proximity to public transport and they do not include any relationship to urban design so that we get good-quality development. Certainly the Social Services Committee has included an extra provision around infrastructure but the whole issue of where development is located has a major impact on what our communities look like and the whole built form.So where there is a reliance on the market and on a private developer coming to the council and saying that it wants to do a plan change and to have fewer planning constraints applying you potentially get situations as happened in Northwood in Christchurch where you get roads in the subdivision that are too narrow to accommodate buses easily. So that is not sound development and it is the sort of speedy development that the bill promotes at the cost of sound development.The bill is also going to encourage sporadic ad hoc development because of clause 32. That outlines the matters that a decision maker must take into account when assessing a qualifying development. The problem here is that the matters are ranked and the bill’s purpose of housing affordability is ranked first. So that means that decision makers must give greater weight to housing affordability and promoting that than to the usual matters in the Resource Management Act. As the Hamilton City Council said: “This in effect raises and prioritises undefined residential development as being of greater significance than other forms of development in New Zealand and undermines the intent and effectiveness of the RMA 1991 and consent authorities ability to make informed balanced and sensible decision on development matters.”The last matter that I want to comment about is the other cost of fast tracking which is the reduced ability for the public and councils to participate in the planning process. That is because my understanding of the provisions in Supplementary Order Paper 351 and the bill itself is that they are going to provide a form of limited notification where the decision maker has to consult the local authority the adjacent landowners any infrastructure providers and anybody who has authorised a designation. But if those parties are consulted and agree there is no need for it to go out to the public for submissions. So that means that if this is not consistent with a plan the public does not get a right to say: “Well we do not like this because it is going to allow development in an area where we would prefer to see it provided as open space for example or where we think it has impacts on amenity or landscape issues.”We want compact liveable cities where people can connect with each other and with good public transport. If we get ad hoc sporadic development we are not going to get the good planning that you would normally get through city and district plans and metropolitan urban limits. If we have development occurring outside of those urban limits it is a recipe for sprawl. It may be more affordable because land prices are cheaper but it is not affordable to the people who live in those houses because they will have much higher transport costs. That is what we have seen in Melbourne where a lot of the houses further out are not selling. There has been a glut of them. They are not affordable for the people who live in them because of the very high transport costs. So we need integrated development and this bill does not promote that.PAUL FOSTER-BELL (National): I moveThat the question be now put.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the question be now put.Ayes63New Zealand National 59;Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes57New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Motion agreed to.The question was put that the following amendments in the name of the Hon Dr Nick Smith to the proposed amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 351 in his name to Part 2 be agreed to:in clause 22 delete subclause (1A);in clause 23(2A) replace “agencies) and Schedule 2” with “agencies) and Schedule 2”;in clause 27(1)(b) replace “sections 78(1)(c) and” with “sections 78(1)(c) and”;in clause 28(ab) replace “were a reference to” with “were references to”;in clause 42(2) replace “an authorised agency may only notify” with “an authorised agency may notify”;in clause 42(2) after “1991” insert “only”;in clause 50(a)(iv) replace “sections 78(1)(e) and” with “sections 78(1)(e) and”;in clause 51(1) replace “(b)” with “(c)” and replace “(c)” with “(d)”;in clause 51(1)(b) replace “were replaced with a reference to sections 24 27 to 40” with “were a reference to sections 24 and 27 to 40”;in clause 51(2) replace “may only notify” with “may notify” and after “section 127(1) of the Resource Management Act 1991” insert “(as applied by subsection (1)) only” ;replace clause 53 with the following new clause:53Mattersto be considered in reviewSection 131 of the Resource Management Act 1991 applies to a resource consent granted under this Act as if—(a)every reference to the consent authority were a reference to the authorised agency; and(b)in section 131(1)(a) the reference to section 104 of that Act were replaced with a reference to section 32 of this Act; and(c)with all other necessary modifications.in clause 54 replace “as follows—” with “as follows:”in clause 54(a) replace “an authorised agency” with “an authorised agency; and”in clause 64(aaa) replace “of this Act; and” with “of this Act; and”;in clause 66A(3) replace “sections 66(2) to (3) apply” with “section 66(2) to (3) applies”;in the heading to clause 69 replace “notice of acceptance” with “making”;in clause 69(1) replace “from the date of notification of acceptance of the request or part of the request” with “after a request is made”;in clause 72(2)(b)(i) replace “or made the request and” with “or made the request and”;in clause 73(2)(d) replace “section 87(4) with “section 87(2A)”; andin clause 78(1) replace paragraph (a) with:(a)a person whose application for a resource consent is not granted by the authorised agency in the circumstances described in subsection (1A) if the decision not to grant the consent was made by an employee of the authorised agency under delegation:”.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the amendments to the amendments be agreed to.Ayes63New Zealand National 59;Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes57New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Amendments to the amendments agreed to.The question was put that the amendments as amended set out on Supplementary Order Paper 351 in the name of the Hon Dr Nick Smith to Part 2 be agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the amendments as amended be agreed to.Ayes63New Zealand National 59;Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes57New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Amendments as amended agreed to.The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 342 in the name of Phil Twyford to Part 2 be agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the amendments be agreed to.Ayes57New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Noes63New Zealand National 59;Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Amendments not agreed to.The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): PhilTwyford’s amendment to replace clause 23 set out on Supplementary Order Paper 343 is out of order. It is inconsistent with the decision the Committee has just made.The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 343 in the name of Phil Twyford to clauses 82 to 84 be agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the amendments be agreed to.Ayes57New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Noes63New Zealand National 59;Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Amendments not agreed to.The question was put that the amendment in the name of Phil Twyford to the proposed amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 344 in his name to clause 35 be agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the amendment to the amendment be agreed to.Ayes57New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Noes63New Zealand National 59;Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Amendment to the amendment not agreed to.The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 344 in the name of Phil Twyford to Part 2 be agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the amendments be agreed to.Ayes57New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Noes63New Zealand National 59;Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Amendments not agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat Part 2 as amended be agreed to.Ayes63New Zealand National 59;Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes57New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Part 2 as amended agreed to.Schedule 1The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 351 in the name of the Hon Dr Nick Smith to schedule 1 be agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the amendments be agreed to.Ayes63New Zealand National 59;Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes57New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Amendments agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat schedule 1 as amended be agreed to.Ayes63New Zealand National 59;Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes57New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Schedule 1 as amended agreed to.New schedule 1AA party vote was called for on the questionThat the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 351 in the name of Hon Dr Nick Smith to insert new schedule 1A be agreed to.Ayes63New Zealand National 59;Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes57New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.New schedule 1A agreed to.Schedule 2The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 351 in the name of the Hon Dr Nick Smith to schedule 2 be agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the amendments be agreed to.Ayes63New Zealand National 59;Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes57New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Amendments agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat schedule 2 as amended be agreed to.Ayes63New Zealand National 59;Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes57New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Schedule 2 as amended agreed to.Clauses 1 and 2PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—TeAtatū): I want to make some comments about the title clause and I have three suggestions for the Committee to consider in respect of alternative titles for the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill. The first coined by my colleague Jacinda Ardern is the “Trickle-down Housing Bill”. I want to say how unconvinced we are by the last-minute desperate effort by the Minister of Housing to defend himself from accusations and pressure about the fact that this bill does not contain any real mechanism to deliver affordable housing. By inserting at the last minute a provision that gives the Government the power to issue by Order in Council some requirements for a certain proportion of affordable housing units in a qualifying development gives us no confidence at all. I want to tell the Committee why.The first reason is that requiring a proportion of affordable housing units is what is known asinclusionary zoning. This Government within a month of being elected after the 2008 election repealed theinclusionary zoning provisions that the former Labour Government had passed. This Government did away with all of the intentions of including State housing and affordable housing in Hobsonville the biggest most promising urban development opportunity in Auckland. We have heard from the Minister on numerous occasions at the select committee and in this Chamber that he does not believe ininclusionary zoning. He does not believe that it works. He does not believe that it is a good thing. So giving the Government the power to requireinclusionary zoning by Order in Council gives us no confidence at all that it will actually happen for those reasons.The second title that we think is worthy of consideration is the “Poor Quality Housing Bill”. I just want to point to some aspects of the bill that do give cause for alarm. Clauses 32 and 61 of the bill for example have the effect of essentially taking the Resource Management Act out of consideration when considering qualifying developments in special housing areas. They strip the Resource Management Act out of the decision-making process for special housing areas. It is pretty clear when you think about the reported comments of the Minister where he told theNew Zealand Herald on 25 May that Aucklanders need to get over theirnimbyism and accept lower quality developments if they want affordable housing. The Minister said: “Higher quality equates to high price.” and that Aucklanders need to accept lower quality developments.This is one of the really disturbing things about this bill—that it seeks to speed up the provision of affordable housing by reducing the quality protections and the environmental protections that we would normally apply to housing developments. That I think is a real concern to Aucklanders. They do not want slums but it is clearly the view of Nick Smith that if Aucklanders want affordable housing they have to accept lower standards.The third title that I want to suggest and that I think would be a much more suitable title for this bill is the “Throw the Baby Out with the Bathwater Housing Bill”. There are three things that National wants to trade off in order to deliver more housing development in Auckland. The first is democracy and we know from the override clauses in this bill that it is willing to take yet again more powers away from local government. The Human Rights Commission expressed concern about this in its submission on the bill and talked about the constant centralising of powers and taking away from local government.The quality protections and the environmental protections I have already mentioned. The last point I want to make is that this bill thoughtlessly undermines the protection that certain special areas like the Waitakere Ranges enjoy by dint of the Waitakere Ranges Heritage Area Act. That Act until the passing of this bill has enjoyed primacy over other district and regional plans. Those other plans are required to be consistentwith the provisions of the Waitakere Ranges Heritage Area Act. But unfortunately this bill dilutes those protections and it requires only the provisions of the Waitakere Ranges Heritage Area Act to be considered. They do not have to be consistent with those provisions.Dr RAJEN PRASAD (Labour): I want to carry on in the same vein that my colleague has been—suggesting alternative titles for the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill that will really reflect its true intent or the intent of the policy that this Minister of Housing is following. Let us look at the history of this. It was only when the Labour Party came up with a very popular housing policy that all of a sudden this became urgent. Perhaps we should call it the “Let’s Take the Focus off Labour’s Housing Policy Bill” because indeed prior to that the Government was not particularly interested in this area. The way in which the provisions of this bill have been spelt out gives the lie to the fact that this is not all that genuine in terms of a real response to what this side of the Chamber has said all along that the focus needs to be on affordable housing. That is where the big problem is but somehow the Minister has his own ideas as to how that is to be fixed.The second title which I think my colleague has already taken is what Jacinda Ardern coined—the “Trickle-down Process Bill”. It is as if that will work it out but that has already been taken now. The other point is that this bill has a provision that states that when it becomes an Act it will be repealed in 5 years’ time. So it could be something like the “Housing (We Will Fix it in 5 Years’ Time) Bill”.Think about it for a moment because that is about the time that this Government has been in power. It intends in the same length of time to fix the housing problems of New Zealand. It is not credible to believe that by creating some special housing areas through the provisions that are here we will have fixed the housing problem and we will have moved on. We do not think that will happen indeed.The driver of this particular policy that the Minister has taken is the use of the market—that the market really is the only mechanism by which our housing problems will be fixed. Nobody believes that except the Minister. So maybe it should be called the “Housing (Leave it to the Market) Bill”. This is a failed market yet the Minister has so much confidence that the bill will fix it up. Perhaps all that the bill will achieve when you think about it is it will enable more land to be made available to the developers who want to build big houses. They will build them through a faster process through the planning process that is in Part 2 of this bill. It will be a faster process to get land available and thereby it will make—[Interruption] Sorry Minister?Hon Dr Nick Smith: It’s a short title debate.Dr RAJEN PRASAD: Well a faster process is what the Minister is proposing here. That is not credible. It is not credible that it can be done in that period of time. But maybe it does belie the true agenda of this Minister: to advantage one side. The other area that we have constantly talked about on this side is the override provisions which we find entirely objectionable despite the fact that there is now a mediation clause in the bill. Another name could actually be—and this should generally be in there—the “Housing Accords and Overrides Bill” because the override provision is objectionable. It is hidden there somewhere. There is a little change in there around mediation and that fixes it! It does not.Perhaps the other one that we object to is this notion that there are provisions hidden somewhere introduced at the last minute and hidden in the amendments that state that by Order in Council the affordability question will be answered. We notice the Minister has taken no calls on that at all to explain how the Order in Council would work. We all appreciate the Minister being in the Chamber and engaging with us but on that point Minister you have not. Perhaps you ought to have and maybe you can still do that. Itneeds an explanation as to how that is going to work. It is the Minister’s own answer to our requirement and our objection to there not being a process of the type that addresses affordable housing.In the end the bill is suboptimal in terms of what it can achieve. We will not be supporting it. Thank you.CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour): I actually find it sad to be rising to speak on this bill the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill when there is such a genuine need to have something done to deal with the issue of affordable housing. During the course of this debate the Minister of Housing has finally said something about an Order in Council as my colleagues Rajen Prasad and Phil Twyford have alluded to tonight. But when you look at this bill it is not a bill about affordable housing and that is what we need.We oppose this bill but I actually say there is no pleasure in doing so because we are genuinely committed to seeing effective changes in the area of housing. For Labour housing is a huge and important policy area. It is going to make a difference to people’s quality of life and a difference to children’s health and education. Accessing housing at a price that people can afford and being able to own their own house are part of being part of a community and feeling like a person has a place in their community.In terms of this Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill others have talked about renaming it. Well I thought you could keep that name except perhaps add on to the end the phrase “(But Not Affordable Housing)” so that the title would be the “Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas (But Not Affordable Housing) Bill”.We do see the need for bold action to address the housing affordability crisis and we support the idea of a short-term mechanism to stimulate the building of affordable housing through accords with councils in special housing areas and fast-track consenting. We do not actually have a problem with that. During the course of this debate—and I have tried a couple of times previously to have a say on this—we have heard all sorts of comments made by the Minister which are actually not true about what our motivation is and what our housing spokesperson is and is not saying. We do actually agree that there needs to be land supply and that planning regulations do need to be looked at in terms of housing.The Minister is looking at me so I think maybe I could help him out on this and quote from Phil Twyford on the matter of land availability because I want to set the record straight. It was said earlier today that we did not think that land supply was an issue. This is a direct quote from Phil Twyford in the second reading of this bill: “There is no doubt—and I want to put to rest any suggestion by the Minister of Housing in his last speech—that this party does not accept that land supply is a problem in Auckland. It is clearly not a problem in Tauranga and other regional centres that suffer extreme housing unaffordability. But for the sake of this argument let us be very clear and put on record that there is no doubt—the data makes it crystal clear—that constraints on land supply in Auckland and the failure to intensify is behind an increase in the price in land that has flowed on to the price of housing. But land supply is only one factor in the housing crisis and the National Party has a fixation with it.” I just wanted to set the record straight on that. I think it is pretty important.We supported this bill going to the Social Services Committee because we were interested in seeing whether there was some value in this bill. However we are not going to support this bill because we believe it is flawed in its design and it will not achieve its stated aim of more affordable housing. The mechanism is not there in the bill. The Minister is now talking about what he may do by Order in Council but in this bill there is nothing that ensures that of the new houses that are built in special housing areas a portion of them will be affordable to low and middle income earners.At the moment there is something like 5 percent of new residential construction that is affordable. That is just meaning that so many New Zealanders see no hope of owning their own home. I want to particularly note young New Zealanders like my niece who is currently finishing her university education with a large student loan. I do not believe she sees that at any time in the foreseeable future she will be able to pay off that debt and save enough money to buy her own home in this country.Andrew Little: She’ll be overseas by that time.CAROL BEAUMONT: That is right. In all probability as my colleague Andrew Little says a bright young woman like her will probably end up going overseas for a better income and a better future. That is not what we want and what we need in this country. So again I say that this bill picks up only a couple of factors underlying the crisis—HOLLY WALKER (Green): I do not often take calls on the title and commencement clauses in the Committee stage because to be honest sometimes it feels a little bit silly making up new titles for a bill. But I did want to take a call tonight on the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill and propose four alternative titles. They are four alternative titles that speak to serious issues both of process and content with this bill.The first alternative title I would like to propose is the “Quick Let’s Cobble Something Together to Announce in the Budget Bill” because that is indeed what this bill is. I have had a look at the Budget papers that were released in association with this bill. What is very clear from those papers is that this is not a bill that has been a long time in production in policy development in consideration in consultation with departments and related Government agencies or in consultation with affected local authorities. In fact it was cobbled together very quickly so that the Minister of Finance could make housing a centrepiece of Budget 2013.In fact what this Minister wanted to announce was an urban development agency right up until as recently as March of this year. That is what he was hoping to announce to be the big centrepiece of housing in the Budget. I am disappointed he did not get to do that because I think it is a very interesting idea and one that has a lot more potential depending on how it is designed to address the crisis of housing affordability than what we ended up with in this bill. But evidently he was not able to get that over the line so something was drawn up very quickly instead and that was this bill that we are debating in the Chamber tonight the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill. But it could equally have been called the “Let’s Cobble Together Something to Announce in the Budget Bill”.That poor process that was followed for the development of this bill has followed through with other stages of the bill. We have heard speakers on other parts of the bill talking about the very limited time that was allocated for submitters to make their views known on the bill and the very limited notification of affected territorial authorities and potential stakeholders about the opportunity to make those submissions. Many of the submitters who came before us at the Social Services Committee spoke of their concern about the process—that it is a very substantive bill making very substantive changes that had a big effect on them but they did not have a lot of time to progress. Indeed in the select committee it was very pressured for officials for members of the committee and for the Parliamentary Counsel Office to draft and make the changes to the bill that were required in the time that was allocated for the committee to consider it. That again is a reflection of the rushed way in which the bill was put together. The fact that such substantial changes were required after the select committee process speaks to the fact that the bill was drafted in rather a hurry and needed to be clarified and significantly amended at the select committee. It is not an ideal process.The second title I would like to suggest for the bill is the “Housing Accords and Urban Sprawl Areas Bill”. As my colleague Eugenie Sage set out in her contribution a few moments ago on Part 2 that is in fact what the special housing areas are likely to create particularly because there is no requirement that they include a particular percentage of affordable housing and that is what we have largely been debating in the Chamber tonight.What is likely to happen is that housing developers and property investors will build largeMcMansion-style houses just as they do currently in greenfield developments on the urban fringes because that is what is profitable for developers. We heard from a number of submitters that to make a profit in the construction industry you need to build large houses with large footprints so that you can recover all those variable costs of building and make a profit. Because there is no requirement that those developers build affordable houses they will not. They came to the Social Services Committee and in fact they told us that themselves. They do not expect to see any increase in the provision of affordable housing and the bill is likely to result in more of the kinds of development that we are seeing already. As we have heard they are likely to be in greenfield areas on the urban fringes.As my colleague Eugenie Sage has pointed out there are a number of hidden costs associated with those types of development which actually mean that yes although the cost of land perhaps on face value may seem lower—Peseta SAM LOTU-IIGA (National—Maungakiekie): I moveThat the question be now put.Hon ANNETTE KING (Labour—Rongotai): In the debate on this part of the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill there have been several attempts to give it a correct title. I opened up theDominion Postthis afternoon and found the perfect title for this bill on page 2: the “First Rung of the Property Ladder (Tough Climb) Bill.” What we do know is that this bill has very little to do with people who want to buy their first home getting into a home. So let us try the “First Rung of the Ladder (Tough Climb) Bill” because Minister it is going to be an awfully tough climb to get into a house as a first home owner under this Government. This bill is nothing more than flimflam when it comes to affordable housing. We have found that out as we have debated this today.Then I look further on page 2 of theDominion Post and I find a headline that says: “Buying a home with a low deposit gets even harder.” It is interesting is it not that commentators—not Labour politicians or the Greens or New Zealand First—writing stories about housing are telling New Zealanders that nothing this Government is doing is helping them to get into a home.Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga: You’ve had a shot Annette. You’ve had your shot.Hon ANNETTE KING: Low deposits are getting even harder—for the member from Maungakiekie who is interjecting. Getting on the property ladder has just become harder with banks nudging up fees charged to borrowers with small deposits.What we are finding out is that this bill ought to have a title that reflects what is happening. I think it was the Law Commission that said that we often have bills that have grand titles that do not relate to what the bills actually mean. I think we need to have a title so that people are not misled about what this grand bill that the Minister of Housing has introduced in a flurry of activity with only 2 weeks of submissions for people to look at it—Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga: Not true.Hon ANNETTE KING: “Not true.” said the chair of the Social Services Committee. Have I got something wrong? Have I got something wrong Mr Chair? He walked to the Table and said when I said it was 2 weeks for submissions that it wasnot true. Would the member like to correct me if I am not correct? Well I believe those on the Social Services Committee would know. Perhaps the chair of the select committee was not there? Well if he was there his mind was not there. So I believe that we ought to have a bill that is correctly named as the Law Commission often said. Perhaps the Minister is going to take a call because one of the things that he did not do before dinner was take a call and answer some of the questions that could have helped give this bill a proper title.Hon Dr Nick Smith: Because the member didn’t bother to read the bill. It’s in the bill.Hon ANNETTE KING: He has got his opportunity instead of just sitting there flapping his lips. He could stand up and he could answer some of those questions that would maybe give us the correct title. One of them is about affordable housing and his—Hon Dr Nick Smith: The lazy member should read the bill.Hon ANNETTE KING: Oh! I am certainly not lazy but I do not make things up like that Minister. He has got a record of making things up and of creating figures and facts to suit himself. So I think perhaps that he might like to get to his feet and tell us about the Order in Council. Tell us about the Order—Hon Christopher Finlayson: Lazy and embittered.Hon ANNETTE KING: I see my cousin over there up to his usual tricks—a few nasty jabs and gibes. He can never debate a single issue without throwing in some nastiness. I do not know how it is I ever got related to him. It is not in our side of the family. So I have to say to the Minister: get to your feet Minister. Get to your feet and answer the questions about when the Order in Council will be introduced what will be in that Order in Council and then maybe—just maybe—this bill could have its correct title.MAGGIE BARRY (National—North Shore): I moveThat the question be now put.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the question be now put.Ayes63New Zealand National 59;Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes 57New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Motion agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat clause 1 be agreed to.Ayes 63New Zealand National 59;Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes 57New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Clause 1 agreed to.The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 351 in the name of the Hon Dr Nick Smith to clause 2 be agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the amendment be agreed to.Ayes 63New Zealand National 59;Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes 57New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Amendment agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat clause 2 as amended be agreed to.Ayes 63New Zealand National 59;Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes 57New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Clause 2 as amended agreed to.Bill to be reported with amendment presently.