Mackey Moana: Housing Corporation Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Mackey Moana: Housing Corporation Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:671;Page:17922] 
MOANA MACKEY (Labour) 
: 
 Is that it? Really? Wow. I am happy to stand and speak on the first reading of the Housing Corporation Amendment Bill. The reality is this bill is just another piece of tinkering around the edges from a Government that has absolutely no plan to deal with the ongoing housing crisis in New Zealand and particularly in the instance of the Housing New Zealand Corporation the crisis in social housing. 
I will say from the outset that Labour will support this bill going to the Social Services Committee but we do so with enormous reservations and we cannot guarantee we will support it beyond that. We think the legislation is a timely opportunity to have a discussion about the Housing New Zealand Corporation and its current direction and focus which have changed dramatically since the change in Government. There has been a cultural shift in the Housing New Zealand Corporation and that shift has been punitive and has made things far more difficult for tenants. In fact tenants have been completely left out of the loop. The reports that the Minister of Housing has commissioned include the huge Housing Shareholders’ Advisory Group report which was about State housing. One group of people had absolutely no involvement whatsoever in that report: the tenants of the Housing New Zealand Corporation. The tenants whom the entire piece of research was about were not consulted were not involved and as far as I know have still not been talked to about the implications of that report for them as clients of the Housing New Zealand Corporation. 
It concerns me to hear the Minister talking about the separation of State housing policy from other housing policy. Of course housing is a continuum. It goes from the social housing that the Housing New Zealand Corporation provides all the way through to the affordable housing initiatives brought in by the previous Labour Government some of which have been continued under this Government and some of which have been scrapped. But State housing does not exist in isolation from the rest of the housing market. I am very concerned and maybe I misheard or misinterpreted the Minister’s comments but the idea that State housing policy will somehow be completely separate from policy for housing everywhere else is I believe a step backwards. In saying that I also know that there are some concerns particularly within the community housing sector that there is a conflict of interest in the Housing New Zealand Corporation providing policy advice when it is also a stakeholder. I think that is an issue we can discuss at the select committee. 
I want to talk a little bit about the history of State housing in New Zealand because sometimes Government members forget where it came from. It goes back to Michael Joseph Savage and the first Labour Government. A very wise decision was made back then that taxpayers’ money would be used would be invested to support low-income families unable to access appropriate and affordable housing. Generations of New Zealanders—generations of them—have invested taxpayer money and have done so proudly. As a country we have been proud of our investment in social housing proud of the way that we have supported those families who from time to time and for varying lengths of time have needed the assistance of State housing which started under the first Labour Government and continues to this day. It has been a very wise investment. It has provided many families with the kind of support they need to raise their families in conditions that are appropriate. 
Those families have included that of the Prime Minister of this country. The Prime Minister of this country grew up in a State house. He likes to make a big deal of it. I have to ask why then he stopped the building of 500 State houses in his own electorate. He said it would be economic vandalism for poor people to have sea views—economic vandalism. Well that is not what New Zealanders believe about State housing. It was a very very disappointing comment from a Prime Minister who has traded on his State house past. He has pulled up the ladder behind him like so many other National Party Ministers and members. 
The 1990s was a very turbulent time for State house tenants. Nearly 13000 State houses were hocked off mostly to developers under the guise—and we have heard this again now—of letting State house tenants own their own homes. Well there is a reason State house tenants are in State houses: because they are on a low income and are unlikely to be able to purchase their own homes. They cannot afford it. I note that the policy the Minister brought in again of allowing State house tenants to purchase their own homes—although this time he did not make the mistake of subsidising them for his mates; he put them out at market values—has been an abysmal failure. It raised the expectations and the hopes of thousands of State house families who thought it would be their pathway into homeownership. They were devastated when they realised that it was nothing more than a slogan—nothing more than a slogan—and that the Government was not going to do anything to help them into homeownership and to improve the affordability of homeownership. 
The Government brought in market rents. It got rid of income-related rents and brought in market rents. It drove thousands of families into poverty overnight. The Government carried out no modernisation whatsoever of the State housing stock throughout that time. I will read a comment from the housing Minister at the time Tony Ryall who is still on the National front bench. This is what he said in general debate in the mid-1990s: “I think it is much better that the State is not involved in housing and that we say to New Zealanders that our effort will go into putting people into private enterprise housing.” He then said in 1999: “National MPs inherently do not have a desire to expand the level of State housing in New Zealand. It is not an issue that is dear to our core constituency.” The more things change the more they stay the same. Nothing has changed between that National Government largely and this National Government. Those core values are still there. 
Where have we seen that? We have seen it in the fact that the State house budget was slashed—slashed—by 80 percent last year. Mr Heatley has had to swallow the dead rat of income-related rents as has his party because abolishing them in the 1990s was so unpopular. But National has not done it because it agreed with income-related rents; it has done it because it knew that it would have been politically untenable to go forward with a policy of getting rid of income-related rents once again. It took a Labour Government in the 2000s to bring back income-related rents for State house tenants. We rebuilt 8000 of the 13000 State houses that were hocked off during the 1990s and we did that at a time when there was a major housing boom and it was difficult to get builders. We carried out modernisation at a time when it was difficult to find people to do the work because in the 1990s builders had left the country in droves and the National Government had done nothing about it. It had done nothing to keep those builders in work or keep them in training. So when we came to another housing boom we did not have the skilled labour to be able to do everything we wanted. 
Does this sound familiar? Well it should because it is happening right now. It is happening again. This National Government has learnt nothing. In the last 2½ years we could have been building housing. Over the last 3 years Australia has put more than $5 billion into housing as part of an economic stimulus package. It has added 20000 State houses to its State housing stock. And do you know what? It has kept builders in work it has kept building companies in employment and it has kept local businesses open because of the purchases that are being made. It has kept income tax and sales tax going through as well. What did we do? Nothing—absolutely nothing. Our building sector is in the deepest recession it has ever been in since records began. The chief executive of the Registered Master Builders Federation said that once again we will not be able to respond to demand whenever we come out of a recession because our builders will not be there. Our builders are leaving; they are going overseas. Our apprentices are going overseas too. 
What was the Government’s answer to the housing crisis? It slashed the budget for State housing by more than 80 percent in last year’s Budget. Mr Heatley likes to say to the housing sector that times are tough and there is no money. Well there was plenty of money for $15 billion worth of tax cuts which overwhelmingly went to people who did not need them and have not spent them in the economy. There was plenty of money for the plastic waka up in Auckland; it would have been nice to spend it on housing. There was a lot more money for private schools and $2 billion for the “Holiday Highway” north of Auckland. That is the kind of infrastructure the National Government believes in: infrastructure that gets Ministers to their holiday houses 7 minutes faster. Well the kind of infrastructure that Labour believes in is housing. Housing is core infrastructure. It should be a higher priority for this Government. 
The second thing the Government wants to do is hide the problem by bringing in an options and advice service that has no function other than to keep people off the waiting list. That is what it is doing. Emergency accommodation providers are saying that people are turning up the Housing New Zealand Corporation having turned them away or put them into boarding houses. They are living in completely unacceptable situations because the Minister will not let them have a needs assessment before they are farmed out to the private sector. The only reason someone would make that decision would be to keep people off the waiting lists and I say congratulations to the Minister because it is working. The Government is hiding the figures so that it does not have to deal with them. 
The last thing to do if one is a National Government is to make it someone else’s problem. National says to the community housing sector that it is now its job to build houses not the Government’s. Labour believes in supporting the community housing sector to grow but it must grow as well as Government housing as well as Housing New Zealand Corporation housing not instead of it. Instead we have a Minister and a Government that want the community housing sector to do their job for them. Generations and generations of taxpayers in this country have not invested in social housing to provide housing for vulnerable families only for this Government to hock them off in more asset sales and to treat those tenants as though they should be ashamed to live in a State house.