Goff Phil: Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 21 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3646. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): Can I welcome the Minister for Social Housing to the chair. She is the Minister in charge of this bill so we expect her to actually address questions that are asked genuinely to her rather than being mute and dumb in the chair. I have some questions that I need to ask about Part 2 of this bill. I am looking particularly at clause 20 which provides that Housing New Zealand does not have the purpose of providing policy advice and clause 21 which says that Housing New Zealand research and monitoring does not include research and monitoring to advise on the policy issues.I would have thought that the Minister would find it really useful to have an independent source of policy research and advice rather than listening solely to right-wing ideologues and property speculators and drawing on their advice and encouragement in order to set policy. For example Minister if you had listened to the advice of Housing New Zealand rather than not listening to it and now taking away its ability to give that advice you would realise that your statement yesterday that you are providing $500000 for emergency housing is practically meaningless. I have got a picture here of a house on the edge of my electorate of Mt Roskill. It is just in Mount Albert. It is a two-bedroom home unit. Do you know what that was selling for last week? It was selling for $797000—a two-bedroom unit. There it is—a very modest little home unit. Apparently the Minister does not understand that house prices for incredibly modest homes are now so high that people cannot aspire to homeownership and people who are renting are being asked to pay higher and higher rents that are unaffordable because the person who invests in that as a property investor wants to get a return on their capital.We know Minister Bennett that 40 percent of all homes purchased in Auckland are purchased by property speculators. I would have thought that you would know that and had you listened to the advice of Housing New Zealand you would have been better informed about it. So you would not then in your press statement say: “Look I am dealing with the big problem of homelessness—I am going to give emergency housing half a million dollars.” You know what that will do Minister? It will purchase half of that two-bedroom home unit. How is that going to address the problems of the shortage of accommodation and homelessness?If you had listened to Housing New Zealand you would also have gotten some information from it so that when you talked about supporting moves to housing independence in your press statement—I do not know who drafted that; great spin—you would have known what those words actually meant. They meant that you were not moving 3000 people to housing independence; you were evicting 3000 people. Housing New Zealand in its research and advice would have told you that a lot of those people are people who are going to find it really hard to cope in the private housing sector. I was talking to a woman; she is on a reasonable income now but she is crippled. The ministry spent I think $27000 on the State house to adjust it for a person who needed wheelchair access and was not able to have mobility. Because of her income she will now be put out in the private housing sector. The question I would like to ask the Minister if she is listening to the advice of Housing New Zealand is: what private landlord is going to spend $27000 modifying a house to deal with the purposes of somebody who has not got mobility?Then the Minister talks about increasing affordable housing supply. I know for a fact that Housing New Zealand would be able to tell the Minister that that simply is not happening; that instead of increasing affordable housing supply its housing stock has been run down by 1600 in the last 3 years. So here we are: we have got the worst housing crisis that Auckland has ever seen and what is the Minister doing about it? She is depleting the stock of Housing New Zealand rental housing. A good policy-advice agency would have told her that but clearly she is not getting that advice and now deliberately she is saying—