Craig LizDr LIZ CRAIG (Labour): Thank you Mr Speaker. Well unlike that other member I'm actually proud to be part of a Government that's tackling the long-term challenges facing our country and one of the biggest challenges we've got is the huge mess in housing that was left by the previous Government. Certainly down in Invercargill where I live we've got lots and lots of people that are struggling to find decent housing and in particular we've got this acute shortage of State and social housing because of the huge number of sell-offs by the previous Government. So what this bill does is it does two key things: the first thing it does is it becomes a world-class public housing landlord and then the second thing it's going to be doing is becoming the leading coordination of urban development projects. What we need is decent coordination in terms of housing and urban development and we need a decent standard of rental housing to address this housing crisis. What I want to do today is just focus first of all on the role of a world-class public housing landlord because I think for anybody that's ever been a tenant—like myself—what you really realise is that you're incredibly reliant on the decisions that are made by your landlord. The decisions about insulation the decisions about whether you fix up those leaks and whether you do the maintenance—all those basic basic decisions. Do you put a heat pump in or not—because the problem is that if you live in a crappy cold damp house you live with those decisions every single day. You live with them when you put your child to bed at night and you live with them when you get up freezing in the morning and send them off to school and that has huge consequences for kids for their health and for their wellbeing. So thankfully our Government has put some decent rental housing standards in place that will put a bottom line in for many of those areas and that's incredibly important. Chris Bishop: That was our bill thanks very much. Dr LIZ CRAIG: You put in the insulation but our standards also include things like dampness and they include things like thinking about what your clean-heat source is so you can afford to turn on the heater. Over the next couple of years a lot of the living standards of many many tenants will be significantly improved and so this is where the Government needs to be leading and setting the standard in terms of decent quality housing for those people for us—for all of us. I think the thing we've got though is that what this bill does is it legislates. So some of those social housing objectives that were recently introduced into Housing New Zealand—what it is doing is it's legislating for those and putting those into law. Things like providing decent housing being a fair and compassionate landlord and helping to sustain tenancies—those are some of the principles. So what this bill does is it talks about the operating principles that will be underpinning Kāinga Ora and those operating principles are what the Kāinga Ora board will have to enforce. The first one of those is very very simple: providing good quality warm dry and healthy rental housing a thing that many many kids—a whole generation of kids—over the last decade have missed out on. What I used to see in my old job was we used to see thousands of kids coming into hospital every year with respiratory infections and many of those were from the poorer parts of town where rental homes were substandard. What we were seeing was kids coming in with bronchiolitis pneumonia and bronchiectasis which is permanent lung scarring. What these rental standards are doing and what Kāinga Ora becoming a world-class landlord and providing warm dry healthy homes is doing is that they will have a huge impact on many of those families. Some of the other underlying operating principles include supporting tenants to be well-connected with their communities and to lead lives with dignity and the greatest degree of independence possible and to sustain tenancies so that you're not worrying about having to change houses all the time and changing schools for your kids and the impact that that has—so some of those basic operating principles to underpin what we're doing. But the other thing is thinking about ensuring that we've got housing supply and that it meets demand and so some of those other principles that this bill introduces is managing our housing stock prudently including upgrading and managing it to ensure it remains fit for purpose. That's where the ball got dropped under the previous Government as well. So many of our State houses got rundown and so then we couldn't be proud as a Government as a landlord because of the state of those rental houses—but also ensuring that housing developed is appropriately mixed so you have communities so you can have public affordable and market housing mixed together and creating the communities that people want to live in. So it's incredibly important to have these operating principles embedded into law.One of the other things I think and this is where the zero carbon bill—and we've heard a lot of conversations about climate change over the last year. So what this talks about is operating in a manner that recognises the need to mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change. It also talks about that in the Government policy statement (GPS) which is also introduced by this bill because what this bill does is it requires a strategic direction to be set out in terms of where we're going in housing and urban development.So what the bill in Part 2 talks about is Ministers must issue a GPS on housing and urban development no later than"—it's 2021. So we've got two years from when this bill comes in to have that Government policy statement which outlines our broader vision in terms of where we're going in housing. Basically that needs to be reviewed every three years to make sure it's up to date. There's a whole range of things that the legislation sets out in terms of what needs to be in that but there's one that says this must include a multi-decade outlook because it's incredibly important that we don't just focus on what's in front of us. We need that broader vision because a lot of the building programme a lot of what we're developing will take time to bed in and we need to know where we're going in the bigger picture.But it also talks about how Kāinga Ora will recognise the need to mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change because all around the country what we've got are huge infrastructure assets that are within one or two metres of sea-level rise. I think about down where we are in Invercargill. Our airport is at a very low level of sea level and we've got around the country many many houses that while they may be higher than a couple of metres of sea-level rise the roads that get to them aren't. The sewage plants that actually are going to be looking after those housing developments—if they're at sea level we've got to be thinking about what we're doing there. So what this bill does is it says that within the Government policy statement the Government must think about that broader vision in terms of where we're going in terms of mitigation and adaptation for climate change which is incredibly important.There's a range of other things that must be included in terms of this Government policy statement in terms of looking at the overall direction and talking about what the other Government agencies need to be doing in this area because I think what's really important is if you've got other agencies and other people thinking about where they're going to be building their infrastructure and what they're doing they need to have a very very clear idea of where the Government's going. I think that's what was highlighted in some of the submissions that came in with the Environment Committee. What they were talking about is having that sense of: if we know where the Government policy statement is going and the Government has laid out its direction that means that developers and others can get a sense of that and then they can plan accordingly.So I think this bill is incredibly important because on the one hand it sets out how we are going to be as a public landlord and the kind of principles that we want underpinning our role as a landlord. I think that had we had that over the past decade the lives of many many families would be significantly different because we would've thought about how we can provide warm dry housing but we also could've thought about how we provide secure tenancies and how we can have those communities that kids want to grow up in and feel absolutely at home.In that we also need to know where we're going as a country—what's our broader strategic direction? This is where again I look at the struggle we've got with social housing down in Invercargill. Across all of Southland in the early 1990s we had over 800 State houses but just progressive sell-offs and we're down to under 400 just before the last election. We've stopped the sell-offs and we've started to rebuild more but I don't know whether anybody actually thought about consciously what we were doing in that and then what would happen and the impact that would have on families.And certainly it's families that I meet now in my office and all the agencies down in Invercargill also are actually working with. So it's incredibly important that we have that broader strategic direction so that we know where we're going and know what impact our policies are having and how they'll impact on our families and our community. So I'm incredibly proud to be speaking on the third reading of this bill because I think it's going to have a huge impact for good in terms of our country in terms of our strategic direction on housing in terms of our strategic direction on urban infrastructure and I'm very very pleased to commend this bill to the House."