Foster Andy; O'Connor GregANDY FOSTER (NZ First): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's great to be able to speak on this long-term insights briefing on housing. I think this is an excellent initiative of the 53rd Parliament. What's really good is that we get the opportunity to be able to think about long-term issues: not about what's happening in the next three years or even the next news cycle but think about things which are genuinely long term: 30- 50- 100-year issues.What we're discussing at the moment is the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development's long-term insights on housing. They could have covered a whole range of different issues but what they did is they focused on I think four major issues. First of all the ageing population which we've heard quite a bit about. Secondly the declining level of home ownership—in other words more of us who are renting. Thirdly the place of Government housing. And fourthly the response to climate change. So I'm going to try and flick through some of those issues.First of all on the ageing population the graphs in the report are really really stark. In fact you look at the number of nought to four-year-olds as a proportion of the population it's half what it was in 1961—half what it was. The ageing population—well the good news is that our life expectancy is going up. Back in 1948 the average age expectancy for men was 66.7; for women it was 68.5. Now for men it's 80 or over 80; and for women it's about 83 or 84. So actually the good news is we're living longer we're living healthier we're living better. But the nature of our population structure has dramatically changed. As we've heard already 17 percent of us today are over 65. By 2053 it's going to be 24 percent of us.So there's a question which this report raises: is our housing stock appropriate for that ageing population? Clearly the answer is no at this stage it's not. So is it accessible enough? Is it close enough to facilities? The ability to be able to drive for many people as they get older is simply not going to be there; that proximity is important. The placement of retirement housing is also very very important. Is the housing size appropriate? Look for many years we were building bigger and bigger and bigger houses and now we're starting to see the emergence of smaller houses. That I think is a response both to affordability but also to a changing population. Then we've also heard about alternative 10-year plans.There's also a lot which is said about affordability and the number of people who are renting is rising dramatically. That is particularly as we've heard a real problem for our older population. I mean the superannuation system we've got at the moment is not designed on the basis of people having to rent as well—it's simply not going to be able to afford it. The numbers actually are pretty challenging. In 1986 as the report says 79 percent of Europeans and Asians owned their own home; it's now 51 percent. For Māori 54 percent; it's now 40 percent. For Pasifika 51 percent; it's now 31 percent. So right across our population the number of people who can afford to buy a house has declined. That is a real problem for an ageing population.So we've got to do something about these things. There are some people who would like to see the house prices fall. The problem is that we saw that post-COVID. We've got a housing crisis and we want to build more houses but of course what people did is say Well actually there is no money in building houses because the house prices are falling the cost of building is going up." and people stopped building houses. So that didn't solve the problem at all. What we do need to do is to make sure that the cost of building a house—[Member is passed a note] Can I finish? Jamie Arbuckle: Yeah.ANDY FOSTER: The cost of building a house needs to come down relatively. Minister Penk is doing some great work in that area to pull down the cost of building a house. Secondly we need to make sure that we can actually raise incomes so that people can afford to buy those houses.I'm being encouraged to move the speech on so I think what I'll do is just to commend the great work that's been done here. There's a lot more that can be said about housing—housing is a major issue for this country. We've got a huge amount of work to do to tackle those issues. The report raises a number of those issues but I'm going to finish now because I know that there is an anxiousness to move on to the next issues.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O'Connor): Takutai Tarsh Kemp. Unfortunately we've only got two minutes left for this speech for a timed debate so New Zealand First gave up a little of theirs so thank you."