Mackey Moana: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Mackey Moana: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Sitting date: 12 February 2013. Volume:687;Page:7734. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
MOANA MACKEY (Labour) 
: 
 It has been very interesting sitting here listening to National Party members giving their speeches on the Prime Minister’s statement. It has been basically spin and rhetoric and meaningless drivel constantly all afternoon. I think that if members of Mr Key’s own caucus are unable to elucidate exactly what his vision and his plan are for New Zealand then the rest of us do not really stand a chance. This is the fifth year of this National-led Government and we have been saying since the day it was elected: “Show us the plan. Where is the grand plan for our economy? Where are the jobs going to come from? Where are the ideas? Where is the vision of this John Key - led National Government?”. Here we are 5 years down the track and still no answer. 
There was a lot of apportioning of blame from Mr Key and from National Party members a lot of telling us whose fault it was and who should have done this and who should have done that and a lot of trying to blame the previous Labour Government saying that the previous Labour Government is to blame for the financial difficulties of today despite the fact that the previous Labour Government reduced net debt to zero paid off the debt and ran surpluses every year. The IMF not a loony left-wing organisation by any stretch actually said that New Zealand was one of the best-placed countries in the world to go through that global financial crisis relatively unscathed compared with other countries because we had been prudent we had reduced debt and we were in a position where the Government could get in and play its role in supporting its economy and in supporting its communities and its families when times were toughest. Instead—instead of the acknowledgment of that instead of John Key and Bill English saying thank you to Michael Cullen and the Helen Clark Labour Government for leaving the books in such a good state—what we have had is John Key and Bill English trying to blame the last Labour Government for the global financial crisis. Well I can tell you that Helen Clark was good but she was not that good. She was not that good. There is no way that Helen Clark was responsible for the entire global financial crisis but to listen to the National Party that is exactly what it would have New Zealanders believe. 
What this side of the House has been saying consistently is that the Government does have a role to play here. When economic times are really good when things are humming along a Government might play a lesser role but when things get really tough and when the levers that need to be pulled are the levers that only the Government can pull that is where a Government needs to get involved. That is what Governments are there for—to listen to the business community to listen to those families and to say when times are tough “What do you need from us?”. There are things that only a Government can do. With the best will in the world the private sector cannot pull some of the levers like monetary policy that a Government can pull. So on this side of the House we say that there is an appropriate time for Government to step up and be a part of the economy. 
What a radical idea that a Government that expects everyone else to be part of the economy might actually see itself as a player in that as well and might actually see itself as having the ability to reduce certain barriers that no one else can reduce to make things easier where no one else can make them easier and to pull levers that do not exist for anyone else in the country other than with Government! That is what a Labour Government will do. That is what a Labour Government will do because we do believe that a Government has a role to play and we do believe that saying Governments should stay out of it just for the sake of it is not good for New Zealand it is not in the best interests of our economy and it is certainly not in the best interests of the families that are really struggling at the moment because this Government has taken its hands off the wheel. This Government has said it is asleep at the wheel it will go wherever it wants to and it will go completely off course if that is the case because no one should be driving this. Well Labour says that is not the case in fact. We do have a role to play. There should be someone in that driver’s seat because at the moment we are headed off the end of a cliff. 
I think a really good example is in the area of housing. Labour has released our plan for affordable housing and is it not a unique and novel idea for a major political party to have a plan on affordable housing? The National Party hates it. It hates it because it knows that in 5 years it has done nothing. It has done absolutely nothing. Let us have a look at what the National Party did. Well the first thing it did was that John Key said he did not want any of those State house people in Hobsonville. Hobsonville is in his electorate. We have very few opportunities in New Zealand for greenfield housing developments. Hobsonville was—and still is because we are going to be in Government in 2014—a great opportunity and what we said was that within this development of 3000 or so houses 500 would be State houses and 500 would be affordable homes for first-home buyers. That is what we said when we set the project up. That is what all the research and all the evidence tells us works best: mixed communities. We had all the amenities: the public transport the schools and the jobs for people who were going to be living there. And what John Key said was that it would be economic vandalism to have State houses in Hobsonville. I mean some of those properties have sea views. God forbid that poor children should get to look at the ocean as well! Surely that should be something that is only the preserve of freehold homeowners! 
Andrew Little 
: How could it possibly help? 
MOANA MACKEY 
: How could it possibly help them? Absolutely. What utter garbage. It is so offensive from a man who at every chance he gets trades on his State house upbringing that he has now pulled up the ladder behind him and denied that same privilege to 500 families in his electorate—500 families. 
What the then Minister of Housing Phil Heatley said was: “You know there’s not really the demand out there.” Well there is not the demand out there because there are no State houses out there. All those people are living in South Auckland often in overcrowded situations and going on the waiting list there. But there are going to be jobs in Hobsonville for people—you know minimum wage jobs. There are going to be jobs for people who are going to clean the school and clean the businesses. There are going to be a lot of jobs there for people who are going to struggle to be able to afford to live there but the National Party vision is that those workers should have to travel all the way from South Auckland up to Hobsonville to clean those schools and to clean those offices rather than saying that here is an opportunity for them to live in this fantastic new development and this new community. That was our Prime Minister—our Prime Minister whom we are all very proud of who said he did not want State housing in his electorate because it might damage house prices. 
The other tranche of that was that there was going to be 500 affordable houses in Hobsonville as well. I think at the end of the National Party’s last term in Government we had about six—about six. And the only people who could afford them—and this is the really fantastic bit—were people who could already afford to buy a market home at market rates. The only people who could get into National’s Gateway Housing Assistance programme were people to whom banks would lend the entire amount up front. So in its first term of Government not only did the National Party have tax cuts for the wealthy; it had an affordable first home ownership policy for the wealthy. That is pretty impressive even for the National Party: to manage to set up an affordable homeownership scheme that only the wealthiest New Zealanders could possibly access. 
So Labour has come in with an affordable housing plan that will make a real difference and will create jobs. This is what the Australian Labor Party did after Australia’s last election right at the beginning of the global financial crisis. It recognised that housing not only provided a social good but also provided an economic good and that it created a lot of jobs and it created them quickly. It had what was called a long tail which meant that it employed a lot of other people outside of just the construction industry: the people who sell the whiteware the people who sell the carpet the people who do the landscaping. All those people were involved. Apprentices were involved. This is an area where you get a very quick short-term and medium-term benefit. That is why so many Governments around the world when the global financial crisis hit decided that housing was one of the areas that they were going to put a focus on. They did that because like New Zealand a lot of other countries in the OECD have under-invested in this area over a long period of time. So this was not creating an asset that was not needed; this was actually taking an opportunity to keep people in employment keep income tax flowing keep GST flowing keep all that money coming into the Government and keep incomes going into households at a time when the private sector was pulling back and at the same time create an asset base that was desperately needed and that we are desperately short of in New Zealand especially in our major cities. 
So the Australian Government invested billions and billions and billions into housing. It created tens of thousands of new houses for State housing and affordable homeownership. It kept people in work. It kept apprentices in training. It kept all its income taxes flowing. It got all the peripheral benefits that come from building that housing and it did not go into the deep recession that we went into. It did not have the issues. I remember reading about a building firm in Australia. One hundred percent of its work came from that economic stimulus package. The only reason it was able to keep all of its staff on and all of its trainees on was that housing was used as an economic stimulus package. 
That is what a Labour Government would have done. That is what a Labour Government will do again. We recognise the importance of housing not just for the social benefits it brings; I also welcome the moves that we have announced to increase the warmth and the health of our housing in New Zealand and also for those in private rentals. But the reality is that there is a big economic benefit to taking housing seriously which this National Government does not do. The market is not going to provide in this area. What we need is a Government that is prepared to take action is prepared to be a part of the solution and will not just sit on the sidelines telling everyone what the problem is.