Hipkins Chris: Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 21 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3615. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka):I do indeed wish to continue Mr Chairperson; I am just getting warmed up. As I was saying last night before I was so rudely interrupted by the suspension this Government claims that this year’s Budget is sticking with a plan that is working. The real question that New Zealanders will be asking is: working for whom? Whom is that plan working for? Working for the property developers is what this Government is really interested in not working for the first-home buyers who are struggling to get on the property ladder not working for the people who live in State housing who are being ignored shafted and are having their homes sold from under them by this National Government.Why is the Government pushing this measure through under Budget urgency? It is pushing it through because it does not want it to have the scrutiny that it really deserves. It does not want all of the social housing providers who do not want this to be able to come to a select committee and explain how this will not actually work—how this will actually result in a massive transfer of wealth from the Government sector to the private sector and it is the housing tenants who are going to pay the cost in the long term. The Government does not want this all to come unravelled through a proper public inquiry—through a select committee inquiry—so it is pushing it through under urgency.When Government members first mooted the idea that the private sector should have more involvement in State housing they tried to say: “Actually it’ll be the social sector. It’ll be organisations like the Salvation Army and these sorts of unspecified others who will be involved.”They cannot name one organisation that is actively involved in the social sector at the moment that actually wants this to happen. This is an open invitation to all the Government members over there: name one—name one. Not one—they cannot name one social sector agency that actually wants this to happen and that wants to be involved in these provisions. Simon Bridges points to himself. He is now a social sector agency in his own right. “Captain Slick” over there has now decided that he is going to become a social sector agency in his own right.This is simply unnecessary. This bill should not be being pushed through under urgency. It deserves proper scrutiny. At the last election the National Party promised New Zealanders that there would be no more asset sales. I did not see the footnote in small print that said: “Except for all the State houses that we’re going to hock off in a fire sale up and down the country.” Billions of dollars’ worth of State housing assets is now on the auctioneer’s block under a National Government that promised New Zealanders it was going to stop asset sales after the election. That was another broken promise in a long litany of broken promises made by this National Government and that is absolutely abundantly clear in this Budget. Of course we know it is not going to get back into surplus this year and probably not next year either. It is not going to deliver on its promises.It has got no plan to deal with the housing crisis that we have in New Zealand. In a very short space of time $1 million is going to be the average amount needed to purchase a house in Auckland and other New Zealanders are suffering because of that. They have higher interest rates around the rest of the country because the Government is not dealing with the housing crisis in Auckland. Even the plan to free up land in Auckland was of course a plan that the Labour Government was actioning back in 2008 which the then incoming National Government cancelled—so it is 7 years behind the eight ball. Even then the Governmentisnot going to guaranteethat houses built on that land are going to be affordable houses. It was offered the opportunity multiple times yesterday to give New Zealanders an assurance that those houses would be affordable and it did not take it because it knowsit cannot because freeing up all that land is not going to benefit first-home buyers; it is going to benefit property developers.