Twyford Phil: Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTwyford Phil: Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 05 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13330. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—TeAtatū): In beginning this speech I want to note just how reliant members of Parliament are on the many staff who support us in this Parliament. One such staff member is Sarah Austen-Smith who works in the Labour media team and who has supported me on housing issues on a number of occasions. She is about to leave us shortly and I want to thank Sarah for her work but also thank all of the staff in this institution who make it run.I want to say first that there is nothing wrong in principle with a bill that sets up special housing areas with a bill that makes new greenfield land available or a bill that fast tracks consenting. There is a housing crisis in this country largely because of the economic settings that this Government has refused to change over the last 5 years. The crisis is taking the Kiwi dream of homeownership further and further out of reach for a whole generation of young New Zealanders. It requires bold action but this Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill is not it.This bill is the centrepiece of the Government’s housing policy and in spite of the claims made by the Minister of Housing in his earlier address it falls well short of what New Zealanders want and expect from their Government in tackling the housing crisis. This Government refuses to crack down on speculators. It refuses to consider the advocacy of almost every mainstream economist in this country who says that a capital gains tax should be implemented in order to take the speculative steam out of the housing market. It refuses to stand by Kiwi first-home buyers and do something about the offshore speculators who outbid young New Zealand first-home buyers at property auctions daily. It has no concern that real estate companies are actively marketing New Zealand houses in places like Hong Kong and Singapore as some kind of happy huntingground for property speculators with no capital gains tax no stamp duty and no restrictions on foreign ownership.Even worse still National refuses to roll up its sleeves and actually build affordable houses. For some reason it is allergic to the notion that a Government in a housing crisis like this should actually build affordable houses and in spite of the Fairfax poll a few days ago that showed that 73 percent of New Zealanders support the policy of the Government actually building affordable houses. Instead it prefers to tinker with the Resource Management Act and blame councils for the worst housing crisis this country has seen in a generation.The final piece of the picture that is the essential context for this bill is the agreement negotiated in May between the Reserve Bank and the Government on the introduction of macro-prudential tools that would give the Reserve Bank more tools to deal with monetary policy and particularly loan-to-value ratio lending limits. The Government bungled it it panicked and now first-home buyers are being shafted by this policy which has the effect of locking out 80 percent of first-home buyers who cannot get a 20 percent deposit together. First-home buyers are now being affected by interest rates going up. In fact everyone who borrows money is now being affected by interest rates going up. All four of the major banks have put up their rates citing the effect of loan-to-value ratio lending limits. Bank charges have gone up specifically for low-deposit borrowers and the banks are charging a premium. All four banks are charging a premium to low-deposit borrowers because of the Government’s failure to negotiate even a temporary exemption for first-home buyers from the loan-to-value lending limits. A generation is being locked out of the Kiwi dream of homeownership.We voted for this bill at its first reading during the Budget debate because we took the view that the housing crisis is so severe it is having such a terrible impact on New Zealand families and we felt that if the Auckland Council and the Government had spent 6 weeks trying to negotiate an accord it was worth giving serious scrutiny to at the Social Services Committee. But we will not vote for it now. It is weak. We have no confidence that it will result in any affordable housing being built and submitter after submitter came to the select committee and said that. We have no confidence that it will even make housing any more affordable in general. It is based on a kind of trickle-down theory of housing that if you build more houses no matter how expensive they are somehow that is going to make houses more affordable. Mr Banks is shaking his head but I ask him this: if you import moreMaseratis into New Zealand will that make the Corolla more affordable? It is a fairytale of economics there is no justification for it and we will not go along with it. The Minister explained to the select committee under questioning that if you build a whole lot of $800000 houses then some people are going to sell their houses possibly cheaper ones to move into the $800000 ones and that is how this bill will make housing more affordable. It is trickle-down housing economics and nothing more.I want to note in response to the Minister’s comments that he rushed a swag of amendments to the House an hour or two before the Committee stage of this bill. Supplementary Order Paper 351 amended 57 of the bill’s 89 clauses. He did not see fit to bring those amendments to the select committee. He tabled them on the floor of the House only an hour or two before the Committee stage. That is sadly symptomatic of the rushed ad hoc approach we have come to expect from this Minister. At least I suppose the Government has bowed to pressure and all the comments made by submitters who came to the select committee and complained that the bill contained no serious mechanism to deliver affordable housing. The amendments give the Minister by Order in Council the power to regulate for a share of affordable housing in any qualifying developments. But he declined to put the actual mechanism into law. Hecovered the bill’s inadequacy with only a fig leaf of a power to regulate. Frankly on this Government’s record that gives us no confidence whatsoever that he will use this power. One of the first things this Government did when it came to power in 2008 was it repealed Maryan Street’s law that gave councils the power to practiseinclusionary zoning to require a share of affordable housing in new developments the very thing that should be in this bill—the very thing that should be in this bill. Nick Smith in 2008 voted to repeal the law that would have done that and now he has brought to this House a diluted weak watered-down version of the same thing.This Government stripped the Hobsonville development of State housing and under pressure from Labour the best it could do was reinsert a watered-down promise to build some small number of so-called affordable houses costing more than half a million dollars—affordable to very very few Aucklanders. That Minister and others like the Hon Bill English are on record all over the place as rejecting the notion ofinclusionary zoning rejecting the very notion of requiring developers to build a share of affordable housing. That is why we have no confidence in that Minister’s provisions.There are several other defects I want to just note in closing. This bill weakens quality controls. It undermines environmental standards. Is it any wonder that Aucklanders are alarmed by Nick Smith’s comments in theNew Zealand Herald that Aucklanders had better get used to lower-quality housing developments? That is a major concern. Secondly the override clauses in this bill are undemocratic. They are part of a trend under this Government of stripping away the powers of communities and local government and constantly centralising power to the executive. It is a mockery of the whole notion of an accord that this bill gives the Government the power to do whatever it wants regardless of what a council wants to see. How can a council negotiate a housing accord in good faith with a gun held to its head in that way?The bill also undermines the protections given to special areas like the Waitakere Ranges under the Waitakere Ranges Heritage Area Act. That Act currently has primacy over other laws and regional and district plans but this bill requires only that decisions made in relation to special housing areas give consideration to that Act. Is it any wonder that people in west Auckland are worried about housing developments in the Waitakere Ranges? Labour will not support this bill.