Swarbrick Chlöe; Rurawhe AdrianCHLÖE SWARBRICK (Green—Auckland Central): E te Mangai tēnā koe tēnā koutou e te Whare. Today I am standing to talk about an issue that actually was relatively well highlighted in the Financial Stability Report as aired at the Finance and Expenditure Committee earlier today which is the housing crisis and we heard there from the Reserve Bank of New Zealand that they have an immense amount of focus on the need to stabilise our housing market because at present it poses a huge amount of risk to our financial system. Now I've spent oodles of time in this House speaking about this feedback loop which has created over successive Governments and through the likes of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand's monetary policy almost a too big to fail" kind of mentality towards the approach we have been taking to ever-escalating house prices. Just this week the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand has posed the need to start talking about rent controls in Aotearoa New Zealand because what we saw in response in particular to the Government's suite of tax changes to try and dampen the demand side of the supply and demand issues with regard to housing in this country was a huge number of property investors being wheeled out and talking about mum and dad investors and just how bad this was going to make things for those who own property in this country. But the part of the equation that the Green Party thinks was entirely neglected from that mainstream narrative and debate were mum and dad renters—just renters actually as a matter of fact because we know that a third of this country rent and we also know based on Statistics New Zealand's data that those renters are typically paying more of their income towards housing costs. But we also know that if you look at the distribution of homes in this country—and I've spoken about this before in the context of wealth inequality because we know that the spread is such that the top 10 percent of this country owns 59 percent of the wealth and the bottom half the bottom 50 percent of New Zealanders own just 2 percent. How that plays out in the housing market noting that a third of people rent—based on Real Estate Agents Authority New Zealand data—is 30 percent of homes in this country are owned by people who own between four and more than 20 properties. You don't start to rebalance this issue or tilt that balance through timidity but you do it through bold steps to address a problem that has been percolating for a long time. So when we as the Greens have put questions to Ministers over the past two days that the House has been back in question time that we have been putting on the table the need for greater discussion for rent controls in Aotearoa we've heard in response from Ministers the need to keep monitoring this issue noting of course the fact that over the past 10 years we've seen wages increase by 20 percent but rents increase—far outpacing that—by 50 percent. Ministers have told us of the need to just keep monitoring—just keep monitoring this issue. In fact they've also thrown out the fact that they believe that we don't need to engage in this dialogue of rent controls because in fact if you look at the past year of 2020 rents only increased by—based on their numbers—1.6 percent. But the logic that fails there is the fact that during that record low in the scheme of the past 10 years' increase in rental prices we had a six-month rent freeze. That is demonstrative of these kinds of policies working. It shows us that we can do these things. Here I just want to spend a brief period of time addressing a report produced by the New Zealand Initiative which I think is relatively economically and intellectually disingenuous in the way that it puts forward its arguments stating in particular that in San Francisco with the introduction of rent controls—what they said was that people were less mobile. But in fact if you talk to the majority of renters in this country they would love some stability. In my electorate of Auckland Central we have the highest rate of transience amongst renters. That has massive flow-on effects to the likes of the transience in schools that the National Party seems to be so concerned about. Then you also have the point made that in Cambridge Massachusetts when rent controls were removed in 1995 we saw a massive increase in rents by 45 percent—again an argument to continue down this pathway. We can do this. We have the willpower to do it and we—DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The member's time has expired."