Bishop ChrisHon CHRIS BISHOP (Minister of Housing): I thank the member Mariameno Kapa-Kingi for her question. She's doing well when she asks sensible questions rather than talk about some of the things she was talking about in the general debate last week. But let me deal with the questions in order. First question was about Māori homeownership: 31 percent was the figure mentioned; it's too low. Homeownership for all New Zealanders is too low. In 2018 which is the latest figure we have stats for homeownership was down to 63 percent. It's a 30-year low give or take so it's too low for everybody and it's particularly too low for Māori and Pacific.We have a comprehensive plan across the housing system to improve homeownership. The centrepiece of that is the Going for Housing Growth plan which is about unlocking land inside our cities and at the edge of our cities and sorting the infrastructure constraints that stop that land from being developed and also working alongside councils to develop incentives for them to grow. Ultimately as a Government we are focused on dealing with the underlying cause of all of our housing issues and the social housing system—some of which we've been talking about—sits within that broader housing framework around land supply and infrastructure funding and financing. Unless that is sorted we will not make progress on any of the underlying issues in our housing system including homelessness and including emergency housing and including social housing.So we have deliberately made a conscious decision to focus on the fundamentals and that work is under way right now but the driver of our agenda is to lower land cost make it more affordable and cheaper to build and over time that will lead to more affordable housing for homeowners and first-home buyers and for community housing providers and Kāinga Ora as well because Kāinga Ora also pays too much for land; Kāinga Ora also pays too much to build a house. My colleague Chris Penk the Minister for Building and Construction has work under way around lowering build costs but as I say the primary driver is around land supply and infrastructure funding and financing.In relation to her second question around people moving around and the stability of homeownership I agree with her that families that don't get stuck in the rental cycle of moving from year to year are able to put down roots and there's a sense of social stability that comes with that. Evidence tends to suggest kids go to school more often they are able to build relationships—all of the benefits that come with homeownership and social stability. We've also got to balance that with the fact that we have a very tight rental market at the moment. The member will have seen the Trade Me data out last week that rents are at record highs. We've got a tight rental market and the reality is many landlords left the rental market over the last few years because of a twin-pronged assault on landlords. The member calls them greedy. Actually the New Zealand housing system would fall apart without private sector landlords because they do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to providing accommodation to people.The word landlord" is a somewhat pejorative phrase. Actually what a landlord is is someone who rents out something that they own to someone who needs accommodation. We have rejected the last Government's policies when it comes to interest deductibility and restored a principled approach to tax policy which taxes profit not revenue and so that will be wound back and that will put downward pressure on rents. We will also rebalance the rental market to make sure that people who want to provide property to other people are able to do so. There are finally balanced judgment calls around things like 90-day notice periods and some of the fixed-term tenancy changes we are making but I think they will on balance be a good thing because they will send a message that those who wish to provide property are able to do so. In relation in particular to a market like Waiheke Island or Queenstown or Dunedin for example the fixed-term tenancy automatic rollover to a periodic tenancy has caused utter chaos and my colleague Joseph Mooney who's the MP for Clutha-Southland has been advocating for the changes that we are making and rightly so. I think that deals with the third point that the member raised as well around the rental market and as I say reject her characterisation about the greed of landlords.If I just finish with this point: there are often solutions put out there to solve the fact that rents are too high. The Greens like to talk about rent freezes and things like that—economically illiterate nonsense solutions. The ultimate answer to—Chlöe Swarbrick: It's your tax settings Bish.Hon CHRIS BISHOP: Well that doesn't affect it either because as the member well knows and I can't believe we're—I feel like I'm stuck in Groundhog Day because you know the entire time I've been an MP and Chlöe Swarbrick's been an MP we've had this ongoing back and forth about capital gains taxes. I invite the member to go to Sydney and Melbourne and London and all the other countries and places that have in some cases quite punitive capital gains taxes where you will find housing markets that are utterly out of control.The actual point is this: the only sustainable long-term way to make rents more affordable is supply of housing. That is the answer. As the member well knows herself if she looks at the evidence from the Auckland Unitary Plan that was adopted in 2016 which has led to a big house-building boom in Auckland particularly around apartments and terraced housing and other housing typologies that Auckland didn't have enough of there's a wealth of evidence now available—and I refer the member to Stuart Donovan's research and some other research by other urban economists that Auckland has experienced an increase in rents far less than other housing markets with inflexible land supply and restrictive land policy. So once we liberalised the Auckland land market and made it easier to build people went and did it.That's got to be the thrust of our housing policy generally which is why—and the member wasn't here—I go back to the point I made at the start which is: we are dealing with or we are aiming to deal with the fundamentals of housing supply which is land supply infrastructure settings and getting councils to go for growth because the political economy in too many of our councils is stacked against growth. We actually want to invert the situation so that councils don't see growth as something to be ambivalent about or hostile to but they see growth as good. That involves considering sharing the benefits of growth with them and we're taking on board the good suggestions of the ACT Party in relation to that. But the fundamentals are about land supply. It's about density inside our cities and it's about growth at the city fringe where the infrastructure can be justified and the economics of that make sense. That is what we are focused on. That is the only sustainable answer to more affordable rents.Everything else is tinkering. Everything else is sugar-hit economics. Everything else feels like the right thing to do but actually is counterproductive. The proposals often put about by the Greens—and I'm pretty sure the Māori Party has been on board this illogical train as well. Everything about rent controls is counterproductive. It means that landlords just simply don't offer properties in the market in the first place and everybody else raises their rent because when demand stays the—[Interruption] This is economics 101: when demand stays the same and supply falls guess what happens? The price goes up or when the price is not allowed to go up because of sort of Stalinist-style rent controls when the price can't go up they don't offer properties in the first place. That has been the experience of city after city that has looked at the well-intentioned but misguided stupidity of rent controls and decided that that is a good idea.Economists don't agree on that much stuff almost universally but there are two things: one free trade is good. It raises incomes across the board. That's the number one. And the second thing they almost universally agree on with the exception of a few crank economists out there is that rent controls are counterproductive and stupid policy and that's why we won't be adopting them."