Goudie Sandra: Affordable Housing: Enabling Territorial Authorities Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Goudie Sandra: Affordable Housing: Enabling Territorial Authorities Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:649;Page:18470] 
SANDRA GOUDIE (National—Coromandel) 
: 
 I fully concur with my most eminent colleague John Carter. He is absolutely right. He has said the very things that needed to be said about the fact that this Government should have taken a step back and should have done the work necessary so that we would not find ourselves in this very unfortunate position in respect of considering the Affordable Housing: Enabling Territorial Authorities Bill. The first definition in clause 4 covers affordable housing which “means housing that—(a) is for persons living in households that—(i) have low to moderate income; and (ii) have no low or moderate legal or beneficial interests in property; and (b) is priced so that the persons are able to meet—(i) their housing costs; and (ii) their other essential basic living costs; and (c) is within the regulatory criteria for determining what affordable housing is if regulations setting criteria exist”. 
I am blowed if I know what that means and I am sure it is a lot of gobbledegook for most people. But when we look at moderate incomes I am concerned. The average income of the majority of people in my electorate is around $26000 a year. That is the average income for the Coromandel electorate. How could anybody afford to own his or her own home on that level of income? We talk about most people now earning around $60000 a year but coming from the Coromandel I find that very very hard to believe. 
Business is incredibly important in the Coromandel because we need those businesses to provide jobs for the local people and housing is certainly an issue. We have a very limited land resource and we need to use it to the very best of our ability. 
I would like just to pick up on some of the points made by John Carter when talking about affordable housing. He referred to providing housing that can be affordable. If local government and central government are to work together then they need to look at the cost of building a house. They need to look at the cost of purchasing the land in the first instance the cost of building the house and all of the constraints that start to come into play the moment someone takes a step into the council to begin the process. Firstly there is the resource consent cost and secondly there is the building consent cost. The bill has a definition of affordable housing; paragraph (c) of that definition states: “is within the regulatory criteria for determining what affordable housing is”. This Government has not done that. Obviously the expectation is that local authorities will do that and it will place an incredible burden of cost on them because it is not an easy undertaking to start pulling all of that analysis together to determine what affordable housing is. 
In the first instance councils are required to implement legislation passed by the Government like the Resource Management Act and the Building Act. They have to do that regardless of how poorly the legislation has been drafted and how it has not been changed to accommodate some movement in the cost of housing. Councils have to work with that. They do not seem to be able to control the costs incurred by people who want to build houses through that process. That is absolutely where it needs to start. When I talked before about a $150000 development contribution it was $150000 after the costs of about $40000 or $50000 just for the resource consent and the building consent alone. We are looking at some councils charging up to $1000 for building a carport. 
It is going out of control and is becoming a nonsense. The sooner some rationality is put into the process around how resource consents and building consents are dealt with the sooner we might be able to have more affordable housing for people in New Zealand. I wish that some sort of sense could be made within the regulatory criteria as defined in the bill. The purposes clause talks about enabling territorial authorities “in consultation with its community to require persons doing developments …”. But it is done in consultation with its community. People who know anything about what it is like when someone starts to consult the community will know this is just another one of those exercises that adds hundreds of thousands of dollars on to the cost of starting an affordable housing scheme.