Bidois DanDAN BIDOIS (National—Northcote): It's a great privilege to be able to speak in the first reading of the Urban Development Bill. I was waiting for the member Mark Patterson to break out his Rob Muldoon voice there. I would have loved to have heard a bit of that on a Tuesday night—but for another time. We're here today to discuss a very important issue and that is the urban development authorities. This bill basically provides a framework for these authorities so that we can build houses. After two years of this Government and two years of non-delivery in this area it seems they are finally wanting to get a move on in their year of delivery. This bill is a bill that we'll be supporting. It is a bill that is a long time waiting for this House and essentially it's an omnibus bill that provides the Crown—or Kāinga Ora which is essentially Housing New Zealand. It's been renamed Kāinga Ora. It basically enables Kāinga Ora to look at designated zones throughout the country and treat those as development areas and then fast track their processes for building homes. So that is something I think is really important. Of course to address housing in New Zealand there is really only one way to address housing and that is to build more houses. The thing that I am interested in is that we've actually got a bill here that is developing a workaround on current legislation. That actually exemplifies the need to look at the existing regulations—in particular the Resource Management Act (RMA)—and to speed up that process. This bill in itself—all this is doing is actually working around the current rules that we have because they're so onerous and cumbersome and these housing developments need to get a move on in that support. So the National Party supports this bill. We support this bill because ultimately we want to see more houses built in this country. We do have some reservations though and we'll be discussing those in the select committee process. But I want to talk about what National was doing under the previous Government in this area because I think National has got a proud record in this area. We established the Hobsonville Land Co. They were helping Housing New Zealand to provide more homes more easily through these designated housing areas. You can look no further than my own electorate my fantastic electorate of Northcote where we had the Northcote redevelopment project which is still going on now. I'm very grateful that this Government hasn't abolished that project. This project is essentially going to put 1500 new homes on to the housing market. Of those 500 will be Housing New Zealand or what we're calling now Kāinga Ora; 500 will be what we were calling at the time income-related and Phil Twyford has gone and called those KiwiBuild; and then the final 500 will be sold at private-market value. So this is in fact a perfect example of these designated areas where these urban development authorities can work to speed up the regulations and speed up the consenting processes the building consents and the resource consents—the dealing with the bureaucracy of local government and central government—and I think that that is a proud record that we stand on here with respect to that. Let's face it: KiwiBuild has been a fail—am I right? Hon Members: That's right. DAN BIDOIS: That's right. KiwiBuild has been an absolute failure and we need to look at other ways to actually speed up the development process for homes. This bill through the urban development authorities will in fact achieve that. But I think we do need to revisit the RMA because this bill is based on workarounds to the RMA and we've already committed on this side of the House to tackle that problem head-on. We've heard a bit of rhetoric and platitudes from the other side but no firm commitments. You know we're getting on and doing the policy work in Opposition because we know that the issue of building of houses in New Zealand is an important issue and National takes this issue very seriously. So we commend this bill to the House.