Salesa Jenny; Stanford EricaASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Mālō 'aupito. The next call is a split call. Erica Stanford—five minutes.ERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you Madam Speaker. This is a relatively historic occasion where National and Labour have come together in a bipartisan approach to try and fix what has become our housing crisis. Can I start by acknowledging our new deputy leader and my colleague Nicola Willis for her extremely good work on getting us to a position where we can support this bill.In my community of the East Coast Bays you can't really buy a home for anything less than $1.5 million. So you're looking at somewhere around $300000 for a deposit on a home. And the one thing that the people in my community tell me is that they are worried. They're worried for their children and their grandchildren who won't be able to buy a home in the community where they grow up and that they will be forced to go to places like Australia. That is one of the biggest concerns people say to me that their children and their grandchildren will be forced offshore to places like Australia where there are better opportunities lower cost of living but—critically—much lower house prices. That's what they're worried about. They are desperately worried that they won't see their grandchildren grow up because their children have moved offshore. Not only am I worried about the people in my community I'm also worried about workers in our big cities. Workers like nurses and teachers policemen firefighters who are facing the same issues—can't buy a home in their community and are looking to move to Australia. We see that all the time. I get contacted by nurses all the time who are shifting to Australia for the reasons I mentioned earlier. We're also losing migrant workers before they even get here because they look at the cost of housing and they choose to go elsewhere. In a global war on talent we need to have affordable homes so that we can attract quality migrant workers to this country. Currently in our housing crisis with house prices that have exploded in the last year up 30 percent we're not able to attract those workers keep our own workers and keep our children and our grandchildren here in this country.As was mentioned earlier the last four years have seen a failure to act on any of the problems that we have with our housing crisis. No matter if you look to KiwiBuild if you look to banning of foreign buyers ring-fencing of losses for landlords: none of these things have worked. The single most important thing that we can do at the moment in this approach is to cut the red tape; is to allow people to build on their existing residential properties more homes—and the kind of homes that we need terraced homes apartments multiple-storey buildings on small sections. These are the kinds of homes that our children and our grandchildren will be able to afford to buy to keep them in our communities. I would like to respond to Brooke van Velden who spoke earlier about how important it was to keep families close in communities and in our existing suburbs. And the point that I want to make is that that is what this bill does. It removes that red tape so that we can build more houses in the suburbs where parents can keep their children and their grandchildren close to them—which is the one single thing that I get day in day out in my community. It's that they want their grandchildren and their children to grow up in their communities. This bill allows that to happen.Of course there are concerns around infrastructure. Part of those concerns were acknowledged in the bill where we give councils the ability to restrict areas where this can happen if there are issues with the area and infrastructure. But also we acknowledge that this bill is one part of a much bigger puzzle and that much bigger puzzle includes things like infrastructure. But this bill is about cutting the red tape; something that you would have thought that the ACT Party would have supported. It doesn't fix all the problems we acknowledge that but it is one part of a much broader puzzle that we have to continue doing work on—but it is no reason not to support this bill to allow more housing in our residential areas and more housing in greenfields developments.I look forward to a future where my daughter and my son can afford to buy a home a first home in the community that I live in. This bill and the work that Nicola Willis has done will allow that to happen. Thank you.