Hipkins ChrisCHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): There are moments in the House when you sort of take pause for a moment and you take stock and you think. Someone says something that makes you really think about things and you just hope that other members in the House have also paused to think about them. For me that was a few weeks ago when we were in the House and the Minister who is now in charge of social housing Amy Adams stood up and boasted about the fact that the National Government was spending more on emergency housing than any other Government in New Zealand's history. I stopped for a minute and I just thought: Really? That's their signature achievement in housing—that they are spending more on emergency housing than any other Government in New Zealand history?". I thought: "Well Labour did not need to do as much because we actually had houses for people to move into." Amy Adams' pride and joy so far in the portfolio is that the Government is giving more people hotel units or caravans than it is giving them houses.I think that says everything about where this National Government has landed up because for years and years we heard Bill English talking about how the National Government was going to protect New Zealanders from the sharp edges of the economy. Well which New Zealanders are those? It is not the 41000 homeless New Zealanders whom we are now dealing with the tens of thousands of young New Zealanders whom Bill English has written off as "pretty damn hopeless" or the 78 percent of people renting houses today who have no hope of getting the deposit together in order to buy their own homes. None of those people are being protected from the sharp edges of the economy by this National Government.When I think about what this Government has done to housing I do not need to look much further than my own electorate. One of the first issues that I dealt with as a member of Parliament was the publicity and the furore around what was going on in Farmer Crescent in Pōmare. There was a North & South magazine and the cover story on it said: "Is this the"—I do not know whether I can use the word in the House. It was the headline in the paper. It said: "Is this shittiest street in New Zealand?". That is what the North & South magazine said about Farmer Crescent. Phil Heatley who was then the Minister of Housing went in there all guns blazing and booted everybody out. He evicted everybody from their houses those houses then ended up being vandalised and they were eventually demolished and the land sat empty for years. Finally the Government got around to doing a redevelopment. Well how many of those families were able to return? None. How many of those houses ended up being State houses out of the hundreds that were demolished? Only a handful ended up being State houses and the rest have all been private houses.So where did those people go? Where did those problems that were associated with that street go? They have not just disappeared. Those people did not just vanish off the face of the earth. They are still there. They have just been relocated elsewhere and in the meantime the Government freed up some very nice land to create more private houses for people who could afford to buy them—none of the people who used to live there of course. And what do we know now? It is doing exactly the same thing in Naenae and in Ēpuni and in Pētone and in other areas of the Hutt Valley where the Government is demolishing houses and leaving the land empty. Nothing is happening there. Nothing is happening there and as a result we have got more people showing up at our electorate offices in the Hutt Valley desperate for accommodation.I also want to put on the record here that I think the decision to separate out the needs assessment from the provision of housing has been a disaster. The left hand does not know what the right hand is doing and my office day in and day out is trying to mediate between Housing New Zealand and Work and Income because they cannot get their act together and we have got people living in car boots because of it. We have got people missing out on rental housing because they do not know what they are doing and because nobody can get any sense out of Government departments that are supposed to be working together. The Government has made an absolute hash of providing social housing for people. People are falling through the cracks they are being lost in the system and the National Government is simply turning a blind eye to the problem.It is getting worse—more homeless people every day. I had someone sleeping outside my electorate office a few weeks ago because they desperately needed housing and no matter what we did we could not get the Government agencies to get their act together and provide them somewhere to stay. The holiday parks in my electorate think that the Government's housing plan is great because they are getting extra business from people who are homeless and the extra revenue that goes with that. I think that that is an indictment. I think that a fundamental right as a citizen is to have a roof over your head and this Government's track record is woeful. It is a stain on this Government's record—the level of homelessness and the absolute disaster when it comes to people being able to afford any form of accommodation."