Street Maryan: Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeStreet Maryan: Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 03 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13167. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour): I rise to speak to the second reading of the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill.Hon Dr Nick Smith: It’s the Committee stage.Hon MARYAN STREET: Sorry the Committee stage is what I meant. Thank you. I quite agree with the Minister of Housing that affordability is not a new problem. It was a problem when we were in Government between 1999 and 2008. It was indeed a problem but I have to say that since December 2008 the average residential property price in Auckland has gone up from $496000 to about $645000 in July of this year. So it has increased by about 30 percent in the time since the Government has been in office. The average residential property price in Christchurch has increased by 25.6 percent since December 2008 when it was about $345000 to $433000 in July of this year. And on we go. We can see that although it is not a new problem it is a worse problem.We spent much of our 9 years in office—and again I agree with the Minister that this is not a single-solution problem—devising a menu of options that we could put together that would address housing affordability. I would not for a moment say that the Minister was lying but I will say that the Minister was profoundly mistaken when he said that there had not been any other legislation addressing housing affordability. I remember it well. I was the Minister of Housing who introduced it. I was the Ministerwho ushered it through the House against the protestations of the people who are now in Government. It was called the Affordable Housing: Enabling Territorial Authorities Act or some other difficult name. That is what it was designed to do. It was called the Affordable Housing: Enabling Territorial Authorities Act and it was one of the first pieces of legislation that this Government repealed on coming into office which was rapidly followed by abolishing our shared equity scheme. That was another way in the menu of things—the menu of solutions—that we had devised to help particularly young people get into their first home.The Minister said in his peroration earlier that there had been no previous legislation. Because he said it loudly and got red in the face about it does not make the Minister right. He was completely wrong on that score. So I just want to set that record straight to begin with.Secondly I would be inclined to support this bill if it did anything. Our Act our law by contrast actually gave local authorities the legislative ability to require that 10 percent of any residential development be set aside for affordable housing—10 percent. So what does this bill do? The bill says in clause 4 that ‘The purpose of this Act is to enhance housing affordability by facilitating an increase in land and housing supply in certain regions or districts listed in Schedule 1”. Well the only one listed in schedule 1 is Auckland and I will come back to that shortly. So this is the intention and purpose of this bill and at clause 11 we get to the guts of it. That is about the form and content of a housing accord. What does it say? I go to look for something concrete like “10 percent of a residential development must be put aside or may be by legal means put aside for affordable housing” and what do I see? I see that “A housing accord must—(a) be in writing;”—whoopee—and must “(b) set out the parties’ agreement about how they will work together to achieve the purpose of this Act …”—mmm getting warm. It has got to “(c) set out agreed targets for residential development …”—talk about lacking ambition. It does not even say “10 percent”. It does not even suggest an amount of any residential development that should be set aside for affordable housing.In fact under that clause it talks more about how to dissolve a housing accord and how to resolve disputes around a housing accord than it does about housing affordability. In fact housing affordability is not mentioned—not mentioned. There is a reference to the purpose of the bill but it does not say that there must be affordable houses. It just says that there must be more—there must be more—and you know we will work that out between us. This is more flimflam than you can—Hon Annette King: Shake a stick at.Hon MARYAN STREET: I was going to say “shake a stick at” but it sounded a bit colloquial for the Committee. It is more flimflam than you can shake a stick at as my colleague Annette King says. The point about this is that this Government has done nothing on affordable housing in 5 years. If this is one of its great pieces of strategy to address housing affordability which is chronic and has become worse under this Government then I am sorry about it. It is pathetic. It does not specify housing affordability in any of the housing accord clauses.The things that our Government did—just to refresh the Minister’s memory—were that we brought in the Welcome Home Loans which this Government has chosen to keep. Yes because it was very difficult for it to repeal it. Secondly we brought in KiwiSaver deposit-matching where the Government would incentivise new homeowners by matching what they could save if they saved a certain amount over 5 years. That is now coming to maturity. The shared equity scheme is the one where I think the Minister misses the boat entirely. Land supply of course is important but what about Crown-owned land? This is what Hobsonville was about and the Whenuapai Air Base was about. The Crown land was set aside by a Labour Government for 3000houses—500 of them to be social housing 500 to be affordable houses and the other 2000 the Minister and his mates could buy at market rates. That was not ghettoising anybody. It was not going to pull down the values in John Key’s electorate. It was going to address housing supply by freeing up Crown land.One of the other things that was important was that in freeing up Crown land—by a Government that cared enough to do it—we could couple that with a shared equity arrangement and say that the Government can own the land and the new homebuyer can buy the house and then it becomes entirely possible for young first-home buyers to get a foot on the ladder. They can buy the house and the Crown keeps the value of the land. They can either buy the Crown out over time—this was our plan—or they can onsell the house and whatever profit they make from that can then go into buying their next property. Freeing up Crown land is not something we hear this Minister talk about. He talks a lot about land supply. In the National Government’s terms that simply means urban sprawl. Urban sprawl is not the only way to address housing affordability. In fact it is the least efficient way to deal with housing affordability. Higher density is much more sensible than moving metropolitan urban limits and just creating sprawl and setting people up in houses where they have no access to amenities or transport nodes or anything of that kind.The other thing I want to say very briefly is that schedule 1 applies only to Auckland. People in Wellington Christchurch the Minister’s own electorate of Nelson and Queenstown live in the most unaffordable parts of the country. In fact Tauranga is now up there amongst the top half-dozen least affordable places to buy a house. So if this is going to be one of the panaceas for housing affordability that the Minister says it should be it should be expanded. Not only should it have some real teeth to it but it should be expanded to all of those areas that have high housing costs. This does not even touch the surface. Thank you.