Social Housing Reform (Housing Restructuring and Tenancy Matters Amendment) Bill

I wish to speak to clause 1, which is the title of this piece of legislation. It is called the Social Housing Reform (Housing Restructuring and Tenancy Matters Amendment) Bill. It could more properly be called the “Strip Back Housing New Zealand Bill”, because that is what it does. It takes income-related rent subsidies and moves them with a very small quantum of money across to the third sector—across to the civil society organisations that are committed to social housing. It moves the needs assessment process from Housing New Zealand to the Ministry of Social Development. Not only does some money go out of Housing New Zealand and into the third sector—which we would not object to were it not for the full implications of that, which I will make plainer in a moment—but it removes the needs assessment function.

No longer do people who need housing get to go to Housing New Zealand, to people who have been dealing with housing needs for a very long time, for a needs assessment. No, they go to the Ministry of Social Development. So what does that leave Housing New Zealand with? Well, under this Government it leaves Housing New Zealand with a diminishing stock of State and social housing, with fewer responsibilities than it had previously, and as a hollow shell of a thing, which could easily be run over in future years.

This bill could also be called the “Distance Government from Responsibility for Social Housing Bill”. This is where the Government decides it wants to ease itself out of the provision of social housing, ease itself out of the responsibility of providing housing for our most needy, and to, further down the track, I dare say, absolve itself of this responsibility altogether. This could also be called the “Dissolve Housing New Zealand Bill”, because this, again, is the moment when Housing New Zealand ceases to have the mandate it has had for so long—well, it diminishes that mandate. It does not cease to have it in totality, but it ceases to have the extent of the mandate that it had previously. This is something that we on this side of the Chamber object to profoundly.

The Social Housing Reform (Housing Restructuring and Tenancy Matters Amendment) Bill almost could sound anodyne. Unfortunately, it is not. It is anything but. It requires Housing New Zealand to divest itself of some very critical functions that it had previously. It provides the grounds for reviewable tenancies. In other words, any tenant in any State house—it does not matter whether they are elderly or disabled or a family with young children—may have their tenancy reviewed at any time. The Minister of Housing predicts that there might be 1,000 of those in the first year. I predict that there will be many more reviews than that if this Government is re-elected next year and if it is allowed to continue with this despicable policy. This is no more than a Government washing its hands over time in a gradual way so that people will not notice so that only those who are the least able to protest will be the ones who feel the brunt of this policy, and the Government will proceed to wash its hands of the responsibility for providing social housing.

This bill could also be called the “Punish the Poor Bill”—the “Punish the Poor Bill”—because it takes away the security that the poor in this country who need the support of the State not just for a time but perhaps for quite a long period in their lives through one reason or another—

I guess it is axiomatic that the titles of bills like this are somewhat euphemistic, but the Social Housing Reform (Housing Restructuring and Tenancy Matters Amendment) Bill does not really do it justice. Anyone listening to this debate will know by now that Labour members feel very strongly about the changes in this bill, and that we protest what we see as a running down, a winding back, and a dividing up and handing around of the parts of a much-diminished Housing New Zealand.

You can ask why this is important. It is important because for generations in this country, people have believed that it is a core responsibility of the State to put a decent roof over the heads of people who cannot afford to buy their own home or who cannot even afford decent rental accommodation. It is one of the institutions built up by our forebears with the express purpose of giving every child in this country the best possible start in life, no matter what side of town they grow up on or what their parents do for a living. It is not perfect by any means, but we believe on this side of the Chamber that in the 21st century it is still a vital role for the Government to not only ensure the funding of but also deliver State and social housing as a key way that we can level the playing field for all New Zealanders.

If there is one lesson from the disastrous decade of the 1990s, it is that when the State withdraws from housing policy and from the provision of housing and focuses simply on incomes policy, it is an utter disaster. The policy of market rents in the 1990s had terribly damaging social consequences for a whole generation of the children of the poor in this country, and we are still dealing with the consequences. A State house is not just a temporary roof over someone’s head in a time of need; it is a place to call home for people who cannot afford to buy and own their own home. And in the current market there are many, many people who, a generation ago, should naturally have expected that, being unable to buy their own home and to afford that, they could have had the security and the safety of a State house. But because successive National Governments have wound down and sold off the housing stock, we have a pitifully small social housing stock in this country compared with other countries that we usually compare ourselves with. Four percent of the population have a roof over their heads from State or social housing.

The reason that we oppose this bill so strongly is that we believe, contrary to the Minister of Housing’s explanation that he is simply trying to bring in community housing providers, that this is, in fact, part of a systematic pattern of cutting back, winding down, and dismembering Housing New Zealand, and we protest that very strongly.

I do not know what would be a suitable name—the “Winding Down of Housing New Zealand Bill” or the “Final Solution for Housing New Zealand Thanks to the National Party Bill”. It is not an exaggeration to say that this is the end of Housing New Zealand as we know it, and maybe that is a better title for this bill. It is a direct threat to the very existence of Housing New Zealand as a Government-delivered vehicle for social housing for people who cannot afford to either rent quality housing or own their own home. That is, in a nutshell, why we are so strongly against this bill. It is not because we are opposed to community housing organisations having more involvement or having access to the income-related rent subsidy, or, in fact, having housing stock transferred across to them.

We do not believe that the intent of this Minister in this bill is a bigger, stronger, better State and social housing sector. In fact, we believe that it is quite the opposite. If you put this bill and the Minister’s policies, the Government’s policies, in context, then—

I call the Hon Annette King—no competition.

No competition—thank you, Mr Chairman. I am really disappointed that we have had no opportunity to have a response or any comment on Supplementary Order Paper 397, which I put forward. In fact, I did not have the opportunity to raise it again with the Minister of Housing. He did not respond to the Supplementary Order Paper that I put forward, which asked for the Government to consider local government to be considered a community housing provider. So I want to call this bill, the Social Housing Reform (Housing Restructuring and Tenancy Matters Amendment) Bill, the “Lock Out Local Government Bill”. What we were asking for was for the biggest provider of social housing in New Zealand, local government—in fact, the Christchurch and Wellington city councils—to be considered, just considered, as social housing providers under the definition in this bill. The Minister did not address that question at all, and I think it is a terrible lost opportunity.

One of the things that the Government has said is that it recognised that maintaining financial viability is an issue for all social housing providers. The council here in Wellington has adopted a very conservative rental policy approach to ensure that rental housing is affordable for those who live in it. By doing that, by keeping the rents at a reasonable level, it is actually saving the Government millions of dollars on the accommodation supplement, because if it was to be charging the sorts of rents that the others can charge, then the tenants could go straight to the taxpayer and ask for an accommodation supplement. So what local government has been doing is holding the prices down to make it affordable for central government, thereby saving the taxpayer from having to pay out an accommodation supplement, which the Minister himself said was over $2 billion a year. It is a huge amount of money, much of it going to landlords to provide rental accommodation.

It seems to me that this was a great opportunity to enable local government to be considered as a social housing provider. We lost that opportunity, and I think we need to rename the bill. There will be many local governments around New Zealand disappointed that it could not even get a mention—a peep, a squeak—out of the Minister. Even though he could get overexcited about everything else, he could not raise his voice to say: “No, no, we don’t agree with that for these reasons.” I would have accepted that, but we got absolutely nothing from him.

I also think that we ought to change the name to reflect the fact that it is now going to have the assessments done by the Ministry of Social Development. We do not have any particular difficulty with that, but I do think it was an opportunity to look at the issues that arise from it. One that worries me is whether the Ministry of Social Development will have the resources to be able to provide the assessments for housing. Not every person who is in a State house or who is assessed for housing is actually on a benefit, so the number of people going to the Ministry of Social Development to be assessed as being eligible for housing is going to be more than the number of people that it deals with now. We had no response. So maybe it ought to be called the “No Response Bill” because we were not told. We already know that the Ministry of Social Development is very stretched now, and we were not told whether it has the resource to undertake this role.

I do not think the ministry does a bad job; in fact, people would like to be able to go to one place. But I think that there ought to be assurances given because, goodness me, we have seen changes made to Housing New Zealand that were going to provide a far better service for tenants, only to find that the greater, better, faster, more convenient—or whatever it was—service meant that the doors of Housing New Zealand were closed. The “better service” actually meant that the doors of Housing New Zealand offices were closed to the public. Well, that is a great way to give better service, is it not? You say: “We’re giving you fantastic service, because no one’s coming through the door.” Well, nobody could get through the door. Interestingly enough, not even the Prime Minister or the Minister for Social Development could get through the door of a Housing New Zealand office, because the door was locked and, even though they knocked on it, nobody came to open it.

So, you see, the changes that this Government has made already when it comes to providing better services for tenants have been an abysmal failure. They have not improved the services for tenants. In fact, people sit for hours on a telephone line, waiting for someone to answer. Then they get somebody that is not a person, who says that they have to ring back, and so on and so on. So I think that we ought to have had an answer to that part of our questioning.

We were also told that the Ministry of Social Development already does not tell all the people who come to it their entitlements—what entitlements are available to them—so we want to make sure that whoever is going to undertake this role is going to inform the people coming through the ministry’s doors of their entitlements and what they are able to have. These are some of the questions that we might have got answered if the Minister had taken a call on them, rather than getting on his feet to rant and rave about how wonderful he is as a Minister of Housing.

This bill has a number of things that we would support, but it also has many things in it that are going to make social housing worse for New Zealanders. There is a fundamental issue here that this Government constantly overlooks, which is that the people who need social housing are the people who are already the most disadvantaged in New Zealand. What they do not need is an approach that is going to review their tenancies on a regular basis—review their tenancies to see whether they are able to stay there. It is a lack of understanding that it is not just a house that they live in; it is their home. As a constituency member of Parliament, I know—as I am sure many members here who are will know—that people really value where they live. They want to bring their children up there. They want to send their children to schools in their communities. They want to be part of a community.

But the evilness of these reviewable tenancies is that those people can be told that they are down the road, and what really worries me is that there is no protection for the most—most—vulnerable: our older New Zealanders. Why did the Government not pick up Phil Twyford’s Supplementary Order Paper and write it into the bill that the tenancies for the elderly and the disabled people in New Zealand would be protected? It is all about ideology. That is what this Government is driven by—not by the needs of people, not about caring for the people who need the greatest help, but by what those members’ ideology tells them about State housing and community housing.

💬 David Bennett: Rubbish!

It is absolutely right, David Bennett—no care or concern at all for those who need social housing. Those people are just a number to move around. They are just a number to go and interview and say: “You ought not to be in that house.”

This bill is incorrectly named. It does not provide greater social housing reform—and that is in the name of the bill, “reform”. That is a misnomer. This is not a reform; this is a march backwards, as Phil Goff said, to the Ruth Richardson era.

I rise to take a brief call on clauses 1 and 2 of the Social Housing Reform (Housing Restructuring and Tenancy Matters Amendment) Bill as it proceeds through its Committee stage under urgency. I really do want to contest again the title of this bill. What this bill really does is create uncertainty about one of the most basic social needs that people have, and that is the very human need to have a good roof over your head. The idea that this bill is somehow reforming social housing really is a misnomer. It is, in fact, actually taking away the very notion—a proud tradition, I think, that was started by a Labour Government, in fact—of social security. That is the idea that people, no matter what circumstances might befall them, would actually have the support of the State from the cradle to the grave. And “From the cradle to the grave.” is actually a statement that was made famous by Michael Joseph Savage. It was around the idea of social security.

In fact, probably one of the most demonstrable images of social security, and what Michael Joseph Savage meant when he talked about security from the cradle to the grave, was actually around housing. Those images of the first State houses and of furniture being moved into those first State houses have, in fact, been lost sight of by this Government. It does not seem to understand the importance of security in that phrase around social security. Here it is pushing through a piece of legislation under urgency that actually makes housing certainty so much less certain for some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

The thing that I find deeply offensive about this is that, yes, it is the elderly, it is the people who live with disabilities, and it is the children who will suffer as a result of not having security around this most fundamental of needs. So it is not just a little bit of reform, or what the name of this bill in brackets is—“(Housing Restructuring and Tenancy Matters Amendment) Bill.” Why do Government members not say what they really mean? Why do they not say “Tenancy Insecurity”? Why do they not say “Reviewable Tenancy”, instead of hiding it and disguising it under this general phrase of “Tenancy Matters”? It sounds quite benign, but, of course, as this side of the Chamber has very ably demonstrated through the course of this debate, it is not benign at all. It is an active act by the State to give insecurity of tenancy to those who are the most vulnerable in our society.

So if the Government was going to be up front about what this bill was about, then it would actually have the word “insecurity” in the title of this bill. It would have the word “vulnerability” in the title of this bill. It would not dare use such a benign word as “reform”. Although I suppose that those of us who learnt to understand what the word “reform” meant back in the days of Ruth Richardson et al. probably do quiver whenever we see those words.

I think Bill Birch used it as well, actually. He was going to just reform the labour market. It was just this benign thing—reform—but, of course, what everyone came to understand about that was that it meant that their wages got cut. That is what reform meant. So in this context what reform means is that people’s security of tenancy is cut. It means that they can no longer rely on knowing that their children will continue to be able to go to the local neighbourhood school, because, if their circumstances change, then they will be moved on.

I want to just reiterate what my colleague Moana Mackey said. What about the good old relationship-style model of having Housing New Zealand staff who used to negotiate this through with people? That was instead of having an 0800 number that people can never get through to, where people’s calls are never returned, and the faceless—

I move, That the question be now put.