Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill

I move, That the Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill be now read a second time. I think there are a few things that we need to clear up for the member who spoke at the end of the first reading, Su’a William Sio. If he is sending people to Housing New Zealand to go on the waiting list and wondering why they are standing in queues for so long, it is because he is sending them to the wrong place. That is now done by Work and Income. There are 147 Work and Income offices throughout New Zealand. They are front line, so you can turn up there and that is where your assessment is actually done. I think it is really important that you understand—[Interruption] Go on—shout it out; get it out. I understand you are a bit angry about today because it has not gone quite as badly, actually, as you hoped it would. So first of all—

💬 Carmel Sepuloni: I can’t wait for the next few days—it’s all downhill from here. When we’re talking, she stops. Keep going.

💬 Hon Member: Hey, grow up.

Bring it on—bring it on. [Interruption]

💬 Carmel Sepuloni: When we’re talking, she stops. Keep going.

All good? Finished the abuse yet? Get it out—get it out. Get the abuse out of your system.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! Look, I would actually like to hear the debate.

Thank you very much, Mr Assistant Speaker. What we want to make clear is that what this bill can do is actually quite exciting. It is not necessarily about buying the houses, but it might be. What it could be about is an organisation that wants to lease a house—yes? So, currently, it has land or it has got a house and thinks it wants to get more so it can provide for the very same people, who, we all agree, need more housing.

So let us go for a bottom line—we all agree that there are vulnerable New Zealanders who need access to higher-subsidised housing from the Government. So your argument is that you think the Government should own all of them land; we think there is actually room in the market for community housing providers as well as the Government. So we do not abdicate our responsibility in any way, shape, or form. In fact, I am making a commitment that there is another $152 million that will be going in to help subsidise the accommodation of those who really need it. We actually subsidise accommodation in this country to the tune of nearly $2 billion and we are adding another $150 million.

We all agree that there are vulnerable New Zealanders who are not getting access to that heavily subsidised housing, and they should be. The disagreement we have is whether it should all be State-owned or whether there is room for community housing providers to also be doing that. We stand on this side and say that there is most definitely room for community housing providers to provide housing and wraparound services, and how you do that is by passing this bill. What this bill actually means is that we can contract with those providers over a longer period of time, and for some that provide specialist services for certain cohorts, we can actually give them more money so that they have a guaranteed income that they can either borrow or lease against, or provide more services. Community housing providers are saying that to us every day. We would like to be providing more housing. Whether or not we get that from the Government—right—so whether it is about them building more houses themselves, going into partnerships, or leasing properties, what they want from the Government is a guarantee of income so that they can actually then use it against those things. That is what this bill does.

This bill supports community housing providers as they are building the sector. It does not abdicate the Government’s responsibility to pay. In fact, on the record we make an obligation that we will pay, with certainty, more than what they needed and asked for, and this bill delivers it to them.

At least the Minister for Social Housing got to her feet and stayed on her feet for what, all of 3 or 4 minutes? That is more than we can say for all of those 1-minute johnnies on the Government benches—all those Government backbenchers—who are so proud of this policy of selling off State houses that they could not summon up more than half a minute’s speech to explain and promote their Government’s policies, which raises, I have to say, the question of why this bill is being rammed through under urgency. What is it about this bill that means it has to be passed by tomorrow? Are the members opposite in such a hurry to flog off billions of dollars’ worth of State houses to their property-developer mates that the bill cannot go to select committee and the public cannot be given the opportunity to have a say and come along and make submissions? Is the bill so urgent that it has to be rammed through under Budget urgency? I would like to hear an explanation from the Minister or from other members on the Government side for why this bill has to be rammed through under urgency, because I cannot see, for the life of me, what is so worthwhile or so urgent that it has to be pushed through under urgency.

This bill is about flexible purchasing. It puts extraordinary discretionary powers into the hands of the Minister, to do sweetheart deals with the people he wants to sell these State houses to. He can ramp up the subsidies if he wants to—if it is a particular deal with a private landlord or a property developer whom the Minister is desperate to do a deal with—or he can turn down the subsidies. That kind of flexibility is exactly what National members want in order to be able to do the sweetheart deals they need to flick off these State houses, because they are desperate to offload them to anybody who will take them. The Salvation Army walked away, the Methodist Mission walked away, and the other community housing providers are basically saying “The only way we could make this work is if you not only gave them to us at rock-bottom prices but you also heavily subsidised us into the bargain.”

This Government has been a bystander while the housing crisis has got worse and worse and worse. House prices in Auckland have gone up $100,000 in the past year—$100,000 in the past year. They have gone up by 87 percent in Auckland in the past 6 years but Government members are deep in denial, because they believe that there is no housing crisis, that there is no problem, and that speculators are not a problem. Oh, actually, I think they just admitted on the weekend that speculators are a problem, because they were so embarrassed by the Governor of the Reserve Bank saying publicly that they had not done enough to tackle the housing crisis and that they should do something about the rampant property speculation that is driving house prices higher and higher in Auckland. People desperately wanted this Budget to do something about the housing crisis, but there are so many gaps in this Budget. It does nothing for the regions, it does nothing to diversify our economy, and it does nothing to plan for future economic growth for New Zealand. But probably the biggest disappointment is that it contains nothing of any substance to fix the housing crisis.

Today the Government announced that it is going to make Government land in Auckland available for housing developments, and I think everybody agrees that that is a good idea. The shame is that this Government did not do it 7 years ago when it came to office. Instead, what did it do? Government members derided and ridiculed the Helen Clark Government’s work on providing an inventory of Government land available. They knocked that work on the head as soon as they took office, and they have sat on their hands for nearly 7 years. They have done nothing with it, and it was only as they were scrambling around in a panic to find something to present to the public that would show they were doing something about the housing crisis that they dusted off the work that was done 7 years ago by the former Labour Government.

What is really telling if you watch Nick Smith, the Minister for Building and Housing, on the TV news tonight, or if you go to the Stuff website and see the story about him, is that he was asked by a journalist how many of the houses they are going to build in Auckland on vacant Government land will be affordable. Nick Smith gave a sly little smile and said: “I think they’ll be affordable to somebody, because somebody will buy them.” That says it all.

💬 Hon Annette King: Cynical.

It is absolutely cynical. They do not care about the thousands and thousands of frustrated New Zealand families—Kiwi first-home buyers—who are desperate simply to get a roof over their heads and a home that they can call their own. This Government acted cynically with this announcement today—as has been the case with the special housing areas, where fewer than 10 percent of the houses built are actually affordable, and the Government’s definition of affordable is anything under $550,000. That shows the cynicism of this Government. They were not prepared to take up Andrew Little’s challenge. They were not prepared to promise to the public of New Zealand that all the houses built will be affordable. All we got was Nick Smith with his sly little smile saying that they will be affordable to somebody.

All this Government has done is tinker around the edges with half-baked policies that have not made the slightest bit of difference to a housing crisis that has been getting worse and worse under National’s watch. The special housing areas, which are the centrepiece of the Government’s attempt to deliver to the lack of supply of houses in Auckland, have been an abysmal failure. In 1½ years 170 houses have been built in Nick Smith’s special housing areas—170. Auckland needs 13,000 houses every year just to keep up with population growth. Under National, a deficit of 20,000 houses has built up over the past 6 years. That is the Reserve Bank’s number. Twenty thousand houses short, we need 13,000 a year just to keep up with population growth, and how many are being consented under National? Fewer than 8,000 a year. That is why the shortage is getting worse and worse every year. Every day the shortage is getting worse, and that is why Auckland house prices are going up by $1,000 a day. Is it any wonder that it now takes 50 years, on average, to pay off the average home in Auckland? Is it any wonder that homeownership rates under this National Government are the lowest in 60 years—60 years? And John Key says there is not a housing crisis.

Other than the spectacularly unsuccessful special housing areas, what else has National done about the housing crisis? Well, 12 months ago it unveiled another great policy of the National Party, and that was to remove tariffs and anti-dumping duties from varnish, nails and various building materials. Nick Smith stood in this House and promised that it would knock $3,500 off the cost of a new home. His own officials advised that it would save a little over $1,000 and that that money would be pocketed by developers. That is the kind of policy that this National Party specialises in. Since 2006 National members have been blaming the Resource Management Act for expensive houses; since they were in Opposition, they have been saying that the Resource Management Act is the problem. And what have they done? Paul Goldsmith, what have they done about the Resource Management Act reform in 6 years in Government? Absolutely zilch. National has done nothing to reform the Resource Management Act in 6 years in Government, and Bill English has got the cheek to stand up in this House and blame the Resource Management Act. What audacity.

National’s other bright idea was to throw subsidies at first-home buyers through the Welcome Home Loan scheme, and yet the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, Treasury, and the Reserve Bank all told it that it would make no difference—that it would drive up house prices and make the unaffordability crisis even worse than it is already. And now the National Government thinks that selling off State houses to property developers is some kind of answer to the fact that people are living in cars and garages all around New Zealand, and that people are rotting in cold damp substandard private rentals because there are simply not enough houses. But National thinks that the solution to that problem, rather than building more houses, is to change the ownership of the few houses that we have that are there as a dedicated pool of housing for the most vulnerable and the poorest New Zealanders—that, somehow, selling them off to private developers is an answer to that problem. I just do not understand it. I do not understand what makes this National Government tick, and I do not know where its members lost their moral compass.

It is an honour to rise and speak to the second reading of the Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill. Mr Twyford and some of the Opposition have questioned the urgency for speeding through this legislation. The urgency is to do with the 3,000 people who will get extra housing support because of this bill. This will allow support for up to 65,000 people in total, 3,000 more people by 2017-18. What does Mr Twyford say to those 25 percent of people on a waiting list, waiting for Housing New Zealand with a 9 percent supply?

Really, the urgency means that no one should talk longer than the useful information they have to say. That is a lesson your leader learnt today. Something that will last with me through this whole term is this Budget, but, equally, what will stay with me through the whole term is the look on your faces while your leader spoke.

What I say to the community sector, a creative community sector, is that we believe in you. Mr Hague said that we believe in a small State—we do not believe in a small State; we believe in a big community. That is what we are supporting, Mr Hague—a big community. That is what we are supporting. What I can say to those New Zealanders, whether they be Gene Simmons, Axl Rose, or Jon Bon Jovi, is that we believe in you. If you want to be supported to independence in your housing, this bill will support you. We believe in you. I commend the bill to the House. Thank you.

Mr Speaker—

💬 Jono Naylor: One of you do it.

Well, at least I have got something to say. That member—all he did was pick up the research notes and make a speech that everybody else has made. I have to say, when I listened to the speeches—1 minute 27 seconds, 2 minutes, 3 minutes—that is what the contributions have been tonight.

I have to say that this is a very disappointing debate from the National Party. You see, we have before us tonight a piece of legislation that is not going to go to a select committee, that the public of New Zealand will have no input into at all. This House, costing thousands of dollars a minute, is required to scrutinise legislation on behalf of the public when urgency is taken. We would expect that a Government that is so proud of the legislation, that really loves the legislation, would stand and make a 10-minute speech on what it means, what it is going to do, and why it is so proud.

💬 Tim Macindoe: We’ve talked about that.

But what we are getting—apart from the interjections from the senior whip, who seldom gets to his feet but makes his speeches from his backside—I have to say, from the C-team National has rolled in tonight, are 1-minute and 2-minute speeches, 1-minute and 2-minute speeches. That is an outrage to democracy. It is an outrage that those members cannot get on their hind legs and make a speech about a bill that they are so proud of. I have to say, Minister Bennett, that you have not told us why there needs to be urgency. We got an explanation from “Mr Doozy” up the back. “Mr Doozy” up the back told us—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! I know that the member probably does not take offence to that, but his name is Doocey.

The missing “s”—the missing “s”. Let us put the missing “s” back in Mr Doocey and say that he told us why this bill needed to be passed under urgency. And why does it need to be passed under urgency, Minister? Because tomorrow—believe this—3,000 people will be housed. If we pass this tonight, we are going to have 3,000 people housed tomorrow. Let us go back to our electorates and see how many people get a house tomorrow because we took urgency on a bill that does not need urgency, Mr Doocey with an “s”. It does not need urgency. It does not.

Why not let the people of New Zealand have a wee say on the bill. I know why. Because maybe the thinking public of New Zealand will say: “What are you doing this for? What is the reason for this bill? Why do you need this bill, apart from the fact that you want a creative way to sell off State houses?”. National does not want the people coming in, who may well be State house tenants, telling it what they think about this bill, so it is ramming it through under urgency tonight, with this pathetic excuse that it has to do it because 3,000 people tomorrow could get a house.

Well, I have to say, tell me how that is going to happen with this bill. How exactly is this bill going to provide 3,000 extra houses? In fact, how does selling off State houses actually create more houses? How does that work? How does selling off State houses create more houses for social housing? You see, National members cannot answer the question, because it is nonsensical. What it is doing is absolutely nonsensical.

I think the Minister really put it into perspective for all of us tonight when she was speaking and she let the cat out of the bag when she was talking about State house tenants. She called them cohorts. That is what they are; they are cohorts, those State house tenants—just a figure, just a number, just a statistic. They are not people who need to be housed because they are the most vulnerable we have. We do not believe—

💬 Chris Bishop: Outrageous!

No, it is not, Mr Bishop. You totally agree with me. I can tell by the look on your face. You know it. If there is one person over there who is not in the C-team, it is Mr Bishop. In fact, I predict that he is going to be in the A-team pretty fast indeed.

I have to say that I think National members are the Neros of New Zealand because they have been fiddling away with house prices and house policy for 7 years. They have been fiddling, fiddling around the edges, actually having to increase their fiddling every year as we put pressure on them by saying: “You are not housing New Zealanders. You are not treating New Zealanders fairly.”

So as they have been fiddling, house prices in Auckland have been going up and are going up at $1,000 a day. Do you know that the increase in a month is more than a pensioner gets in a year in their pension? That is how fast the house prices in Auckland have been going up. Unfortunately, if they are one of those pensioners whose house value is going up, they will not be able to afford the rates if they are on a pension.

Then we have the Government’s new approach to housing. It is going to free up Government land. Well, we said that 7 years ago. In fact, we said it at Hobsonville. And let me remind members opposite what their Prime Minister, who was then Leader of the Opposition and member for the area where Hobsonville is, said about the use of Government land to provide affordable housing. Can anyone remember? Go back and have a look. Just put it into Google. You will find it. He said it was economic sabotage—economic sabotage—

💬 Chris Bishop: Doing it now.

—well done, Mr Bishop; he had it—to build State houses on land like Hobsonville.

Now it has got this idea, which is 7 years old, that it will open up some Government land and build houses on it. But what we know is that there will not be many that will be affordable, because there is something like 17 in Hobsonville out of the thousands that have been built. Even the 17—if the people in them were to sell them today—would no longer be affordable houses. They were already over $400,000 and climbing.

In this new policy, which was made up in the last few weeks—and we know that for a fact—rushed through, put together in urgency and in a panic, we are not told how many will be affordable or what affordable means. You know, it was only a few weeks ago that I said to Steven Joyce on our much listened to weekly radio show on Newstalk ZB: “Why don’t you use Government land to increase the supply of land in Auckland?”. I said: “The Government owns more land than anybody else.” And do you know what the Minister did? He pooh-poohed the whole idea. He pooh-poohed it.

💬 Chris Bishop: Oh!

You see, it was before the Government made the decision to do it, Mr Bishop. That is why he pooh-poohed it. I will ask him next week on my much listened to radio show what he now thinks of the idea of releasing Government land. He will no longer pooh-pooh it; he will say it was his idea, no doubt. In fact, he thinks he has most of the ideas in the National Party.

You have to say that the whole housing area and these special housing zones that we have got, as my colleague and friend Phil Twyford said, are just a sham. They are just some sort of paper transaction that the Government is having, saying: “Look, we’ve got these special areas and there are 170 houses that have been built.” And then it says: “But what about all the consents that we’ve got going through?”. Well, I do not know whether it has worked it out, but people cannot live in consents. They actually are not houses; they are bits of paper that are shuffled around and maybe one day something will happen.

So what has it done in this space? Well, I like one of the things it has done. It brought in the knock-down nails policy. It got the cheap nails coming in, which were going to reduce the cost of houses by $3,000 a building. Big deal—big deal—because within 3 days the benefits of the knock-down nails were all gone.

When you look at it, it has done nothing with the Resource Management Act. We offered to assist the Government in passing the Resource Management Act around housing. Oh no, it did not want to do that because it wanted the whole big enchilada. It wanted the whole lot. It was not prepared to accept a deal where we could have helped it with changes to the Resource Management Act in housing.

I have to say that the Government still has not learnt that if you do not provide warm, dry, affordable housing, you are going to end up with diseases like rheumatic fever. Let me just end on this note: it has not increased the number of houses. It has not made those houses warm and dry for many people. Today, to top it all off, it is stopping the funding for the rheumatic fever programme.

I just want to speak for a few minutes on the Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill. The previous speaker, Annette King, said one thing that I agree with, one thing only, and that is that Chris Bishop will become a member of the A-team sooner rather than later.

I do want to make a comment in respect of Phil Twyford, who for every single question time for the last 6 months has been vein-bulging at the Government, saying: “Housing crisis! You need to act with urgency. It needs to happen now.” So here we are tonight, standing here with a bill that enables our Minister to negotiate with community housing providers who are ready and waiting to be able to enter commercial deals that are innovative and flexible and will deliver outcomes for their community, and all we get is dissent, pooh, pooh, pooh, and negativity. That is why that party is where it is in the polls.

This is a party that actually has a framework to enable us to be able to resolve issues. You can see it in Tauranga. I was there last week. The Tauranga Community Housing Trust was announcing there the opening of its new, brand new, housing with one and two bedrooms. The tenants were absolutely loving the move from the cold, damp, old, historic State houses. You know, life is not all about the State having to provide everything. There are people in the community who have skills, who have people whom they care about who can partner with the State and get a better outcome. That is what this bill is about, and I cannot wait for it to pass. Thank you.

It is a second reading debate and ordinarily in a second reading I would be looking for the departmental report summarising the submissions. I would be looking for the select committee’s report on what the New Zealand public had had to say about the bill we were considering, and looking for the revision-tracked version of the bill, because there always is a revision-tracked version, is there not? Invariably, the bill that is introduced to this House is considered for its first reading, goes away to a select committee, and comes back changed. It comes back changed because, actually, scrutinising the bill for a little bit longer results in improvements to it. That is why unnecessary urgency is a bad practice for democracy and a bad practice for lawmaking. There is no conceivable reason for urgency for this bill. The bill itself would have been the better for going to a select committee.

I am going to start, instead of quoting from the select committee report, by just quoting from the problem definition in the regulatory impact statement. What that says at paragraph 25 is: “In December 2014 Cabinet agreed a direction for reform of the social housing sector which creates a fair, effective, and efficient social housing market.”—market. Yet the reason that the Government needs to be involved in providing social housing at all is that experience in the real world has shown that social housing is a service that is not well matched to need by markets at all. A market is the very last thing that we need in social housing. Instead, this bill is not about providing for need; it is about providing for the Government’s ideological beliefs—in particular, this ideology of the smaller State. I thank Mr Doocey for his very witty joke in his contribution in this debate.

On 1 November last year the Minister Paula Bennett admitted that in fact this was a State asset sale. She said so on national television, continuing that ideological programme of State asset sales, and winnowing down the size of the State that was commenced by the Government in the last couple of terms. She also went on to say, and Bill English later on in this House confirmed, that there was no guarantee whatsoever that any of the proceeds from selling off those State assets would be used to build any new houses. In other words, it was just about shuffling around the ownership arrangements of the houses, not about housing anyone extra at all. Simply shifting responsibility for the housing of vulnerable New Zealanders on to charities or to the private sector, and then banking the cash from a fire sale of those assets, will not solve anything at all.

Almost 5,000 families were on the waiting list for a State home in December. The census showed over 200,000 people in Auckland, including around 63,000 children, were now living in a crowded household because of the shortage of housing. Those children, as Annette King has said, are at growing risk of diseases of overcrowding, diseases of poverty: skin infections, respiratory conditions, and rheumatic fever. Rheumatic fever prevention, as Annette King has said, was the programme that the Government introduced with all the fanfare in the last term of Parliament. It has lowered the axe on it in the Budget today with no fanfare whatsoever. Those kids do not need to be made the responsibility of a charity. They need a real, tangible place to call home. New Zealand’s housing crisis is caused fundamentally by a lack of affordable homes. Selling off State houses so that developers can make money by sitting on the land or building more expensive homes, which is precisely what is going on under this Government, cannot possibly be the answer.

This bill also serves the ideological belief of this Government that its role is only to be a provider of a small amount of help as a last resort, rather than as the guarantor of those basic rights that New Zealanders hold. Bill English, again, in a meeting that he held with the editorial staff of the New Zealand Herald, said that Housing New Zealand has “become a pool of long-term dependency. You get in and you stay in so you don’t move out. So it’s creating large future liabilities having them in here.” If you go back to the original report—he refers to a report from the Department of Building and Housing. Its big thing was about mobility—how you meet serious housing needs but enable people to keep moving back up the ladder to independence, which is a somewhat cynical way of saying that actually the Government’s agenda here is about minimising the cost of providing services for people. That ladder towards independence is the very ladder that the Government proposes whisking out from more and more State house tenants under the reviewable tenancies scheme.

This bill is also about the ideology of separating out policy advice from the basic grounding that the policy advice could benefit from by being co-located with the planning, funding, and provision functions that exist in Housing New Zealand.

I can almost conjure up that early 1990s environment. I can imagine the hairstyles. I can think of the shoulder pads, the chrome, the pink and grey stripes, and probably, I imagine, that that is the environment in the rarefied atmosphere of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, the Government department that this Cabinet, this Government, can trust to give it the ideologically pure advice on policy around housing that it so desperately craves. Thank you.

Annette King said that this was a Government of Neros because of its fiddling policies as far as social housing is concerned, but I think that it is actually a Government of zeros, because that is the number of additional rental houses that its policies and this bill will generate—zero. That is the effect of this Government’s policies. That is the legacy of 7 years of this National Government—zero. That is what it really is. This bill is a monument to this Government’s appalling record on housing.

When I first entered this House in 2011 there was already a very significant housing shortage, especially in Auckland. Of course, in that very same year we had the Christchurch earthquakes, and that created another housing crisis there. Even then the Government was saying: “There is no housing crisis.” However, it got worse and it got worse and it got worse until we got to the point when nobody with half a brain could deny that we have the most serious housing crisis in this country’s history. And yet this Government still fiddles and still produces zeros as far as increased houses for people who need to rent them from the State are concerned.

New Zealand First would support sensible policies that provide more efficient services and better services at less cost, but never—never—at the expense of people who are being forced out of their homes. That is, effectively, what this legislation and the principal Act that it amends do. What this Government seeks to do is to minimise the role of the State; abdicate responsibility to others; provide as little money as possible for housing; contract others to take responsibility instead; push as many people out of State houses as possible; favour non-government organisations, many of whom are simply not capable of fulfilling this function; pretend that public services are being provided at less cost; avoid full accountability for social housing; and, lastly, fail to protect people against exploding rents. That is the record of this Government, and that is why I say that this bill is a monument to its appalling record on housing.

If you look at some of the best housing providers in the community, one of the best is the Salvation Army. It is an NGO that could be relied upon to be a good provider. However, it looked at the Government’s policies, it looked at what the Government was trying to do, and it stepped back and said: “We’re not going to be a part of that.”—to its credit; to its credit. That, actually, is a sound commentary from an independent source on what this Government’s housing record really is, and on its legislation on social housing in particular. The main thrust of what the Government is trying to do is, actually, to reduce the size of the State and, in particular, in this case, to reduce the role of Housing New Zealand. It could not be more clearly spelled out than we see in this amendment bill. It is a further step in the wrong direction.

By preventing Housing New Zealand from giving advice to Ministers, it is sidelining an important role for Housing New Zealand—a role that it has performed very well over a very long time. It is a mistake to do that. Instead, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment will be given that responsibility, but, actually, it is going to be only a contract supervisor with a limited role and no real responsibility. The result will be that far too much institutional knowledge will be lost, and Ministers will be empowered to give directions. There is a deliberate move towards what is called “flexibility”, but none of the speakers opposite—even though they have used the word a lot—have told us what that really means. What I think it means is that Ministers will be able to exercise their own agenda, and that is why they have been given the power to give directions. This is not a good way to conduct and administer housing policy in this country.

💬 Tim Macindoe: Does that member understand what he’s trying to say?

If that member opposite cannot understand what I am trying to say, then that is an indictment on him, not on what I have said. He does not understand this bill. I doubt that he has even read it, and he certainly does not want to take responsibility for some of the worst Government policy that this Government has brought forward in this term or the last one. I recommend that that member actually reads the bill, and when he speaks next perhaps he will try to say something sensible.

The results of this Government’s policy will be that social housing will be delivered at very great arm’s length from the Government’s agencies. More power will be given to Ministers, which is another example of an increase in executive power. That is likely to mean a very political approach and it is likely to mean a very dogmatic approach, not one aimed at looking at the best interests of the most vulnerable people in this country, despite what those opposite have been saying. It will, in fact, have the opposite effect. It will mean those people will be worse off and have fewer housing choices, and it will certainly not meet the housing need for people who need to rent homes in this country. It ultimately means more housing deprivation. State houses will be even harder to get, non-government providers will impose their own policies and practices—and goodness knows what they will be—and, most of all, it will mean a very uncertain outcome for low-income people, many of whom will be pushed out of State houses with nowhere really to go. That is a very poor legacy and a very poor outcome.

The price of supressing demand, which is what this Government is really trying to do, is very high in social terms. It will cause reduced health and well-being, increased poverty, more families at risk, compromised social cohesion, and an exacerbation of the already badly disaffected enough underclass of people in New Zealand. Despite the Government’s claims, people will inevitably be bullied out of their State houses. The Government will continue to sell State houses. Goodness knows how that will improve the situation for people who need to rent homes in New Zealand. The Government will build far too few State houses, and that is the fundamentally bad part of the Government’s programme. There is no money, really, set aside in this Budget to improve that situation. This Government is simply unwilling to invest and to ensure that there are enough houses for people to rent in New Zealand. It is another step in the wrong direction.

The Government will pay huge sums of money to community housing organisations through contracts that are supposed to be tailored contracts. What does this term “tailored” mean? Again, nobody opposite has really described what that means. What I think it means is that some organisations will be treated differently from others. And what is the effect of that and what is the reason for that? We have not been told. We do not really know what this amendment will do as far as these so-called tailored contracts are concerned. Let us hear an explanation from the Minister, because so far she has not given one. These are still just subsidies to registered providers. Call it what you like; that is actually what they are. These organisations will own the housing funded by the taxpayer, they will profit from it, they will compete for it, and they will try to get the highest rents they can for them.

This bill is a retrograde step. It emasculates Housing New Zealand. It seeks to reduce Government accountability. It increases executive power. It does nothing to reduce rents. It does nothing to increase the rental housing stock. New Zealand First will certainly vote against it.

Well, I think at the heart of this debate about this bill is actually a Government that is putting people at the centre of social housing rather than putting a housing provider at the centre of the bill. It is about people. That is what this whole Budget is about. I would like, with great pleasure, to commend the bill to the House. Thank you.

The next call is a split call. Jan Logie—5 minutes.

After what may have been the shortest speech of the night—I am not even sure whether that last speech made 20 seconds—I rise to take a call—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! I am sorry, but I will ask the member to start again. I could not hear the beginning of her speech.

Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. I was just commenting on the brevity of the last speech, possibly under 20 seconds and possibly even the shortest speech of the evening. Well done, National Party! Your enthusiasm and commitment to the detail is absolutely impressive! I am sure we are all feeling far more enlightened on this side of the House about the details of this bill that has just been presented to us so recently.

As my colleague has also mentioned, normally we come to the second reading after having been through the select committee process where we would have heard submissions from the public who have raised concerns around the detail or the concept of the bill. We have been able to ask questions, and we have had their responses back. We have had ministerial advice from the departments, to be able to consider what the implications are and what this wording is conveying. In my experience, even legislation that has been one page in length, incredibly short, has resulted in change. That is the usual process that we go through. We are here in this situation with a bill relating to housing, which is an absolute core issue for this country at the moment. We know we have a housing crisis, even if some members of that Government seem a bit shy about using that word. I have heard someone on that side use it occasionally, slipping up, and I am sure they got told off afterwards. But here we are, on a major issue for this country, having legislation passed under urgency.

It is legislation—as we have heard several members on this side say—the detail of which is a little opaque. We are looking at the documents that have been given to us; I am looking at the departmental disclosure statement. What this bill is doing, from what I can make out, is that it is not going to affect a tenant’s experience directly. The actual bill itself though, the context that it is sitting in, is in relation to the passing over of State assets to other private property developers or community organisations.

The actual bill itself will enable the Minister to have flexibility to tailor the contracts. We have been hearing a lot about flexibility. What they are saying specifically is that with tenants’ needs resulting in higher or lower tenancy management costs, they can vary the terms of the contract, make payments for vacant properties to guarantee a provider’s income stream, and make offers for long-term fixed-price tenancies at prices that diverge from the market rent but benefit the Crown, the provider, and the tenant.

We see mention of the tenant in there a couple of times, but not that often, despite the fact that we have been told this is all about the tenants; it is not about anybody else—it is not about the Government and it is not about the providers; it is about the tenants. Actually, there is not much mention of the tenants, from what I can see in this. There has been no consultation with any State housing tenants, in the documents here. From what I am hearing from State house tenants in the community, this is very unsettling. Communities are being destroyed at the moment, and that is what people are telling us. Communities that have existed in Maraenui, in Porirua, in Glen Innes, and around the country—longstanding communities are being destroyed. Yet we hear from the National Government that apparently it is the Government for big community. [Interruption] Well, communities of constant transition and movement—that is actually not community, Mr Doocey, might I say.

We are being told that this is about lower payments for providers in places where there is little ongoing demand. I really think that there is enough detail and complexity in there that deserves consideration, and I do have some questions for the Minister We are being told that this bill will allow community organisations to get more money to meet the needs of clients. It is not necessarily even about the sale of houses but about leasing arrangements. I know Women’s Refuge gets houses through Housing New Zealand at the moment, and the needs of women and children going into refuge are dealt with through separate contracts, not through the housing-related contracts. So I am struggling to see where this fits and why those specific needs of tenants cannot be dealt with through existing contracting systems. I am also struggling to understand why Housing New Zealand would need more flexibility. There are questions to be answered, and I really hope that at least at some stage in this debate we get some answers.

The Hon David Cunliffe—5 minutes.

It is déjà vu. Here we are, in the dead part of the evening, passing a Budget bill under urgency, through all stages, when it is not urgent. It is not urgent. The only thing that is urgent is to relieve the Government of embarrassment, because New Zealanders do not want the Government to do what this bill does. I remember a picture of Bob Semple taking the first table into the first State house. New Zealanders loved Mickey Savage’s Government, which built State houses so that New Zealanders who could not afford to rent a house got a roof over their heads. Then the Clark-Cullen Labour Government brought in the income-related rent subsidy to take some pressure off families who could not put food on the table.

Well, this bill undoes all of that. This bill empowers the Minister to flog off those State houses to for-profit developers, in a grand payback to National’s business lobby mates. This bill gives the Minister the ability to change by fiat the 25 percent fixed income-related rent subsidy, thereby costing hard-working New Zealand families the food off their table because they cannot afford the crazy prices of Auckland rents. This is a sad day, and the Government’s pollsters know it. That is why we are here, in the middle of the night, passing this bill, this shameful bill, through all stages without a select committee hearing, without the opportunity for New Zealanders to have their say, because the Government wants it. [Interruption] There they are—sitting and chirping, smug in the arrogance of a third-term Government. They are smug in the arrogance of a third-term Government. They just want it off the TV screens, because they know New Zealanders fundamentally deplore what is being done in this bill.

You know, the housing crisis is about real people, like the people in my electorate. We have three families with young kids who are living in garages. They have come to my office. We have a family of 12 in a two-bedroom property, and the adolescent kids do not have rooms and they do not have privacy. We have got a family that is under abuse, which could not get a safe house because there are not enough houses. And you know that the solutions to those terrible problems of overcrowding and abuse are not hard to think of. You build more houses and you get foreign investors out of the market, because they are simply speculating and driving up the rents.

💬 Carmel Sepuloni: That makes sense.

That makes sense. It is not that hard to understand, but what is the Government doing? It is flogging the State houses off for profit, and it is going to drive up rents by fiddling with the income cap. It is taking it in exactly the wrong direction, because this is a Government that has hit the panic button—hit the panic button. It is well into its third term, it has finally woken up to the crisis, and the word came from the pollsters: “You’d better do something.”

And there is no plan except profit with these guys—no plan except for profit, which comes off the tables of hard-working New Zealanders. Hard-working New Zealand families like the family in my electorate—12 of them in a two-bedroom house—are waiting for the State house that will never come. So, you know, the Government said: “Well, we will give it to the community sector, like the Salvation Army or the Methodist Mission.” Well, they are decent people, who said: “We don’t want an unfunded mandate. What are we going to do with all of the liabilities when you are not giving us any money to buy them with?”. It is a travesty, and the longer that New Zealanders have to hear about it, the less they are going to like the Government that is flogging off their houses for profit and pushing up their rents. That is why we are in this House, in the dead of night, passing this bill without a select committee hearing. It is wrong. The bill is wrong. The process is wrong. The result is wrong, and it will be part of the undoing of this selfish, greedy Government, which is acting against the interests of New Zealand families.

In very simple terms, this bill aims to help families in need to get into social housing that meets their needs. How can this be wrong—meeting families’ needs? It cannot be wrong. As we heard, this bill is to introduce flexibility for the Ministry for Social Development to contract and negotiate with social housing providers. That is to support a growing role for community providers to deliver social housing. It is also to improve the supply of social houses to meet demand. It also clarifies and confirms a number of processes that already happen in practice. This bill will also help tenants get back into housing independence. We want to make sure that those people who are in real need are provided with social housing. We are making social houses fit for people to live in. They are not just properties to us; they are houses where we want to house people in need—families in need.

This National Government has insulated all State-owned social houses. They are warmer, drier, and healthier under this National Government. This flexibility about ownership is a great thing. Social houses sold will remain as social houses, and the tenants will remain housed in them for the duration of their need. This is a win-win situation for tenants, for local communities, and for taxpayers. It is not the duration of the speech; it is the message that counts, and the message is that it is a win-win situation for tenants, for local communities, and for taxpayers. Thank you. I support the bill.

Never before has so much pride been displayed by so few in such a short space of time. It has been quite cooling. That was one of the longest contributions that we have had at a second reading on a bill going through under urgency, where it is not having the scrutiny that we would expect in Parliament under normal circumstances in terms of its select committee stage. It is, frankly, an arrogant Government that thinks that it can rush through legislation at this pace, even under urgency, without giving that legislation a full debate and a full airing. We have heard some fantastical explanations why. There was Mr Doocey, who thinks that, magically, houses are going to grow overnight if only this bill is passed. We will wake up in the morning and, throughout the land, there will have sprouted houses into which the good people can move.

There is a naivety in this Government, which is showing through in this legislation. We are hearing over and over and over again with this piece of legislation the panic that has set in in this Government. There has been some polling and those members have seen there is a problem—their inaction on housing over their 7 years in Government—yet here we are, pushing through a half measure that is only enabling something that is not going to help the situation. It is the only solution that they have come up with. Other suggestions that they have had around housing seem to have disappeared, such as the much-touted during the election campaign, and the much-touted at the beginning of this year, Resource Management Act reforms. That was going to be the silver bullet for housing in New Zealand. We are still waiting for Dr Smith to show us those reforms. We have actually said: “Show us them. Put them on the table and do you know what? If there is some stuff that will help with housing, we’ll look at it. Let’s use the mechanism of a national policy statement, and then we could, actually, perhaps join with you and work on that.”, but has National fronted up and shown them to us? No, because this is a Government that does not have answers around housing. This is a Government that has got empty ideological rhetoric, which is not going to make a blind bit of difference to the lives of ordinary New Zealanders.

What we have had touted tonight—starting with the Prime Minister and echoed through all the research note speeches—is a clear commitment to compassionate conservatism coming from the Government benches.

💬 Hon Member: Big community.

The compassionate conservatism that those members believe they are displaying seems to have evolved so that, actually, it translates into the big society. One of them let it slip, but I think he got it wrong and called it “big community”. The term that your overseas overlords use is “big society” when talking about this. But National Party members need to actually have a look at what compassionate conservativism is. We actually have had National Parties in the past in this country that have practised compassionate conservatism. What is happening in this House tonight and in this legislation is not the conservatism of Sid Holland and it is not the conservatism of Keith Holyoake. When those leaders of the National Party sought to remove the State from housing, they looked to sell houses to the individuals who lived in those houses. They did not look to flog them off to their mates in the corporate sector in order to put people under corporate overlords. This is the Cabinet club conservatism, as my colleague Phil Twyford called it, that underwrote the 1990 market rentals that Ruth Richardson put in place.

Do not kid yourself that this is any form of compassionate conservativism. When compassionate conservativism started to be touted by right-wing parties—it was Bush who first started using it; he abandoned it, pretty much, after 9/11 and just went into plain old “kick ’em in the guts” right-wingism, actually. But compassionate conservativism does not look back to your roots. You are a party that has been better than that—Mr Assistant Speaker, I am sure you are as well. The National Party does have a history that is rooted in some belief in that, but what we are seeing displayed tonight is not that. This is a return to the 1990s and a belief that you can sell State houses off to anyone.

We started with the fiction that this was legislation to enable State housing to be sold to the community sector in some hope of achieving their big society. Well, the problem that we are seeing here, as we have in many places, is that the key providers in that sector said “Yeah, thanks but no thanks.”; they did not believe that State house tenants would be better served under this model than they could be with the Government providing, so they did not want a part of that. And what have we had now? We have had Bill English saying that, yes, we could be seeing some of these being sold to private property developers. The Government has tried to dress this up as something that this is not. This is, pure and simple, a flogging off of our State houses.

What else are we seeing? Not only is the Government divesting itself of the ownership of the housing, it is divesting Housing New Zealand of some of the core policy functions and thinking that need to go into this, so that we will no longer see Housing New Zealand having a policy function. We will not have a dedicated part of our Government that tries to put the bits of housing policy together. Instead, we are going to see a continuation of the approach that we have seen, with the functions spread and splintered across the Government, and we will see that it does not have a coherence that has tenants at the centre and the well-being of the tenants at the centre. My colleague Phil Twyford put it very well when he talked about a State-owned version of Barfoot and Thompson and said that we will have a State-owned letting agency, not a Government department that is dedicated to doing what we expect Housing New Zealand to do and to doing what its functions should be.

That is a very sad day for New Zealand, because what we used to have in this country is a belief that a core part of the safety net that we provided for our citizens was housing—housing that would mean that people would not have to go homeless. I think what we are going to hear through the course of this debate is examples from all around the country that we can speak of where we have constituents who are not being well served. What is most upsetting for us is that these very same constituents are going to be even worse-served under the changes that we are making here under urgency tonight. There is nothing in this legislation that is going to give back to our tenants. Instead, what we have is an ideological commitment to selling houses off to whoever the right bidder is that the Government can find.

The shortage of housing is getting worse, and other speakers from this side of the House have alluded to the fact that selling houses does not create more houses. I think my colleague Annette King chose to point out that selling them off is not going to magically create more houses any more than passing legislation under urgency, Mr Doocey, will allow for houses to magically appear on the landscape of New Zealand. What we have to have, and what we are not having from this Government, is a proper commitment from the Government to ensuring that New Zealanders are housed—something that we think is a pretty basic role of Government and something that we are committed to doing. Just simply passing the buck on to the community sector, which does not want a bar of it, is not responsible government in this area. Passing the buck and abrogating itself of its responsibility as a Government is not good enough.

But what is more galling is where I started: this is a group of people who are trying to kid themselves that this is some kind of compassionate conservatism. This is a return to their 1990 roots, not their roots in the past, in the 1960s and the 1950s, when actually there was a grain of truth in the fact that the National Party in New Zealand did exercise a kind of compassionate conservatism. There was a belief in the role of the State. There was a belief that it needed to do right by New Zealanders. We are not seeing that in this legislation. What we are seeing is a Government that is walking away from one of its core responsibilities, which is providing adequate housing. It is a Government that is out of ideas. It is a Government that is poll driven. What we are seeing here tonight is not going to solve anything.

Given that the members opposite are so keen to talk about the details of this bill, I will simply commend this bill to the House so that we can move to the Committee stage.