Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill

Members, when the Committee was suspended last night the Committee was debating Part 1. Chris Hipkins had the call and he has 3 minutes 40 seconds remaining, should he wish.

I do indeed wish to continue, Mr Chairperson; I am just getting warmed up. As I was saying last night before I was so rudely interrupted by the suspension, this Government claims that this year’s Budget is sticking with a plan that is working. The real question that New Zealanders will be asking is: working for whom? Whom is that plan working for? Working for the property developers is what this Government is really interested in, not working for the first-home buyers who are struggling to get on the property ladder, not working for the people who live in State housing who are being ignored, shafted, and are having their homes sold from under them by this National Government.

Why is the Government pushing this measure through under Budget urgency? It is pushing it through because it does not want it to have the scrutiny that it really deserves. It does not want all of the social housing providers, who do not want this, to be able to come to a select committee and explain how this will not actually work—how this will actually result in a massive transfer of wealth from the Government sector to the private sector, and it is the housing tenants who are going to pay the cost in the long term. The Government does not want this all to come unravelled through a proper public inquiry—through a select committee inquiry—so it is pushing it through under urgency.

When Government members first mooted the idea that the private sector should have more involvement in State housing, they tried to say: “Actually, it’ll be the social sector. It’ll be organisations like the Salvation Army and these sorts of unspecified others who will be involved.” They cannot name one organisation that is actively involved in the social sector at the moment that actually wants this to happen. This is an open invitation to all the Government members over there: name one—name one. Not one—they cannot name one social sector agency that actually wants this to happen and that wants to be involved in these provisions. Simon Bridges points to himself. He is now a social sector agency in his own right. “Captain Slick” over there has now decided that he is going to become a social sector agency in his own right.

This is simply unnecessary. This bill should not be being pushed through under urgency. It deserves proper scrutiny. At the last election the National Party promised New Zealanders that there would be no more asset sales. I did not see the footnote in small print that said: “Except for all the State houses that we’re going to hock off in a fire sale, up and down the country.” Billions of dollars’ worth of State housing assets is now on the auctioneer’s block, under a National Government that promised New Zealanders it was going to stop asset sales after the election. That was another broken promise in a long litany of broken promises made by this National Government, and that is absolutely, abundantly clear in this Budget. Of course we know it is not going to get back into surplus this year, and probably not next year, either. It is not going to deliver on its promises.

It has got no plan to deal with the housing crisis that we have in New Zealand. In a very short space of time, $1 million is going to be the average amount needed to purchase a house in Auckland, and other New Zealanders are suffering because of that. They have higher interest rates around the rest of the country because the Government is not dealing with the housing crisis in Auckland. Even the plan to free up land in Auckland was, of course, a plan that the Labour Government was actioning back in 2008, which the then incoming National Government cancelled—so it is 7 years behind the eight ball. Even then, the Government is not going to guarantee that houses built on that land are going to be affordable houses. It was offered the opportunity multiple times yesterday to give New Zealanders an assurance that those houses would be affordable, and it did not take it because it knows it cannot, because freeing up all that land is not going to benefit first-home buyers; it is going to benefit property developers.

When we get down to the hard end of a debate, that is when we actually get the opportunity to question the Minister, and the Minister can take that chance to answer the questions that we have been posing in the first reading and the second reading. We have one of the up-and-coming Ministers—well, he was an up-and-coming Minister—in the chair this morning, Simon Bridges, and I am sure that he is going to take this debate very seriously. Last night we were told how proud and excited members opposite are about this legislation. They were so proud and excited that they took 1-minute speeches. I think the record was 27 seconds. That is how proud they were. In fact, I think the speech from the member Jono Naylor might have been 27 seconds.

But, anyway, we are now in urgency debating a bill that is not going to go to the select committee. It is not going to the select committee—for no reason that we know about. There is nothing urgent about this legislation, other than that Mr Doocey from down in the South Island said that if we pass it today, we will get 3,000 homes tomorrow. Well, of course, we all know that that is rubbish. So now is the time for the Minister in the chair to answer the questions that the public would ask if they had the opportunity to appear before the select committee. I would like the Minister to tell me whether he has read the regulatory impact statement of this bill. If he has read the regulatory impact statement, then why are there no reviews or evaluation reports to inform on this bill and on whether the policy given effect by this bill will work? That is what the regulatory impact statement says—that there are no reviews or evaluation reports on this policy. So the Government does not even know whether this policy is going to work, because it did not bother to get an evaluation or a review on the policy.

The Government has not allowed the public to review or evaluate the policy, because it is passing it under urgency. Why was there no evaluation? Why not do what Sir Peter Gluckman, the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor, constantly tells the Government to do? What does he say? He says that the Government should base its policies on evidence—good evidence—and that good policy comes from good evidence.

💬 Hon Member: Any evidence.

Any evidence would have been a help—that is true. So why was there no evaluation or review done on this policy before this bill was brought into the House? Minister, we would like an answer on that.

Secondly, Minister, why did Treasury not provide independent opinion on the impact of this bill? Why did Treasury not provide that independent opinion? From my experience as a Minister, Treasury usually comments on absolutely everything, whether you want it to or not. I can only assume that the Government did not want Treasury to comment on this bill, because the regulatory impact statement says that, no, there was no independent opinion from Treasury. Why not, Minister? Why not do the work to find out whether this policy is going to work for the very people who are affected by it?

I think that the members opposite were absolutely stunned. The “C Team” that rolled up here last night was absolutely stunned that there was no evaluation done. Do you know what? They had not read the regulatory impact statement. Not one of them had picked it up off the Table—[Interruption] Had you? Not one of you had read it. So like lambs to the slaughter, they come in here and vote for something when they do not even know how it works. There has been no evaluation done on this policy. Well, that is very, very poor policy making indeed.

For my last question, I want to know, Minister, why the Minister concerned wants more powers to make delegated legislation under ministerial direction. My understanding is that there is already power for the Minister, but she is seeking greater powers for greater flexibility to be able to sell off State houses, and all she needs to do is gazette this ministerial direction and present a copy to the House after some sort of consultation. When I look at the consultation that took place on this bill, it took place with people in the community sector who did not know what the agenda was, and it took place back in March, when Bill English was saying “The Salvation Army are really keen on this policy. They’re going to move on this policy.” But the truth is that they were sold a pup and they are not interested in it.

To pick up where my colleague Annette King left off, not only were those providers sold a pup but also the whole of New Zealand was. This policy is about nothing more than finishing off the job of privatising and destroying social housing in New Zealand. That is the job that the National Party decided to kick off in the 1990s. Last night Kevin Hague said that he could picture the clothes and the colours of the 1990s—the pastels and the big hair of the 1990s. Kevin might even have had hair in the 1990s, who knows? Actually, no, he did not—he did not have hair in the 1990s, either.

It was in the 1990s that the National Party began its ideological crusade against social housing, and that is what this bill carries on. Part 1 of this bill is all about finishing the job that National started in the 1990s. There were 13,000 State houses sold off in the 1990s. Every member of this House who is an electorate MP will say, if they are honest, that one of the biggest issues that comes through the door of their electorate office is people who cannot find housing. In my office, we used to call it the “Friday, 4.30 p.m.” problem, where people would come in on a Friday afternoon with nowhere to live and nowhere to sleep on the weekend. They do not go to the National Party offices because they do not get any response. They come to our offices, and we work hard with the social housing providers to find them somewhere to live. This bill is a charter for the Government to abrogate its responsibility for social housing.

What is more fundamental in our society than the need for shelter—the basic right of people for shelter? In our society, if people cannot find shelter themselves—if people cannot afford to house themselves—it falls to the Government to ask how it will make sure that shelter is provided. The National Government’s response to that is this bill. It throws away the Government’s accountability, it throws away its responsibility, and it pushes that on to the social housing sector. As Annette King said, the social housing sector has looked at this policy and has said no. It has said: “We cannot do this. If you want us to be the people who take on the role that the National Government does not want any more, then give us some money to do that. Give us some money to be able to provide that housing.” But that is not National’s agenda here. National’s agenda here is to push the problem on to other people, to cut the funding as it goes along, and then to blame those people for the situation that they find themselves in.

The extraordinary thing about this legislation, in Part 1, is the power that the Minister gains from it to enter into “flexible purchasing arrangements”. What a form of doublespeak. What a form of doublespeak from the National Party. The flexible purchasing arrangements are to allow the Minister to hock this stuff off to property developers—to the people who funded the National Party’s election campaign last year. [Interruption] That is right. This is about making sure that there is a sweetheart deal possible between the Minister and property developers. Hock it off at a cheap price—make it try to work. But the fundamentals of this policy are deeply, deeply flawed.

You know, we have housing Ministers—and goodness, there are tonnes of them in the National Party now—who cannot actually come up with a decent policy. There are tonnes of them. We have housing Ministers telling us that the problem with the social housing stock is that it is poorly configured and in the wrong place, and that the solution to this is to sell the poorly configured housing in the wrong place to somebody else—and somehow that will solve the problem. Somehow the problem is solved by shifting it on to somebody else. How typical it is of the National Government to solve a problem by shifting it on to someone else and blaming them for not sorting it out. That is what Part 1 of this bill is fundamentally about. It is about a National Government with no real plan for how to make the lives of people in social housing better, and it would rather flick the problem off.

So the questions for the Minister in the chair, Simon Bridges, are important. Why are these flexible purchasing arrangements being put in place now when there are no social housing providers who want to buy into this scheme?

💬 Hon Annette King: It’s only for the developers.

So it can only be for the developers. The question that Simon Bridges needs to get up off his chuff and answer right now is: why is National pushing this policy through Parliament today when there are no social housing providers who want to take this up? It is an ideological experiment. This bill—Part 1—should have been scrutinised by a select committee. It should have gone to a select committee so that social housing providers and members of the public could have at least tried to turn this pig’s ear into something useful, but that opportunity was not granted to New Zealanders.

I want to make another point about what Part 1 does. What Part 1 does is finally kill off Housing New Zealand’s role as a social housing provider. After more than 7 years National has come in and said: “Housing New Zealand, you are a landlord. That’s it. Plain and simple.” In fact, this bill goes even further. This bill takes it from landlord to letting agency. That is what this bill does. Once upon a time Housing New Zealand played a role in understanding the needs of its tenants. How many electorate MPs in this House, and list MPs as well, have Housing New Zealand tenants coming into their offices because Housing New Zealand is no longer there to help support them in their lives?

I have got a question for the Minister. In this environment, where all these problems are being shoved away, down the road here on The Terrace, in my electorate, are the Gordon Wilson Flats. They have been empty for 2½ years. What is happening for social housing in a community like Wellington City? Wellington Central is a wealthy electorate on average, but when you look at the lives of the people who got thrown out of the Gordon Wilson Flats, their lives are not getting better. They need support from a housing provider that looks at their broader social needs. Housing New Zealand used to make policy about housing—about the fact that we might actually need a plan for housing in New Zealand and that we might actually need to think about the future needs of those who live in our social housing. But Part 1 of this bill says that that is not the Government’s responsibility any more. So not only is it outsourcing the provision of social housing but it is also outsourcing the policy for social housing. It is saying that Housing New Zealand has got no role.

Maybe they will not be saying this, actually, because they appear to be mute today. But perhaps at some point a National Party member might get up and say “No, he’s got it all wrong. It is MSD who is doing housing policy now.” Well, good luck finding someone in the Ministry of Social Development whom you can talk to about social housing policy. Good luck finding that distributed among the thousands of other tasks that people in the ministry have got. If we are serious about the importance of providing shelter to our most vulnerable citizens, then we would have an agency whose job it is to focus on that. Instead, what this bill will do is take that away completely from Housing New Zealand and turn it, as my colleague Phil Twyford said last night, into the public equivalent of Barfoot and Thompson—a real estate agent, a letting firm. That is not good enough. That is not what a responsible Government does.

What a responsible Government does is take seriously its responsibilities to the most vulnerable New Zealanders. Just because the Government and Bill English, like some kind of Southland version of Rip Van Winkle, have woken up to the problem of inequality and poverty overnight, after 7 years, does not mean that the National Party has got a plan to lift people out of poverty. It does not mean that the National Party has got a plan to ensure that we reduce inequality—for it to suddenly decide, after 7 years of slumber, to do something in this area. Actually, this bill is much more instructive about where the National Party is at when it comes to the most vulnerable New Zealanders than a small amount of money going into some families’ bank accounts.

This bill shows that the ideological agenda of the National Party is not over—it is not over. In fact, this finishes off one part of it and says that social housing is somebody else’s problem. Well, on this side of the Chamber, we think that the shelter of our most vulnerable citizens is a core responsibility of the State. As well as its own provision of social housing, it is a core responsibility of the State to work with the other people who are providing social housing, not to shove the problem on to them with inadequate funding. This bill thoroughly undermines what we have come to believe is important about social housing. Nothing has stuck in my craw more in 7 years than being lectured by National Party members about State housing and the legacy of Michael Joseph Savage and Peter Fraser. This bill is a slap in the face for the legacy of social housing.

If you listened to the Labour Party members you would think this bill was some kind of wildebeest Gene Simmons - like monstrosity coming to get you, with tongue flapping in the wind. Well, actually, Andrew Little might like that and we have heard a lot of rhetoric from Grant Robertson on this bill—rather better, actually, I might say than his leader yesterday, but be that as it may. So what is this monstrosity we have heard about? What is it doing? Where is the secret agenda? Where is the ideology? Well, it is just this. We see this in the preface: more flexible and innovative social housing—more flexible and innovative social housing. So for all the talk and all the, frankly, scaremongering, we have got from the deputy leader of the Labour Party, that is what this is. I, for one, think that is a great thing. I was with Paula Bennett and Todd Muller in Tauranga just last week, looking at the kind of thing this bill will enable more of. It is really, really exciting.

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: Yeah? Tell us.

I will tell the member Ruth Dyson. She wants to know. Two old rundown State houses in a suburb in my electorate are going to become five new brick, I think, warmer, drier houses that will be fit for purpose for people and that people will really want to live in. In that area it will not give just those people living in those houses a lift but it will give the entire area a lift, and that has got to be good for the people in those houses and the people in that suburb and, actually, in the wider community. Another one we went to on the same day was eight flats—just to give a bit of detail—a little bit behind Tauranga Hospital. Eight flats—they are all right. There was nothing particularly wrong with them. They have become, with the help of the Tauranga Housing Community Trust, 16 brick and tile homes that the people in those homes are really proud to live in. They are warmer, they are drier, they are newer—they are just better. And there are more of them.

Here is what this bill does. It allows for more of that—for the flexibility and for the innovative approaches to that that ensure that we will see more of that in the Taurangas, in the Invercargills, and throughout New Zealand. And here is the thing: this is winding the Opposition up. This is winding the Opposition up. Why is that? Because it knows that what I am saying is true. It knows that for 9 years under Labour, under Ruth Dyson and under Annette King—I cannot blame Phil Twyford; he was not in Parliament—those houses got older. They got more decrepit. They had problems. And, actually, we are going to see the solutions here. Annette King asked: “Well, who else is going to do this?” and “Who actually wants this?”. Well, we have seen on TV already that Accessible Properties says it wants to see it and the old IHC—a really big entity in this space—wants to see this.

Grant Robertson says: “Oh, this is all ideology. That’s all this is; it is all ideology.” Well, if it is, it is simply that, actually, we think there is room for more flexible approaches to this. We think there is room for more innovation. We do not think Wellington has all the answers, unlike Grant Robertson, representing Wellington Central bureaucrats. We think there is room for warmer, drier, more fit-for-purpose homes—actually, more homes, in many cases, going from three or four-bedroom homes with one person living in them to what oftentimes they actually want: more homes that sometimes are smaller and sometimes are bigger and that meet the needs on the ground.

We know on this side of the House that Wellington does not always have the best answers and that, actually, in the Taurangas and the Invercargills where we are trialling this sort of approach already, it can be done better. There are people on the ground who actually know—it is radical; I know that it is radical—what is best for people there who are on the spot and who know and care about those communities, rather than, as Annette King used to do it, just someone in Wellington sitting at a desktop thinking about this and saying: “Hmm, maybe this’ll be nice. No, that looks fine.” This approach will see more innovative, flexible approaches on the ground throughout the provinces of New Zealand. It is a really good set of solutions for New Zealanders.

I rise to take a brief call in the Committee stage of the Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill. I would just like to acknowledge that it is Pink Shirt Day today, and I am hoping that this House will take a break from bullying. It would be a really nice thing to have a day without any personal abuse within this House.

I want now to speak specifically to the Minister in the chair, the Hon Simon Bridges, and to ask him some questions, because we have just heard from the Minister about flexibility and innovation. That was pretty much the entire content of his speech—that I heard. It seemed to echo the speeches that we heard in the first and second readings last night, in the 20-second speeches from members of the Government. I would say that was probably the average length of the speeches, in which they said that this legislation provides flexibility and innovation. Where is the detail, people? This is a bill going through under urgency, with no public scrutiny and with no Treasury input on the financial consequences of this bill. We are being told that it provides flexibility and innovation. Where? In what situations? Why? What is the problem that this legislation is trying to solve? We are not even being told that amount of detail.

The documents that I am looking at in front of me are saying that it will give the agency a new ability to negotiate prices with providers in order to cover diverse situations, including, but not limited to, tenants’ needs resulting in higher or lower tenancy management costs. Tell us what that means in practice, because we also heard from the Minister last night, in one tiny snippet of detail, that this is about, say, if the tenants have disability needs; that this will enable contracts that are able to help housing providers deal with their wider needs—this wraparound service that we hear so much about. Well, that is something I would like to support, but my understanding is that there is the ability to do that through other contracting provisions. Why are the needs around disability needs being provided through housing? Please explain it to us. If you have got a good reason for it, then we may support it, but explain it. At least give the public credit by explaining what this is even about and the reason for it.

I would also like to say that the Minister said last night, in another tiny snippet of detail that may help us to understand this legislation, that it also provides Housing New Zealand with more flexibility in contracting and the ability to fund Housing New Zealand. I do not have the housing portfolio for the Greens, but I have got a little bit of an understanding of housing and of some of the ways that the system works—possibly more than your average New Zealander. I still do not understand that. I am not sure why we need Housing New Zealand to be able to get more flexible arrangements for the funding of its services. Could you explain that to us?

Minister, could you also please explain to us why we are separating out and preventing Housing New Zealand from providing policy advice to the Minister. Why are we stopping the ministry, which has the experience and the relationship with the people in the community, from feeding any learning it has back to the Minister in order to inform policy making? Why? I would like some reasons. I would like the public to be able to at least make an informed decision about their view of this bill, more than just the rhetoric of telling us that it is about flexibility and innovation. They are words, and without any substance, they have very little meaning.

I stand on behalf of New Zealand First to take a short call on this new piece of legislation called the Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill, which to me is quite ironic, really, particularly when we talk about the flexibility that I think this bill is actually trying to address, and that is the flexibility of the socially impoverished people of this country being flexibly rammed around corporations in new, innovative ways, which are the words that I keep hearing from Simon Bridges about flexibility and innovation.

That is what we think of this Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill, which has been pushed down at such great speed that we do not actually have time to consult with the public to find out what the real, serious concerns are. We are not hearing anybody out there screaming from the rooftops saying this is a great idea. New Zealand has had over 100 years—100 years—of standing up for those people in need with social housing. I do not think there is anybody in this room who does not know somebody who has been brought up in a State home. In fact, the Prime Minister himself got brought up in a State home. Many of us have had those same privileges—I will call it a privilege—but what is happening here is that this service is being packaged up, sold off, and given to the friends of the National Party so that they can make some profit out of this situation.

National is saying that this is good. For whom? It is good for the corporations and the big companies that are actually putting this deal together, but it is not good for the people who seriously, genuinely need State homes and support from the Government. This is certainly not something that should be packaged up and given out to people who are designed to make money whichever way they can. This is where the Government has got a legal and moral obligation to stand up for those people and their rights, to ensure that they get sufficient housing support.

This bill is being pushed through very, very quickly. Mr Bridges spoke about warmer, drier, and more fit for purpose homes. But if the commercial sector is going to be doing this, they are going to be creating more expensive homes. If you were truly interested in looking after people, to get them into their first homes, then you would put something in this legislation to make sure that those homes stayed available and affordable for the people who need them the most.

This legislation is not going to be good for New Zealanders. We do not see the benefits at all. Part 1 is all about taking away those rights of New Zealanders to have a comfortable position in their local areas. We definitely do not support it. Thank you.

If there was ever any doubt about the Hon Simon Bridges, the contribution that he has just made in the House puts to rest any doubt that he has well and truly drunk the Kool-Aid. He got up and made, actually, not a very good defence of the Government’s policy on social housing. He showed a lack of understanding of the detail, and really just kind of parroted the most superficial lines that he gets from Paula Bennett about what is really going on with this social housing policy. Here is the big lie. Here is the big lie about National’s social housing policy. National wants the country to believe that it is all about making homes warm and dry, that it is about innovation, and that it is about giving power to the community. We heard Simon Bridges say that local communities can always do it better than someone in Wellington making all the decisions. So this legislation is dressed up in the language of empowerment of community and of modernising the housing stock. It is none of those things.

Let us talk about what is really going on here. In November last year Bill English was, basically, caught candidly telling the truth to the New Zealand Herald when he said that the purpose of this policy is simply to get rid of State houses off the Government’s books. He thinks it is a lazy use of capital for the Government even to own housing. He wants someone else to own the houses. He does not care who. He said that on the record. He said: “We can sell them to anyone. It could be the Salvation Army, it could be property developers.” He does not care whom the Government sells the houses to. He simply wants to get the Government out of the business of owning houses. The model that the National Party wants to move to is one where anybody can own the houses and the State will simply pay a direct subsidy into the pockets of the landlords. It is the accommodation supplement on steroids. It is exactly what happened in Britain under Margaret Thatcher and in countless other countries around the Western World.

Bill English likes to get up in this House and say: “We’re old-fashioned in New Zealand. It’s time we caught up with the rest of the world.” Well, I will tell you, Mr Chairman, what has happened in much of the Western World in the last 20 years. The State, under right-wing Governments, has retreated from the provision of social housing for the most vulnerable citizens in society and has handed that job over to the market. It is rolling back the lessons that were learnt all around the world during the 20th century—that the market alone will never deliver a sufficient quantity of decent housing for society’s most vulnerable citizens. That is what this Government is doing, and it has said it. Nick Smith has said it and his officials have said it. The point of this “ideological burp”—as Annette King has described this policy—is to try to create an artificial market in social housing. As Grant Robertson said, this is Bill English going back to the 1990s when National introduced market rents and flogged off 13,000 State houses, which ended up in the hands of property developers and private landlords. This is simply a continuation of that neo-liberal quest of Bill English to get the Government out of the business of providing social housing.

Rather than listening to the mealy-mouthed platitudes of Paula Bennett, we can actually look at the National Government’s behaviour, to judge whether it is, in fact, seriously interested in providing more decent housing for New Zealand’s most vulnerable people. Let us look at what it has actually done rather than listen to its rhetoric. Since National has been in Government, it has stripped Housing New Zealand of its core functions. It is now, as we have been saying, simply a State-owned version of Barfoot and Thompson. It is no more than a letting agency, and this bill takes away one of the last vestigial functions of Housing New Zealand—that is, its ability to do research, to evaluate its programmes, and to advise the Government of the day on social housing.

National has sold down housing all over the country. In fact, mostly what it is doing is shifting State houses out of regional New Zealand and into the north. It is taking State houses away from Dunedin, away from Gisborne, and away from Palmerston North, and it is stripping out a valuable social and economic asset from regional New Zealand. It is not building any new State houses. More than anything, that gives the lie to the rhetoric of Paula Bennett and Bill English. In the middle of a housing crisis—in the middle of a housing shortage—when people are living in cars and garages, it is not doing the obvious thing, which is increase the supply of housing and build more houses. In the middle of a housing crisis, the National Government is using Housing New Zealand as a cash cow. It has taken half a billion dollars in dividends out of our country’s main social housing agency, and that money has gone straight back into the consolidated account.

When Bill English was asked “What are you going to do with the proceeds from the sale of State houses? Are you going to build more houses with them?”, he said: “No, why would we do that? We don’t want more State houses. What’s the point?”.

💬 Hon David Parker: He used to say that. He said that until 2008.

Yes. Yes, he did, and then he changed his tune.

The Government has also tightened the eligibility criteria. It is so tight that even the poorest people in this country cannot even get on the priority waiting list for Housing New Zealand. Every MP on this side of the House who represents a community knows that there is massive unmet social need, that there is hardship, and that there is poverty in our communities. People cannot even get in the door, because they have to ring an 0800 number. And, worse than that, they have no prospect of getting on the Housing New Zealand waiting list, because this Government has tightened the eligibility criteria in a cynical, cynical move, simply to cut the waiting lists. The effect of that policy is that there are 3,000 vacant State houses sitting around this country while people are languishing in expensive cold, damp substandard rentals.

There are thousands of vacant State houses, and that completely gives the lie to Paula Bennett’s claim that this Government is about housing more people and looking after the tenants. It is a manufactured crisis, where the Government is leaving dozens and dozens of empty State houses sitting boarded up and attracting graffiti in regional centres all around New Zealand, and that is the excuse that it uses for then selling off those houses. We know that Housing New Zealand has been offloading these State houses all around New Zealand—in every regional centre, town, and city around this country—at significantly below their Government value. It is flicking them off with no regard for the taxpayer’s value and is selling them straight into the hands of property developers and private landlords. That is what this Government is all about.

It has subjected hundreds of tenants, including families with young children, the elderly, and the disabled, to needless anxiety and stress, notwithstanding the fact that Nick Smith stood in this House 4 years ago and promised that he would not do that. The Government broke that promise. It is throwing people out on the street because they have committed the crime of earning enough to pay a market rent while living in State housing. These are the policies on social housing that the National Government is implementing. They are destroying the dream in this country that people should be able to have a decent roof over their heads, no matter how much they earn. Paula Bennett and John Key stand in this House, and I do not know how they can do it—how they can stand up with a straight face—to dismantle and dismember the very system of social support that gave them a decent start in their lives. It was OK for the taxpayer to give John Key and his mother a decent house in Christchurch in the 1960s, which gave him a start in life, but now, apparently, according to the National Party, State house tenants are the undeserving poor. Government members demonise them; they parody State house tenants. Nick Smith gets up and says that there are Mercedes Benzes parked out the front of State houses. That is the political cover that the National Party uses to destroy the system of State housing in this country.

This bill gives flexible purchasing arrangements. What a euphemism. It gives the Minister wide discretionary powers to do sweetheart deals with property developers so that the Government can flick off billions of dollars of State houses. It does not care whom it sells them to; it wants to get rid of them by hook or by crook. The current arrangements that the Government has, where it can pay an income-related rent subsidy—the difference between a market rent and a social rent—that is what gets paid to Housing New Zealand. The Government has not been able to sell off these houses to the Methodist Mission, the Salvation Army, or anybody else. This bill is its “get out of jail free” card. It enables the Government to flick off those houses and do sweetheart deals with property developers.

I take a short call on behalf of New Zealand First to strongly oppose the Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill. I have to congratulate Bill English. It has taken him 20 years to get to a place, through incremental changes, with dots on a page, that the National Party has been trying to get to since the 1990s, and that is to completely dismantle Housing New Zealand Corporation.

What will be left once the advice issues get handed over to the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment? And what does the ministry know about actual social housing? Is this another situation where “Mr Fix-it” is going to take over and stuff it up? Is that what this is about? Is this really a partnership between Paula Bennett and Stephen Joyce that the country should be worried about, going on into the future through the next election, perhaps?

What are we doing, through this bill, in taking away the advisory capacity from Housing New Zealand Corporation and placing it with the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment—business, innovation, and employment? How interesting, because suddenly the rhetoric is again around human beings being productive units. In this one, with the housing of those human beings, that is now all about being a business. This is a continuation, to give National its credit, of the spin about “New Zealand Inc.”, as opposed to thinking about it as “Family New Zealand”. That is where New Zealand First is coming from. This is about “Family New Zealand”.

We find it interesting because whenever New Zealand First says that with immigration we should possibly be encouraging people to spread out throughout the country, the answer from the Government benches is “You can’t tell people where to live.”, but that is exactly what the Government intends to do with regard to social housing. That is exactly what it intends to do. So apparently you cannot ask a new settler to spread out around the country and enjoy some of the benefits of regional New Zealand, but if you are a poor New Zealander you can. If you are a poor New Zealander, the Government can actually decide where you will live because it is not going to provide you with any housing in an area where it has decided it is not going to do any regeneration around employment. The Government has decided that it is going to suck everybody into the main centres because—business as usual—it is “New Zealand Inc.” as opposed to “Family New Zealand”.

So that is one reason why New Zealand First will strongly oppose this bill. The other reason is that it is just an out and out sell-off. You have got to hand it to the people whom that Government pays to market the words inside their press releases—I hope that the taxpayers are not paying all the media bill for the National Party over there, but you have got to hand it to whomever it is paying. They know how to spin the English language—that is for sure. They know how to take what is a bitter pill and gloss it up in some sugar coating and then feed it to the New Zealand public with words like “flexible”, with other words like “choice”, for example. Apparently, if you are rich in New Zealand, you can have choice in New Zealand, but if you are poor in New Zealand, the Government will use that word to beat you up. That is the reality of what is happening here today, and it is happening with every single piece of legislation that this Government is forcing through at this time under urgency.

The other thing that we find very interesting is the situation where what we are really talking about is that social contract that New Zealanders believed in—or the majority of New Zealanders believed in—from the 1960s. Instead of actually saying that we are going to send this off to private business now—and it will be private business; the NGOs do not have the capacity—the Government will create what will appear to look like an NGO, but at the end of the day it will be private business that will buy these houses. It will be private business that will on-sell these houses.

It is interesting that this is being pushed through under urgency. I wonder whether it will be pushed through this quickly prior to 2017 because there just might be the off chance of a change of Government in 2017, and there just might be the off chance that there will be new legislation not allowing non-resident or non - New Zealand citizens to buy housing properties. But that legislation, under current free-trade agreements, cannot be put through retrospectively, so it cannot affect anybody who has already bought huge numbers of rental properties in New Zealand. So this piece of legislation, moving very quickly, creates another organisation into which these houses will all be placed, and then they can be on-sold to non - New Zealand residents. We find it highly suspicious. We will be opposing the bill.

I rise to take a call on this bill. I want to challenge members opposite who have read their economic textbooks—and I believe there are many. I can see faces across the Chamber that I have heard preaching on the benefits of sound economics. Indeed, I guess I am talking particularly to those—

💬 Hon David Parker: Thatcherism 101.

—yes, interested in Thatcherism 101—who sleep with Hayek under their pillow, those who have to run a spray mister at night in their room lest they spontaneously combust—the really dry ones; the really, really dry ones. Even they will have heard of market failure. Market failure is something they might not want to acknowledge. They might not want to acknowledge it, but it is something they, in their heart of hearts, know exists. They know that we have State housing provided in this country so that even those who struggle every day have a backstop, have security, and have a safe place to raise their children, and that is for the benefit of future generations beyond just today. Those who are walking the tightrope of poverty know that they have underneath them a safety net provided by a sound State housing system.

As we have heard from many members contributing today, that safety net has been taken away by this Government. It is no longer interested in addressing that market failure. It wants to pretend that it does not exist. Well, in my experience it does still exist. I can think of very recent examples, a couple of which I would like to outline today. These examples are poignant to this bill because these are people who would like to ensure that they stay in State housing because of their experience of going into the private housing market.

The first story I want to tell is of a family that I visited during my home visits. They live in a house that meets their needs, roughly. It is a house with the right number of bedrooms. It is within a reasonable proximity of other family members and therefore they can share the care of children and grandchildren. But when I went to visit this family, the house was rundown. It was cold. It is a private rental. They want to be on the State housing list. They used to be on the State housing list, but they got bumped off. They got told they could have a private rental.

I went into that house, and I was horrified. It is a house I had visited many times as a student. It was pretty rundown then, but now it has holes in the wall, it has no insulation, and it has young children living in it. They have runny noses. They have tears in their eyes. I do not want to be too emotive about this, but these are children who are going to develop preventable diseases through their childhoods, and we as taxpayers will end up bearing the cost of that for their whole lives—and they, and their wider family, will end up bearing the cost of that for their whole lives.

I sought to intervene on behalf of this family—in fact, they asked me to intervene. They asked me to represent their cause because their landlord would not listen. They want, simply, some insulation, for which there are subsidy schemes. They want the holes in the wall repaired. But what happened when I did seek to intervene, when my office sought to go alongside them to meet their landlord, was that their landlord said no. He said they may not bring a representative with them to that discussion; if they did, they risked being turfed out.

That is the kind of bullying that can exist in the private market, where the need is so great—is so great—where there is so much unmet need for social housing that private landlords can exploit the system. A good State housing, social housing, provider ensures that those private landlords are kept honest and that they do have to meet basic needs, because they otherwise cannot compete in the market. But that situation currently does not exist, at least not in Dunedin, where I live.

I have heard, just yesterday, of another case where there is a Dunedin family living in a State house that has just had its fire escape removed. And they have been told it is not coming back. It is the second case I have heard of in the last fortnight, where a fire escape has been removed from the second story of a building that children sleep in and is not coming back. That is emblematic, to me, of what is going on in the social housing sector.

The Government is physically—actually physically—dismantling the State houses that provide care and security for the most vulnerable citizens in our society. And here we have, in this bill, an attempt to flog these State houses off. These examples point in that direction, and, of course, the State housing sales in Dunedin will continue. We have seen many come on to the market. Many are currently vacant in Dunedin, despite the need, despite the families who come through my door every week and despite the families who come through my colleague Clare Curran’s door every week in Dunedin. Those houses are kept vacant because of the criteria the Government applies. It says the need is not great enough.

How great does the need have to be? How great does the need have to be? Surely when there are children in private rental accommodations getting preventable diseases, the need is great enough to want to provide State housing. Yet Minister Smith has previously released papers saying that the Government expects that there will no longer be the need for the 1,500 State houses in Dunedin. It is expecting the need to go down to 1,000 State houses, and it is selling them off now.

This is a Government determined to get out of the social housing sector, determined to wash its hands of the social problems it is creating by not meeting that market failure. This will have very long-term consequences for New Zealand. That is why we on this side of the House will continue to vigorously oppose this bill at every stage. We note that the public have not been invited to make submissions on this bill, and I think that that is shameful and very telling of the Government’s agenda here.

I doubt that we will hear much from the members on the other side during the debate. I would like to be proven wrong. I would like them to stand up and tell me that, in their heart of hearts, they do not think this market failure is going to hurt future families. I would love for them to get up and speak to it, but, actually, I suspect they want to see this bill through the House as fast as it will go, because they do not care about these people.

This is a Government that does not care about these people. It is shameful. They may go to sleep with spray misters in their rooms—they are expensive spray misters that not everyone can afford, I am sure—and they may to sleep with Hayek under their pillows, but they should not sleep easily at night while knowing that they are doing away with these protections for our most vulnerable. These protections ensure that private providers are kept honest and must meet a certain minimum standard. This dismantling of our State housing sector cannot be allowed to continue. We will vigorously oppose this bill at every stage of its passage through this House.

Perhaps I should not be naive after the length of time I have had in this House, but I really hoped, on behalf of my constituents and the people in my city, that we would have seen a Budget that confronted some of the pressing social problems that we are dealing with at the moment. I really hoped that today, under urgency, we would be working across the House together on legislation that would make a difference. Well, that was naive, was it not? It was naive, because what we have seen in this debate and from this Minister in his contribution today is nothing more than double-speak and spin. Talk about more flexible and innovative social housing—how does this bill create that, Minister? This is not about more innovative approaches. This is code for privatisation and opting out of the social responsibility that any Government has to make sure that people have stable, decent homes where they can raise their kids in security and in warm and healthy housing.

Eighty years ago this year, men and women sat in this House and debated legislation that did just that. We set up State housing because that was the guarantee that the lowest-income people in the country, the most vulnerable people in the country, could still aspire to provide their kids with a decent home and a decent start in life. The Prime Minister should know that. That is how he got his start. I am proud that it was a Labour Government that gave his family help when they needed it.

But what have we got now? We have a Government that is ideologically driven, which now just wants to privatise State housing and opt out. I talked about double-speak and Orwellian language. Take this statement that the Minister put out in relation to this legislation: this package was about supporting moves to housing independence. Independence is a wonderful thing, is it not? What was she really saying? She was talking about 3,000 eviction notices that will be given this year to those people who might have just got their chin above the rising level of the cost of living in housing, and now they are out on the street and they are trying to find alternatives for their family.

Talking about, as the Minister did, more flexible and innovative social housing is simply to disguise a Government that has given up, that is opting out of its social responsibility, and that now wants to give these houses not to an organisation like the Salvation Army, as it had promised before, but to property investors and developers that do not have the well-being of the poor, the vulnerable, and the low-income people of this country at heart.

I want to ask the Minister this question: what is there in this legislation that requires urgency today? What is it? What aspect requires us to rush through this Committee today, without the scrutiny of a select committee, the provisions in this bill? I have read it backwards and forwards, Minister, and there is nothing there that requires urgency. Do you know why we are doing this under urgency? It is because this Government does not want to subject its superficial legislation to the scrutiny of the public through a select committee. That is why we have got it here today.

What evaluation has been done? The Government is about to pass over the fundamental responsibility of providing social housing from an organisation that has had decades of experience and the flexibility of providing housing where and when it is needed. It is going to pass it over to the private sector. So I asked the Minister for Social Housing, the Hon Paula Bennett, this question under an Official Information Act request: what analysis has been done of the benefits or disadvantages of social housing being provided by NGOs—because I thought it was NGOs, not the private sector, when I wrote the request—rather than through Housing New Zealand? Listen to this reply: “Your request for analysis on the benefits or disadvantages of social housing being provided by NGOs rather than through Housing New Zealand is refused under section 18(e) of the Official Information Act as this information does not exist.” Do you know what this answer says? It says that we have got a bill before the Committee that will privatise State housing, and no analysis has been done by the Government of the implications and the consequences of what it is rushing through this Committee without the benefit of scrutiny by a select committee.

If you have any doubts about that, just have a look at the departmental statement that accompanies this legislation, because it confirms that there is no evaluation and that not even Treasury has commented on this proposal. This proposal is not a serious governmental proposal; it is an ideological proposal by a Government that pretends it is at the centre and throws a few coins to the poor when it suits it politically to do so, but at the same time it is undermining the ability of our community and our Government to provide people with a fundamental housing need.

I want to know from the Minister what this will do to increase the supply of social housing. When I looked at the figures, Minister, I saw that this Government has not increased Housing New Zealand homes; it has cut them by 1,600—1,600 homes—in the last 3 years. It slashed it. Now it wants to give away another couple of thousand houses to the private sector without knowing what is going to happen.

And what is happening to our people on the ground who could be helped by this legislation? Our people on the ground are paying rents that have risen by $1,300 on average in the last year—$25 a week. It is an interesting figure, that $25 a week, is it not? If you are a beneficiary it is gone already. It is gone on rent increases. But, actually, it is not $25 a week. Read the fine print—if you are in a State house, a quarter of that goes anyway. So $6.25 goes on increased rent for your State house. It is not $25 a week for them; it is about $18 or $19. If you are in the private sector, your accommodation supplement is cut. So it is a case of giving on the one hand and taking on the other.

But going back to this legislation, nothing in this bill helps those people whose rents are going up at six times the rate of overall inflation each year. There is a crisis of affordability for people to be able to get into homes, and this bill does nothing at all about that. Actually, think about the people at the bottom of the heap. Who are they competing with now? They are competing with 40 percent of the population who today have no chance of homeownership. Do you know what has happened to house prices in Auckland? They have gone up by 15 percent, $100,000, in the last year alone—$100,000. What pressure does that put on rent? What pressure does that put on ordinary hard-working New Zealanders who actually want to buy their own home but cannot and are now forced into the rental market and can out-compete the people at the bottom, who previously at least could have looked to Housing New Zealand to provide them with housing security?

There is a crisis in housing affordability in this country. Once upon a time we could guarantee that an activist State would do something about that. Is this bill going to increase social housing by one house? The answer is no. The answer is no; it is likely to further reduce it. The Government is opting out of its responsibility at the very time it should be stepping up to its responsibility. If we want kids to get a good education, if we want healthy kids, that starts in the home and it starts with having a secure, stable home and a warm and healthy home. Traditionally, a Government would say that Housing New Zealand had that responsibility. Housing New Zealand, through one piece of legislation after the other, has had its role and its responsibility cut back. With this bill it is not even going to be able to provide housing advice. Why would it waste it’s time for a Government that has never listened to the advice? I know the Housing New Zealand people who provide the homes. I know the people in Work and Income who now allocate them. If the Minister went out from his ivory tower and listened to those people, he would understand that there is a crisis, and he would equally understand that there is nothing in this legislation that will go one iota towards resolving that crisis.

This Budget was a failure, and this bill is a failure, in terms of actually making a difference for a better New Zealand.

I am very happy to take a call in this Committee stage as we talk about Part 1 of the legislation, which, of course, is the enabling legislation for the great State house sell-off that we are seeing here today, wrapped up in ideological rhetoric of “flexibility”. What we have had is the Minister—because none of the members opposite are willing to stand up and defend what is a terrible policy and a terrible piece of legislation—trying to justify how this really is doing right by the tenants. But if we look at what Part 1 actually does, we heard the Minister wax lyrical, but I would ask the Minister to take another call and point us to the provisions in the legislation we are here in this Chamber debating that do what the Minister claims. Point me to the clause that does what the Minister claims this legislation is going to do. He cannot, because this legislation does none of that. The Government can purport that this bill is all about flexibility, but this is about selling off State houses.

We have not heard about how one more piece of social housing is going to be provided. My colleague Phil Goff just finished off his speech by asking that question. I too would like to put that question to members opposite. Tell me how this bill provides for more social housing in New Zealand. Tell me how more houses are going to be provided for the people who are currently struggling to find accommodation in this country. Tell me how one more person is going to get off the Housing New Zealand waiting list, but, more important, tell me how one more person is going to get on to the Housing New Zealand waiting list. In the last quarter, 4,000 of the 6,000 people who applied to go on the waiting list—not to get a house, but to go on the waiting list—for a Housing New Zealand house did not make it, and this legislation will do nothing to help those people.

My colleague said that he imagined that members opposite were having to sleep with their spray-misters and their copy of Hayek. Well, they are also cuddling up to their fluffy toy version of the Big Society. This is what they are trying to do in this legislation. But like experiments in other places in the world, it is not working. We had the social service agencies lining up and saying that this is not going to work. They said they cannot see how the Government’s plan to sell off State houses will in any way benefit tenants. They are saying that they do not have the capacity and they do not have the infrastructure to manage a sizable housing stock, such as the Government is imagining.

So what are we left with? Who is the Government going to sell to? Surprise, surprise, it is going to be developers. It is what it always intended anyway, wrapped up in the guise of non-governmental organisations, who have told the Government they do not want a bar of it. That is why we are debating this legislation under urgency—so those non-governmental organisations do not get a chance to come to the select committee and tell the Government they do not want its offer. What they do not want is their private property developer mates coming to the select committee and saying that they are lining up to buy these houses. Are they lining up to buy these houses because they want to provide wraparound services that provide well for some of the most vulnerable in our country? No, they are lining up to buy these houses because they see a chance to make a profit, because that is what the private sector does. The reason why these houses need to stay in public ownership is that we have decided in this country that the Government should intervene and that the Government has a responsibility to ensure that we do have housing as a crucial and critical part of our welfare safety net, and that when people need it it is there, and we do not have families who simply cannot find a place to live.

Many of us have spoken about the challenges that people in our electorates are facing and what we are seeing on the ground, at the coalface, every day, and every week. I can only guess that members opposite do this as well. The job of a constituency MP is increasingly being taken up with housing issues. Increasingly, housing is forming a major part of our workload. It is people who simply cannot find somewhere to live, who cannot get on to the waiting list, and who cannot deal with Housing New Zealand when they are there. I would like to use a couple of examples from my electorate. One is a woman in her 60s who cannot afford to be in the private rental market in Christchurch—

I rise to take a second call on this terrible piece of legislation. The more I read it—and let us be honest, there is not a lot to read, to be fair—it makes me feel a little bit sick. I look across the Chamber and I see every single backbencher in the National Party with their head down, listening to their iPod, not looking like they are interested.

This piece of legislation is, seriously, going to affect New Zealand for a very, very long time. I have to say that we have got a proud history of looking after those people who need support the most. What is going on here is shameful and it is going to bite us. Dare I say, there is an old saying—actually, it is not that old: “We have changed.” The old New Zealand would not do what we have done, and what we are going to do right now. To let democracy be pulled out from underneath us to get this piece of legislation rammed through under urgency does not make any sense to me whatsoever. There are a few bills coming up over the next couple of days, and this is one of the bills that we need to be standing up about, proud to fight against—absolutely.

In 1969 my parents bought their first home, when interest rates were 22 percent. How could you imagine that you could actually pay for a house at 22 percent? Now, interest rates are only 5 percent, and we cannot get there. The difference is that back in 1969 the house that they bought was only $14,000, and their annual income, with my father working, was only $12,000. I have to say that this has changed in every way. Back then it was affordable for people to be able to get into a home. If you did not have a job that was paying well enough you could get State assistance and actually have a home where you could be brought up, you could work, and you could have a lifestyle.

This privatisation—the corporatisation of the State housing industry is a fugazi. It does not even exist. What we are trying to do is give wealth and control to corporations. We are not actually looking after our people in this country, which this country has an obligation to do. This is a sell-off. It is going, going, gone. We are getting rid of our State-owned assets, and we getting rid of our State-owned housing. Goodness me, we are probably going to privatise our army—that is the next thing. I am sure we have got some insight into some of the fictional stories that are coming out that say that one day this is going to be the direction of the world. It is going to be globalised and corporatised.

This is a step in the wrong direction. This is knee-jerk legislation, which we are very, very concerned about. One of those concerns is that when you are getting advice as a Minister, you want to take good advice from people who know the situation at the grassroots. The people who know what is going on in this country with regard to State housing are the people who are organising that State housing—the corporations that are there to look after people the most. Now, all of sudden, this legislation says that the Minister no longer has to listen to what they have got to say.

Under this legislation, the Minister can now take advice from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. That ministry does not look after State housing. We are concerned that the second dot point of the explanatory note of this piece of legislation, the Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill, is going to undermine the information that is required to make sound decisions for this Government. We oppose this bill strongly. Thank you.

This bill gives the Minister the flexibility to flog off billions of dollars’ worth of State housing to the National Party’s friends and developers, but what this bill does not do is to take seriously the housing issues that we are faced with in this country. This bill completely ignores and sweeps under the carpet the fact that as a country we are facing a housing crisis.

The Government is underplaying the housing crisis and acting like the flogging off of State houses is somehow going to address the issues that we have with housing in this country. It has stated recently that it is managing the Housing New Zealand waiting lists, but when I put through an Official Information Act request on the numbers of people who actually applied for Housing New Zealand houses—not the ones who actually got on the waiting list—we saw that of the 1,853 applicants who were placed on the social housing list, there were 4,000 other people who did not even make it on to that waiting list.

The Government is ignoring the fact that there is a demand for affordable housing and that there is a need for increased social housing, not the flogging off of Housing New Zealand houses to the private sector. There is a need for increased housing. When the Government is asked time and time again whether it is going to expand the amount of social housing that we have, it goes silent because it is doing nothing to respond to the issue. What we see from members on that side of the House is that any way they can, they will privatise. Any way they can, they will find a way to flog off State housing.

I want to talk about one example, actually, in my own electorate. The project that I am going to talk about is the Waterview Connection project, where houses were purchased for the purpose of that project. Housing New Zealand houses were purchased for the purpose of that project, but when that project was undertaken it was found that a number of the houses were no longer required. You would think that if the Government took seriously the demand for housing that we are facing in New Zealand—in Auckland—it would think: “OK, New Zealand Transport Agency, let’s put those houses back to Housing New Zealand so we can somehow try to meet the demand for social housing that is out there in Auckland.

But what did the Government do? It did not divest it back to the State. Instead, it took that opportunity—any way it can, it will take the opportunity—to sell those houses that were purchased for the Waterview Connection project to private developers, to private owners. The Government could have gone back to the State. It could have met the need that is there for social housing, but instead it sold them off privately for a profit, of course, a monetary profit. But who is not profiting here? The people who are not profiting here are the 4,000 people who cannot even get on to the waiting list for social housing. The people who are not profiting here are the people who are on the waiting list but will be on the waiting list for a long time because of the fact that demand is increasing but the stock of social housing is not increasing.

I think that members on that side of the Chamber should be ashamed of themselves—ashamed of themselves because they think that if they pretend we do not have a housing crisis, if they pretend that people are not in need of housing, then the problem no longer exists. But the fact is that New Zealanders know there is a problem. New Zealanders know that housing is unaffordable. New Zealanders know that they cannot access warm, healthy homes. The Government is trying to say it is going to do something about it, but it has done nothing about it.

We are facing the biggest housing crisis as a country that we have ever faced, and here we have a Government that ignores it and thinks that the answer, the panacea, is selling off our Housing New Zealand houses, our State houses, to their private developer mates. If New Zealanders are not already aware of the fact that that is this Government’s agenda, I have no doubt that within the next few weeks or the next few months that agenda will become very, very clear to all New Zealanders out there who are looking at this problem.

I just want to say that what we have here is a number of New Zealanders out there looking for houses, and the Government is doing nothing to respond to the need that is there. We have the National Government determined to sell off billions of dollars of State houses, by hook or by crook. Bill English says he does not care whom they get sold to; he just wants them off the Government’s books. The Government initially said they would go to NGOs. NGOs do not even want a bar of this initiative because of the fact that they know it is not going to work.

I have a couple of questions for the Minister in the chair, Simon Bridges, if he could lift his head out of his magazine for just a second and listen to the debate that is going on in the Chamber that he is supposed to be responsible for. I have a couple of questions for him. My first question is this: how is the Social Housing Reform (Flexible Purchasing and Remedial Matters) Bill going to make one iota of difference to the housing crisis that we face in my electorate of Palmerston North? And if the Minister does not think there is a housing crisis in Palmerston North, then he should get there and come and talk to the people and talk to some of the agencies that deal with people who are in need of social and emergency accommodation in Palmerston North.

If you drive around my city right now—this has been the case for quite some time, and it is getting worse—there are huge tracts of empty land where there used to be State houses. On Botanical Road that land has been empty for 7 years, with absolutely no plan for what to do with it. On Rugby Street that land has been empty for 3 years. On Selby Place that land has just been emptied now. And finally we hear there is a plan. Can anybody guess what the plan is for that land? Sell if off, flog it off. And this land is not even going to the NGOs or the private developers or the foreign banks that the National Party wants to bring in to social housing. Oh no, this is not for social housing; this is just outright privatisation—selling it off, and that means less social housing for the people who live in my community.

How do National members justify that? Well, I will tell you how they justify that. They say there are only 20 people on the housing waiting list. Well, we have just heard from Megan Woods and Carmel Sepuloni how they do that: 6,000 people apply for a State house in New Zealand and 4,000 of them are denied even the opportunity to get on the waiting list. And where do those people go when they are denied access to the waiting list? Well, they end up at the doorstep of the Salvation Army, which has had its funding cut and has had to reduce the amount of emergency accommodation that it can provide. They end up at the doorstep of Women’s Refuge, which is now having to screen women with families who come and ask for its assistance. Women, regardless of whether they have suffered abuse, are being told by the Ministry of Social Development to go to Women’s Refuge to seek housing because Work and Income cannot satisfy their urgent and desperate need for emergency accommodation.

So Women’s Refuge—which is already cash-strapped, has already had to close down one facility in Palmerston North, and is having more of its funding cut in this very Budget—is having to waste time determining whether or not women with families who come to it actually fit the criteria for its service, because this Government is abrogating its responsibility to provide emergency accommodation to people who desperately need it.

That is what is happening in my electorate and if any National MP honestly believes that the situation is rosy, then get yourself down to your local Salvation Army, get yourself down to your local Women’s Refuge, and go and talk to any of the other agencies. In my electorate it would be Methodist Social Services or Shepherd’s Rest, which have also had their funding cut. Go and ask them what the real story is.

I say to Government members that your numbers do not tell the truth. Your numbers have been deliberately constructed by you to try to fool the people into thinking there is no housing crisis. The people are not fooled. The people are not fooled. We know full well there is a massive shortage of emergency accommodation. People are living in their cars, people are sleeping under bridges, people are having to couch surf from one friend to another just to try to find a place to put a roof over their head.

Families are accommodating other families, with massive overcrowding in those houses, because this Government does not want to participate in a fundamental role of the State, and that is to make sure that every citizen that it represents actually has somewhere to call home and a roof to put over their head, and the safety and security that comes with it.

I urge members on that side of the Chamber who cannot be bothered to get out of their seats and participate in this debate to go to the Salvation Army and to go to Women’s Refuge and find out the truth.

I move, That the question be now put.

To follow on from my colleague Iain Lees-Galloway’s speech to this Committee, earlier this year I had a woman in my office who was desperate. She had been living in women’s refuges for 4 months with her two grandchildren in one room—in one room. She could not get on the Housing New Zealand list. Both the Ministry of Social Development and Housing New Zealand did not want to know. It took the intervention of an MP to battle with them for weeks to get her on the list. Both of those children were living with her because they had severe behavioural issues. They should not have been in one room, and here we had two Government agencies that were impervious to their plight. Now, finally, she is in a State house, but it took the intervention of an MP. Does it take the intervention of a member of Parliament’s office for every single one of those people who cannot get on the list?

I challenge those MPs on the Government side of the House to say that they do not have those people coming into their electorate offices, that they do not see the plight of people who are at their wits’ end and who are desperate. I challenge those people, that Government, to take off the cloak of conservative compassion. Take off that cloak of conservative compassion, which is a sham, and show us your real faces, the real face of ideological privatisers who are dismantling our social safety net by privatising State housing and cementing an underclass in this country. Cementing an underclass—that is going to be the legacy of John Key. That is going to be the legacy of the National Government—an underclass, a true underclass, in this country.

And why do we have this bill coming in under urgency? Because the Government knows that it will come under scrutiny. People will come out of the woodwork and say exactly what they think. As for the social service agencies that have operated in this country respectfully for over a century—the Methodist Mission, the Salvation Army, Presbyterian Support—what do those people have to say about what this Government is planning? They think it will not benefit those who are most vulnerable. Whom will it benefit? It will benefit the privatisers. That is why the Government should take off the cloak of conservative compassion.

Paula Bennett and Bill English came to Dunedin in January. They came to spruik their social housing rort. They told us all that it was going to be nirvana, that it was going to be innovative and flexible, as Simon Bridges has told us. They told us that there are going to be warm, dry homes. They told us that the trend was for one and two-bedroom homes, that nobody wanted the three or four-bedroom homes. Well, in Dunedin that is so not the case. Those people who cannot get on the list are the people who need the three or four-bedroom homes—the people who are desperate, who are living in terrible circumstances in the private sector, who are living under circumstances with slum landlords who are taking advantage of them. They are living in houses that are cold and damp and sending their children to hospital every year. This is the cementing of an underclass, it is the cementing of poverty, and it is the cementing of children who are living in circumstances they should not be living in. This is a great tragedy, and every MP on the other side of the Chamber will have seen these people in their electorate offices, and they should be ashamed.

I would like to challenge the Minister sitting in the chair, Simon Bridges, to get up on his feet and tell us what regional New Zealand will get out of this bill. Get up on your feet and tell us what regional New Zealand will get out of this bill. Will there be a single new piece of social housing? How will those houses be made more warm and dry? What accommodation will those people be living in? What are their options? If they cannot get into social housing, what are their options? Get up on your feet and tell us.

I move, That the question be now put.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to contribute to this debate. Actually, I want to start by quoting from the Prime Minister’s press release titled “Supporting children in hardship focus of Budget”. What I want to highlight is that currently we have 4,808 families on a Housing New Zealand waiting list. These are families who have been through the Ministry of Social Development process. They have been identified as those most in need. In fact, priority A is defined as people who are at risk, and includes families with a severe and persistent housing need that must be addressed immediately. We are actually talking about 10,000 children who currently do not have a home. I think the question everybody should be asking is: how does this piece of legislation contribute to housing those children? The Minister for Social Housing is here. I would love to hear from her about how this piece of legislation will help the 10,000 New Zealand children who currently do not have a home and who have been through the Ministry of Social Development process and have been deemed to be in severe and persistent need of housing. How does this piece of legislation, prioritised by this Government, meet the needs of those children?

When I look at where this piece of legislation came from, it came from a Government-commissioned report called Home and Housed: A Vision for Social Housing in New Zealand. It was commissioned in 2010. The central proposition of this commissioned research was, No. 1, that private sector organisations could provide social housing to those most in need more creatively than the Government. The second proposition was that there needed to be a plan to move people from renting to owning their own home. Again, I ask the question: how does this piece of legislation contribute to those, I guess, two crucial outcomes from that commissioned report?

What we know from the social housing provider - sector is that, actually, social housing providers do not want the transfer of houses, because for them the transfer of Housing New Zealand houses is a transfer of responsibility. I want to quote Major Campbell Roberts, who said that he does not believe “the lives of tenants would be sufficiently improved by such a transfer.” And why is that? It is because to take responsibility for a home means to make sure that that home is warm and dry and is going to contribute to the health and well-being of the family that is living in it. The reality of a lot of the houses is that they are not fit for purpose, and, actually, this Government, which is supposed to provide for those most in need, should ensure that the houses that are being provided for those most in need are fit for purpose. So the private sector organisations that this Government wanted to transfer that responsibility to, actually, at the end of the day, said no, thank you.

We think it is a core Government responsibility to provide housing for those most in need, and to ensure that the 10,000 New Zealand children who are waiting with their families on priority A and B housing lists, which the Ministry of Social Development has determined for itself, get the home that they need. Why is it important for our children to have a home? Well, actually, it is relevant to their education. If children do not have a home, how are they supposed to have continuous education? How are they supposed to go to an early childhood education provider, which we all know is the basis for getting a good education in our country? How are they then supposed to go to a primary school and reap the benefits of our public education system? How are they then supposed to belong to a family where mum and dad have security of tenure in the home that they want to build for their children so that they can go and get further education themselves, or possibly go to work? How is that supposed to happen when we have a Government at the moment that wants to abdicate responsibility for providing houses and homes for those most in need?

I am an MP in South Auckland, and, actually, across the South Auckland area, of the 2,537 families waiting on the Housing New Zealand and Ministry of Social Development waiting list, we have 1,070 families and over 2,500 South Auckland children who do not have a home. Forty percent of the people on this waiting list are Māori. So how is this piece of legislation ensuring that our Māori children have a home and are able to get quality early childhood education and are able to go to school? Pacific children and families account for 19 percent of the families and children on the Housing New Zealand and Ministry of Social Development waiting list. How is this bill going to contribute to meeting the Better Public Services target? We know we have got big issues with Māori and Pacific children. This Government wants to focus on participation.

Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to this debate on behalf of the Green Party. I have to say that this legislation is quite indicative of the National Party and this Government’s approach. I think we all want better outcomes for everyone in New Zealand, but the approach that is often adopted by this National Government is not supported by evidence, it is not going to solve the problem, and it is actually going to make it worse. Everyone in New Zealand needs a place to live and call home. It is a fundamental human right. The way we build a prosperous and happy society is not with the approach the Government tends to take, which is maximising profit for rentiers and vested interested groups and selling off the assets of this State; it is by looking after our people. Surely, having a place to live is one of the core components of looking after our people, and particularly our children.

Social housing could be improved in New Zealand; there is no question about that. There are things we could do better. There may be houses in the wrong place, and there may be opportunities for Housing New Zealand to deliver to more people, but this legislation is not going to do that. If Housing New Zealand is not able to manage our existing stock well, why do we think that social housing providers would be able to do a better job, and why do we think the market would be able to do a better job? Certainly, all the evidence from overseas shows that in the countries that do get the best outcomes in terms of education, childhood development, reducing inequality, and health outcomes, all of that flows through to a strong economy. Of course, the purpose of the economy is to look after people, not just to have a strong economy for the sake of it. In all of the countries that do that, they have a strong role for social support. The State is in the best position to provide social support, particularly when it comes to houses for those who are the most vulnerable.

The housing crisis in Auckland, in particular, is about both supply and demand. I just want to refer to the Productivity Commission’s paper on housing affordability from several years ago, because if you look at its analysis of the social housing situation, it suggests there are areas that need reform. Most importantly, it points out that starting reforms at State housing without addressing demand pressures and without building sufficient options for people to move on to is generating a major risk for those who are reviewed out of State housing. I would say that it is pretty clear that the Government has taken pretty much no action to address the demand problems, particularly in Auckland. It has not done anything to address the supply issues. It likes to characterise its Resource Management Act reform, or “deform”, as being all about achieving affordable housing, but there is no actual evidence that what it is proposing in the Resource Management Act reforms or the Special Housing Areas legislation is actually going to increase the supply where it needs to increase or reduce house prices.

All the Green Party is really asking for is that we take an evidence-based approach and that we look after our people first. There are many steps that could be taken to improve housing affordability in New Zealand. On the demand side, there could be a comprehensive capital gains tax excluding the family home, and the tax treatment of investment properties could be improved. The Government made a tiny move in that direction. It is too little, too late. Of course, the Green Party has been calling for the same tax treatment of income from labour for quite a long time, and it is nice to see that there has been a slight move in that direction. In addition to tax treatments, it makes sense to have restrictions on foreign capital coming in, only because we know that foreign capital coming in is having an impact on house prices and land values, as it is in many other jurisdictions. There are some pretty obvious ways that we can deal with that, like by limiting ownership of land to residents and citizens in New Zealand.

On the supply side, the State is in the best position to address the supply issue of houses, and not just houses but homes and neighbourhoods. The places in Auckland where land values are highest and the places where people want to be is where we need to be providing dwellings for people—where they are close to jobs, where they are close to education, and not out in the middle of nowhere where they are going to have an incredibly long commute and will have to own multiple cars. There is no point in increasing housing affordability—

I move, That the question be now put.

Members, the question is that the question be now put.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. This is a substantial piece of legislation. There are several members on this side who have not been able to participate in this debate to date, and I request that you reconsider your ruling.

This debate is quite a serious one for New Zealand First. A number of our members have left their offices and come down here to take the opportunity to take a call on this and they have not been afforded that opportunity.

Thank you. I am ready to rule on this matter. The question will be put. There have been 21 calls taken by the Opposition. This is the third closure motion, and I am going to put the question.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I accept your ruling and the reference to the number of calls. I seek your reassessment of your decision with regard to the fact that this is an important piece of legislation and it has circumvented the normal select committee process. In view of that, I just wonder whether or not you may reconsider.

I am aware of the process, and I am prepared to put the motion as it has been—

💬 Ron Mark: I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): No, I am not going to take a further point of order from the member. I have taken several points of order—sit down while I am on my feet, please. I have made my ruling, and my ruling is that the question will be put.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. This is a new point of order.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): I will hear the point of order. I suggest that the member be very careful about how he puts it.

Could you advise how many calls New Zealand First has had.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Sorry, I did not hear. Could you restate the point of order.

I know you stated that the Opposition has had 21 calls. Could you tell me please how many calls New Zealand First has had.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Three.

Thank you.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. Can I seek your guidance, please. I stood to take a call at every single opportunity. The main reason was that there is a mistake in this bill that I wanted to highlight. Thank you.

The fact is that it is the Chair’s prerogative as to when he will put the question. I have accepted a closure motion, and I am going to put that question. [Interruption] Sit down, please. Continual points of order around this particular position are becoming quite frustrating. Members will have to accept that there have been a large number of calls on this particular part, and we have only—[Interruption] Do not interrupt me while I am on my feet. I am the Chair of this session, and you are not. There is another part to be debated. There will be full calls given in those debates. I have outlined the number of calls that parties have had.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I will not make a long point of order, but I will make three brief points. The first is that this bill is going through all stages under urgency and it has not been to a select committee. The second point is that there are members who have been seeking the call since the beginning of the debate who have not been given a call, and other members have been given multiple calls. I think that does create an unfairness in this process. The third point is that there has been a long tradition in the House that where the Government does not engage in the debate, that is not used as a reason for closing down the debate prematurely.

In ruling on the point of order, I am going to continue to put the question. The fact is that the Opposition and all parties have the ability to marshal who is going to speak. They all have the ability to make calls. Not every member who seeks a call in every debate does get a call; that is the history of it. Some of us go back quite a long way and remember how these things work and have worked in the past. The most frustrating thing about being the Chair in a debate such as this is that you think of your best lines while you are sitting here and you do not get the opportunity to use them. Having said that, I believe that, on analysis, people will find that there has been a significant numbers of calls. Many members have had the opportunity to make their points. The points being made are now becoming repetitive, so I am going to put the question. [Interruption] I am not taking any more points of order. [Interruption] Please be seated. I am not taking any more points of order on this matter. The question is that the question be now put.

We are taking a vote. Please be seated.

💬 Ron Mark: I understand that, but it is about the vote.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): I will accept your point of order.

Mr Chairperson, through you I would like to ask that someone please check that Māori Party vote. I cannot believe that that is the vote that they are taking on this piece of legislation.

The vote is being cast. That was not a point of order.

The member Ron Mark will leave the Chamber. He has been here a long time. He knows that votes are called in silence. He was reminded of that, and he decided to interject on three occasions, casting aspersions on people who voted in a particular way. He will leave the Chamber.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I understand the decision you have just made. I waited until the vote was completed before intervening. I do understand the point you have made, and it is out of order for a member to interject when a vote is being taken. That is absolutely correct. I do ask that you consider, when determining how long the member will be out of the Chamber, the fact that this is a bill going through all stages under urgency and this is in fact the only opportunity to participate in the debate.

I will put my mind to that. The member is still within the Chamber. I must admit I was tempted to quote him from 2 days ago.

Ron Mark withdrew from the Chamber.

Part 2 Remedial and other matters