Social Housing Reform (Transaction Mandate) Bill

I am speaking to the title and commencement clauses of the Social Housing Reform (Transaction Mandate) Bill, as we draw this debate towards its inevitable conclusion. It is traditional at this time in a debate to make proposals about alternative titles for the bill.

💬 Tim Macindoe: Blah, blah, blah.

I do not think the suggestion from the Government whip, that it be called the “Blah, Blah, Blah Bill”, is a very sensible suggestion. But from this side you will soon hear that we have some constructive proposals for the renaming of this bill. I for one would like to start off by proposing that this bill be called the “State House Sell-off (Charter for Corruption) Bill”. That title conveys, I think, two of the critical themes that have been discussed in this debate—that, for all the blather and the spin that we hear from the Government benches and from the Ministers, this bill is about social housing reform. Actually—let us be brutally honest about it—this is an old-fashioned privatisation programme of billions of dollars of publicly owned land and housing. That is all it is.

💬 Chris Bishop: You told the community houses that you were in favour of it.

Bill English has decided that the Government has no business owning land and housing for the purpose of State housing. He simply wants to get it off his hands. He will sell it to anybody who wants it, Mr Bishop. First, it was the Salvation Army. Then it said it did not want it. Then he thought that iwi would buy it. They said they wanted it only if they could have it for free. And now the Government is hawking these billions of dollars of assets to anybody who will take them. The Government is meeting with merchants bankers, public-private partnership outfits, banks, consultants, property speculators, and financiers. The latest on Bill English’s wish list is that big private equity funds will see this as an opportunity to establish a business model like the retirement village companies in New Zealand. Nothing could be more crazy than to think that the retirement village business model—by which companies like Summerset Group Holdings Ltd and Ryman Healthcare make huge dollars by working over the wealthiest quartile of the New Zealand community, the wealthiest 25 percent of New Zealanders, who end up pouring their life’s assets into these retirement villages. Nothing could be more different to the job of actually delivering decent and affordable social housing and State housing to the 5 to 10 percent of the poorest and most struggling New Zealanders.

It is obvious that that business model would not work in terms of State housing unless, and here is the kicker, the Government is prepared to pour unlimited volumes of taxpayer subsidies directly into the pockets of those companies. But do you know what? That is probably exactly what Bill English is thinking of doing. How else would those companies make the kinds of returns that they currently make on their assets in the retirement village sector? They typically make something like a 25 percent return on their assets. They are highly successful property development companies. How would they make that kind of return on the provision of social housing in New Zealand? Only with massive and ongoing public subsidies. So the other possible title for this bill is the “Snouts in the Trough for the National Party’s Mates (Social Housing Sell-off) Bill”. It is sad that we have got to this point. But the way that the Government has handled this whole process over the last 2 years has made the public very cynical. It has stripped away any pretence that this is about building up a more diverse and innovative community housing sector. The community housing sectors are alive to that. They feel like they have been manipulated, lied to, and used by this Government as a way of dressing up a highly unpalatable policy: the privatisation and the flogging-off of billions of dollars of land and housing that have been paid for over generations.

I would like to continue from where my colleague Phil Twyford left off. Following the parliamentary tradition of looking at alternative names during the debate on the preliminary clauses, I would like to praise whoever the policy person is who dreams up the names of these bills. They try to flower up these names. The bill’s current title is the Social Housing Reform (Transaction Mandate) Bill. But I would like to offer an alternative, to get precisely to what this means to the people who will be affected. I would like to see us change the title to some pretty precise language—the “Evict, Sell, and Abandon (Who Cares?) Bill”. That is exactly what this piece of legislation will do. We have had wave 1 of this policy from the Government, and that has reduced the amount of social housing by evicting people.

I have got an example of that right here, in my electorate. This photo is of Iris Grove in Cannons Creek, Waitangirua, about 5 or 6 years ago before the demolition men came in and took away all of these houses. If anyone on that side of the Chamber would like to tour Porirua and this rough area around me, it will not look like this anymore; it looks a lot different. Imagine beautiful, green, no houses at all, just grass. That happened in about 2011. At the same time Housing New Zealand promised that community that some houses would go back in. Well, we are still waiting. So there is phase 1: evict. Just get the people out of their houses—make up any old excuse you can just to get these people out of their houses. They were told the houses were earthquake prone—evict. They were told “We are going to build you some more houses.”—evict. Get them out of the houses—we do not care how you do it; get them out. So, phase 1 of this strategy from the Government has happened: fewer homes, fewer people in them. What do they care; they are not their people anyway—so, get them out.

Phase 2 under my new title for the bill is called “sell”, and this is exactly what this piece of legislation does. It gives unprecedented power to two Ministers in this National Government to sell this land that I have talked about here—and houses in communities like mine in Porirua—to whom the hell knows who they are going to be, for whatever price. No accountability whatsoever, and, as was debated in a previous part, if something goes wrong, we do not know who is responsible. This is because, apparently, the Ministers avoid any trouble and then later on their officials will not be responsible either, so whatever dodgy deal these guys cook up, no one is going to be accountable. They can sell a house for a dollar, give it to someone who has given them some money—it does not matter. No one is going to have any dirt on their hands, but the houses will be sold.

Then it is all about abandoning the people who used to live in these houses. Apparently, there is not any demand for social housing. So much so that in January this year the social housing Minister said: “We are going to move people out of Auckland—because there is such a problem there—and we are going to send them to places like Wanganui, New Plymouth, Porirua.” Well, as I was finishing up my summer holiday I nearly fell off my chair, because—Holy moly—there are apparently a lot of empty State houses in Porirua that the Minister wants to send Aucklanders to. Well, apparently so in January, but not so in December, because when we asked the Minister a question about the need, the demand, in Porirua, we were told that it was high. So somewhere over Christmas the Government apparently found a whole lot of empty homes in Porirua that it can send people from Auckland to live in. I do not know how this happened, but somehow it magicked up some homes so that people could be sent down from Auckland into all the empty houses that I see every day in Porirua.

I would also invite someone from across the Chamber—anyone, just one person—to take up my offer of an invitation to my electorate office any day of the week, where it is constantly housing-related issues—

💬 David Bennett: Oh, you’re never there. You’re never there.

David Bennett, you crack me up. Here I am talking about people who contact us via Facebook because they are living in their cars, and, you know, MPs live in their nice houses—and Mr Bennett thinks it is funny. But he is selling them off, so what does he care about? What does he care about—because he is part of a Government that does not care about people who live in their cars. I am not sure whether he would get people contacting him and saying: “Excuse me, my local MP, but I am living in my car with my kids, and I need somewhere to stay. Can you do something about that?” Well, I would like to do something about that: “I am sorry but the current Government wants to sell all those houses that would be really good for you and your kids to live in.” I know that there are some decent people on that side of the Chamber—not a lot, just some.

💬 Phil Twyford: Name one.

I will not name names. I will not name and shame them—I will not name and shame them. But I think some of them are aghast at what could happen here.

I would like to tell you a little story about a man who grew up in Christchurch. He lived in a State house; did all right for himself; came to Parliament. It is actually a story about two people: me, who is standing on this side—who wants to defend and protect social housing and State houses—and someone on that side of the House who had pretty much the same upbringing as me, but he made $50 million and then wants to sell State houses. Sell them. So the very privilege that he and I have had to live in a State house—I am on this side saying: “Do not sell them, because, actually, Mr Prime Minister, people like you and me, who are vulnerable, and families who cannot afford market rental, actually need some of those houses to live in.” But, no, he wants to sell the very privilege that he had—a lot like the free education that he got at university. A lot like the free university education that he had: “Oh, it is good enough for me, but let’s not have it for anyone else. Let’s not have it for anyone else.” Well, there is a double standard right there.

So, I think that the Government should have a look at itself, and think about what it is doing, because it is evicting the most vulnerable people in our country—those people who cannot go to the market and say: “I can afford that rent.” The market does not work for them. But on that side of the Chamber the market is perfect: it will sort everyone’s problems out. Everyone’s problems—the market will sort them out. But we know that the reality is that there are people who cannot afford market rent, who are struggling every day to do the basics, and the help that they need is a State house. Instead of building more houses for these people, this Government wants to sell off State houses for God knows what reason, for God knows what price, and it thinks that is going to help people—it thinks that is going to help people who are the most vulnerable out there. I think that is completely and utterly crazy. It is pretty basic. If people are out there and they need help with their accommodation, and they cannot afford market rent, when the market fails, the State has to come in. That is why State houses are there. That is the way that my family got our start in life, and that is the way that the Prime Minister’s family got their start in life. But there is a difference between this side of the Chamber and that side of the Chamber. Those members would like to evict, sell, and abandon the people who live in State houses. On this side, we actually care about the most vulnerable people in our community. We want to make sure that they have got somewhere that they can afford to live in, that is safe and warm. That is why this piece of legislation is a complete and utter shame for that side of the Chamber.

As my colleague Kris Faafoi—whom I acknowledge for his excellent contribution to this debate—so eloquently outlined in his last address, this is the traditional time in the House when members have the opportunity to propose alternative titles for bills, in this case for the Social Housing Reform (Transaction Mandate) Bill. I want to highlight how sterile the title of that bill comes across—as absolutely sterile. It sounds almost like it is meaningless, like there is no substance necessarily—it is non-threatening. It certainly does not symbolise or adequately convey the depth of change that this bill is proposing.

Because, as we have discussed in this debate, this bill fundamentally changes ministerial powers, fundamentally changes the idea that Housing New Zealand is there to make sure that we have adequate community housing, and answers a problem by creating a problem. So that is why I think this bill would almost be better labelled “The Problem with the Wrong Solution Bill”. I think this is almost really well-timed in the way that the problem was highlighted in the Salvation Army’s state of the nation report that came out today. It always does a section on housing and housing supply. Of course, that means that over the last few years there has been a significant focus on Auckland and the pressures that exist in Auckland. But what it is starting to highlight is the contagion: the spread of, almost, the housing supply disease coming out of Auckland and into surrounding areas.

If members on that side of the House have conversations with people who live in areas like Cambridge, like Te Awamutu, and like Hamilton, they will hear the pressure that is coming down on those communities as the result of the housing crisis in Auckland. There is a flow-on effect. This is not solely an Auckland problem now. A significant part of this housing problem, of course, is the lack of community housing, of State housing, and of emergency housing to provide for those most vulnerable who are the first to suffer in a significant housing crisis. So what we heard from the Salvation Army today was that when you have a massive supply problem, obviously, as you can deduce, simply transferring the stock from one agency to another does nothing to resolve that problem. It does absolutely nothing to solve that problem—but nor do any of the other solutions in this area that the National Party has proposed lately.

The last proposal we had was from Minister Paula Bennett, who suggested that we should simply ask those on waiting lists to transfer to other areas. I do not know how many members on that side of the Committee believe of the waiting lists they have in their area that they should simply go to those individuals and tell them that they should just move—they should just move. First, that assumes that we do not have pressure in other parts of the country, and we do, thus proving that the idea of a bill that simply is transferring stock from one provider to another is not going to solve all problems. So the “Misguided Bill”, perhaps, would be a better title. If you asked people in the other parts of the country, they would say they have waiting lists, too, so how is this solving the problem?

I know that Jenny Salesa, in particular, has done some work in this area. She knows the impact that transferring people from the waiting lists in her areas would have—or how little impact it would have. So it assumes stock in other areas. The second assumption is that it assumes that those on waiting lists are not working. There is this derogatory message that is sent by saying we should simply tell people on waiting lists that they should go and move somewhere else; it assumes that they are somehow just sitting there waiting for a house to come up, with no attachment to anything in the area, such as employment. Sure, it might be insecure employment or it might be multiple part-time jobs, but there is a distinct assumption from the Government in that announcement that there is no connection from that person to that place.

The next point I would like to make is that that connection is, of course, not just about work. The interesting point that Alan Johnson made around people who are connected to a community and the importance of housing, in the state of the nation report this morning, was that when we see those differences that emerge between two measures of poverty—material deprivation versus income poverty, so there are two distinct measures there—they are both important. But someone has asked the question: how can you have income poverty, but not have as high a measure on material deprivation? That is things like not having shoes to wear to school, beds to sleep on, or a warm, dry home. How can you not show so highly on that measure, and yet definitely be in income poverty?

The answer to that question? Community—community. If you have connection to your community, if you have family, if you have support around you, they can cushion poverty. Of course, that is not an ideal situation. That is not the environment that we want—people in poverty existing simply because there are people around them who are propping them up. We want them to have that dignity for themselves, but that speaks to the importance of community. What almost every policy, including the Social Housing Reform (Transaction Mandate) Bill, ignores is the importance of keeping housing stock in the areas where people need to be connected to their community. That is what is so devastating about that Government’s policy. So I would say that this bill needs to be renamed the “Loss of Community Bill”, the “Destruction of the Sense of Community Bill”.

All too often, I think, as MPs, we do—if you are listening and you have your eyes and ears open—hear examples and have manifestations of what the reality of these policies mean coming through our office doors. I still remember to this day the young woman who came to see me a few years ago, now. She had grown up in a Housing New Zealand home in central Auckland. So it is fair to say, of course, that that has been an increasingly affluent area, an increasingly gentrified area, but by virtue of its history it has a significant number of Housing New Zealand homes, or has done. This young woman had grown up in one of those homes. She had, tragically, lost her parents early—because she was a young woman—both of them within a relatively close time and proximity to each other. There she was left—she and her brother. This young woman, sadly, also suffered from a severe case of epileptic seizures. It prohibited her from holding down consistent work, but she also had the care of her younger brother.

She came to see me because she had grown up in a Housing New Zealand house that was made for a family, not for two young people, and Housing New Zealand had determined that it was time for her to move on. She came to see me because Housing New Zealand was not offering for her to stay in the community that she knew. It wanted her to move a significant distance outside of that community, to another community entirely where she knew no one, where she had no connections. That woman’s only family had become her local church, and Housing New Zealand was asking her to move 20 minutes’ drive away from the only community that she had left, as a young woman caring for her younger brother.

This is what the policies that that Government is implementing around Housing New Zealand—the loss of stock, the transfer of stock, and the review of tenancy—are doing to people. It is easy for us to debate these things on paper, as policies that sound as distant as the Social Housing Reform (Transaction Mandate) Bill, and forget that behind that sit people who are affected by these reforms. She was one of them. And what could I do for that young woman, in a city where more and more Housing New Zealand stock was being sold and where there were fewer and fewer options for her and her brother to move into? She accepted she did not need a big house. She just wanted a house closer to people who could look after her, and that is not a lot to ask.

This is just an extra cog in the wheel of devastating housing reforms in the social sector that we have seen under this Government. They are like a plague on our ability to cater properly for our most vulnerable citizens, and Labour cannot support a bill that simply moves the deckchairs around the Titanic.

I would just like to return—as we are debating clauses 1 and 2—to the title of this bill, because this is actually a really important part of what is going on here. We have heard a number of alternative titles, but the actual title of this bill, I believe, is actually very good. It is about social housing reform. That is actually what we are talking about doing here. We are having a reform of a system that has been essentially the same for a number of years. And let us be honest—if you are going to reform something, if you are going to change some things around, it is probably likely to result in a change of ownership of some description, so, of course, we need the word “transaction” in the title. So the title Social Housing Reform (Transaction Mandate) Bill is actually, although it may be a little dull for some people, an incredibly appropriate name for this bill.

I think it is important, as we move towards the end of the Committee stage of this bill—we have had a wide-ranging discussion—to come back to what the whole point of this bill actually is. The whole point of this bill is that we can actually start to provide for vulnerable New Zealanders who are, for whatever reason, unable to either live in their own home or rent in a normal commercial sense. That kind of social housing environment is going to be flexible, it is going to be responsible, and it is going to ensure that they get the very best care, the very best housing that they can have, and the best kind of wraparound services.

In order to do that it is important that it is not just the Government that is involved in this. We have got a number of very, very good agencies right around New Zealand that are providing an excellent service to their clients, to their customers, to the people who are living in the houses that they look after. I would like to see those people be able to do even more. I would like to be able to see those very good organisations, which are doing a really, really good job of looking after vulnerable New Zealanders and their housing needs, be able to do even more of that. Some of our housing stock is not necessarily fit for purpose anymore because the demographics have changed. It just makes sense to me that we have an ability not necessarily to withdraw housing services from those people but to transfer the delivery of those services from the Government to other agencies.

In order to achieve that, it seems a very good idea—and this is not saying that all 65,000 houses are going to go on the block—for the Government to allow some other people to access those properties so that they can provide those very, very good services. The system we have currently has, by and large, done a pretty good job. In many ways it has done a very good job of looking after vulnerable New Zealanders. But just because we have always done it that way, it does not seem to me that we should always do it exactly the same way.

Coming back to where I started from, this about having a system that is more flexible and more responsive, and in order to do that some transactions will need to occur for us to bring in appropriate, well-balanced, and good social housing reform for those people of New Zealand who need it. I happily stand by this title, the Social Housing Reform (Transaction Mandate) Bill.

I stand to address the title clause of the Social Housing Reform (Transaction Mandate) Bill and suggest some alternative names. I have done a bit of a Facebook post and have a number of options here and contributions from the public.

💬 Chris Bishop: Oh!

Yeah, a good 5 minutes’ worth, at least.

💬 Chris Bishop: Crowdsourcing rubbish.

I know. You are going to love this. We have got some suggestions here including the “Sell Off to Make More Homes to Sell Off Bill”; the “Social Housing Elimination Bill”; the “Kāinga Elimination Bill”; I like this one though, the “Tent Pole Bill”, because that is all you are left with; this is good, the “Property Development Handout Bill”; the “Death to the People Bill”; this is an interesting one here, the “Balancing Our Budget Because it Doesn’t Balance Bill”; the “Housed to Homeless Bill”; the “Antisocial Housing Reform Bill”; and, lastly, one of my favourites, the “One Percent Get Richer By Selling Homes Meant For Lower-income Families Sponsored by the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, Anadarko, and Nestlé Bill”. I did want to stand up and offer those public contributions with myself as a mouthpiece.

I have my own final contribution, which does refer to Part 3 of the bill. Part 3 of the bill talks about how land taken under the Public Works Act, including freehold and customary Māori land, does not have to be offered or returned to Māori under the first right of refusal principle. So, effectively, the Government will be able to sell off State house properties without offering them to Māori first, if they were those publicly confiscated lands. For me that is an ongoing Treaty breach as well.

So my final offering, and I would like to hear from them, is “Why Is the Māori Party Supporting this Bill? Bill”. Thank you.

I want to refer to the contribution from Jono Naylor, prior to the one that we have just heard, because that was the sound of the National Party, of the Government, abandoning its responsibility towards the citizens of New Zealand—all they want to do is have decent life. That was the sound of what we had from there, because the truth is that this bill is about flogging off State assets and, more important, doing it in a way that actually affects the most vulnerable in our society. I think the National Party should be ashamed of this bill. It should be ashamed of its track record when it comes to housing, both the housing crisis that it has presided over in Auckland, which is now moving around the country, and of going back to its bad old ways of selling off State housing, because let us face it, we have been here before.

💬 Phil Twyford: Back to the 90s.

We have absolutely been here before. I remember in the 1990s standing around State houses in Waharoa, one of the poorest communities in the Waikato, forming a human chain to stop those houses from being picked up in the middle of the night and transported by that Government up to Auckland so that they could flog them off for more money than they were worth in the poor community of Waharoa, while the residents of Waharoa lived in garages, lived in cars, and lived three families or four families to a three-bedroom house. We are seeing that being repeated all over again.

I particularly want to talk about the commencement date, clause 2, of this bill, because it says that “the Act comes into force on the day after the date on which it receives the Royal assent”. Assuming that this passes through the House in a timely fashion, that means that is going to happen sometime this year. The timing could not be worse.

For communities like Hamilton, the timing could not be worse. What is occurring as we speak is that that Government’s failure to address the housing crisis in Auckland is now spreading to the rest of the country. One of the first communities to be hit by that has been the city of Hamilton. What is happening currently is that Aucklanders cannot afford housing in their own city, so they are moving to cities like Hamilton, where the housing is not cheap but is more affordable than what it is in Auckland. What that is doing is it means the housing prices are shooting up steeply in Hamilton, making those houses more unaffordable for people who already live in the city.

But, worse than that, the rental prices are following suit. So the rental prices—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I am just going to remind the member that we are debating the title and the commencement date. There is some latitude, but members do have to address the bill.

Thank you for that guidance, Mr Chair. I am attempting to describe why the timing of what the Government is doing affects this community so badly, because right now in Hamilton rents are going up at such a high rate that the people at the lowest end of the rental market cannot afford those increases. They cannot afford those increases.

They need more State housing, because that is the contract that we have had with New Zealanders, that the Crown has had with New Zealanders for decades—that there will be that safety net, that there will be a safety net for people to be able to live in decent housing. That is what this bill is abandoning. It is abandoning the Government responsibility towards that.

💬 Chris Bishop: Oh, it does not.

Well, it does, Mr Bishop, it absolutely does, because—and I will refer to the title now—it is the Social Housing Reform (Transaction Mandate) Bill. We do not talk about State housing any more. This Government refuses to call it State housing because it does not want the State to be involved in it at all. So it is now called social housing reform, because the Government is washing its hands of it, and it is in the title, Mr Bishop. It is absolutely in the title that you refuse to call it State housing anymore, because you simply do not care about the Government having any responsibility in this. The title gives it away. It gives it away, Mr Bishop—the Social Housing Reform (Transaction Mandate) Bill.

I move, That the question be now put.

I take a short call here in this clauses 1 and 2, “Title” and “Commencement”, debate on the Social Housing Reform (Transaction Mandate) Bill. Let us call it the “Social Housing Transaction to Treat People Like Commodities Bill”, because that is what it does. I would like to acknowledge my colleagues who have spoken: Jacinda Ardern, with her passionate plea about treating people as part of communities; Sue Moroney, who talked about her community of Hamilton and how this will affect it; and my west Auckland colleagues Carmel Sepuloni and Phil Twyford, who have spoken so eloquently and passionately about the way that this iniquitous bill will affect the real people of west Auckland, our constituents.

I want to take a couple of minutes to talk about my constituents. Housing is the No. 1 presenting case problem in my electorate, and it is not hard to understand why. There are not enough places for people to live in, and they simply cannot afford to pay the rent, let alone buy a place to give security to their children and their families. It is that simple. At very best, this bill, which sets up draconian powers for Ministers to transfer at the stroke of a pen vast numbers of State houses to private hands—offshore hands at that—does nothing positive. It will not build one house. It will not home one west Auckland or New Zealand family. That is at the very best. At worst, what it will do is it will strengthen the profit drivers for the new owners, who will cut corners, who will put on pressure, who will put on rents, and who will put people out of their homes and displace them out of their communities.

The fact is, the Government already makes a huge dividend off Housing New Zealand, and that is shameful. Housing New Zealand used to be a social housing provider. It was there to provide a safety net for people who could not afford it themselves and for whom hard times or bad luck or, sometimes, bad decisions or ill health or incapacity meant that they were in trouble. It was a leg up and a way back. Now it is a profit-making body nominally owned by the State, and the Government wants to go the whole hog, treat people as possessions, and turf them into the hands of foreign property developers. It is iniquitous, but it lays bare the drivers of this Government. Somebody said, charitably, that Government members know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. They reduce people to commodities. They reduce people’s lives to saleable units. They take an asset that has taken generations to build up, and propose through this bill to give two Ministers the power to transfer that public asset into private hands. It is the biggest privatisation we have seen in decades.

New Zealanders need to wake up and understand that once it is done it will be extremely hard to undo, because, amongst other things, under the Government’s Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement we will stand to be sued by those private investors if they can argue that they have been expropriated of the property rights that they are being gifted by the stroke of this pen. This bill is an outrage. That is why the Labour Opposition, with a very full bench, is here debating it for as long as the Committee will let us, because another hour without this bill in force is another good hour. Another day without this bill in force is another good day for vulnerable New Zealanders.

The people of New Lynn have housing very much on their minds. Over summer, we had a group of people sleeping rough in the bush just behind the main street of our town centre. It has just taken place that we have been able to move those people on—move them into family homes; move them, in some cases, into temporary accommodation. We are now dealing with the aftermath, which is a rise of related or unrelated street crime around that area, because when you have homelessness, other problems follow.

You know what the Government’s solution has been? To trumpet the fact that it was voting a whole—wait for it—$2 million for the whole of Auckland for emergency housing. But it will not tell us what it is for yet, and it will not tell us how much is going to west Auckland. What is it going to buy with $2 million? A shack in Ponsonby? Or will it give a quarter of it to west Auckland, and buy one garage in Kelston? Or is it just going to bypass that and buy tents and hand out canvas? Maybe that is what the $2 million is for, because it is nothing more than a public relations con. It is manipulating numbers to manipulate public opinion, and when the Salvation Army has to call out that despicable Government for that kind of manipulation—

I move, That the question be now put.

Well, we are on the title and commencement clauses of the Social Housing Reform (Transaction Mandate) Bill. I think we could all come up with a range of titles for this legislation, but what we need is a title that captures the things that this bill actually does. What it does is it vests enormous authority in the hands of Ministers, with absolutely no transparency and with absolutely no accountability. Also, what it does is it allows for the corporatisation of our social housing stock.

The other thing that it does, which does not appear to have been considered in any great detail in this Chamber, is that it allows for the massive confiscation of property rights that have been held for over a century in this country. That is in Part 3, where it talks about how the Public Works Act 1981 does not apply and has never applied. So, in other words, under the Public Works Act, what normally happens is that the previous owner of land that was acquired under that Act would be able to have first right of refusal if the Government decided this land was no longer going to be used for housing. That does not apply under this legislation. That no longer applies.

So we could call this legislation, considering the title and commencement clauses of this legislation, “The Most Massive Confiscation of Property Rights in New Zealand History Bill”. That would be a far better and more appropriate title for this legislation than the rather bland Social Housing Reform (Transaction Mandate) Bill. Another name we could give it is the “Vesting Enormous Power in the Hands of Two Ministers Bill” because that is another thing that this legislation does. It takes away decisions from Housing New Zealand—the Government agency that has the expertise to deal with housing—and hands them over to two Ministers.

This could be the “Handing over Social Housing to the National Party’s Mates Bill”. That is a far better title for this legislation, because what we have got is a piece of legislation that gives the National Government the ability to hand more of the State infrastructure to its buddies, to its rich mates, than it has already done. Think Rio Tinto, think Skycity, think Warner Bros. Well, the next thing will be the Aussie banks that will be able to get their hands on our social housing stock under the “Give the National Party’s Mates Our Social Housing Stock Bill”, which would be a far better title for this legislation than this bland title that we have got.

As for the commencement date, I have got a suggestion: never. Never ever allow such an ugly piece of legislation to be enacted. How about that? I propose that as an amendment. Let us never commence this legislation, because it is a land-grab, because it is the corporatisation of our social housing system, because it is giving more wealth to the National Party’s mates, and that wealth will come from our most vulnerable people. The rents that people will be paying in social housing will be going directly into the hands of the Aussie banks, under this legislation, and that is appalling.

So how about never? How about we do not commence this legislation? How about we do not pass it, for a start? But if we are going to pass it, how about we have a commencement date of just never? “We never meant to do that. It was folly, it was a really bad idea, and even though we passed the legislation, let’s just not start doing it, because New Zealanders just know that this is the wrong kind of direction for us to be taking our social housing stock.”

Let us not privatise more of our social housing. Let us not hand over more of our social security net to Australian banks, to American movie companies, to Australian gambling corporations. Let us not do that. Let us actually do what works. Let us have a solid social security net. Let us have a State housing stock that is sufficient to actually meet the needs of New Zealanders. Let us not sell off houses in one part of the country—

I move, That the question be now put.

Motion agreed to.