Housing Legislation Amendment Bill

I am happy to take the first call on this—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): As long as the member puts his collar down.

Happy to dress myself properly.

💬 Hon Members: The jacket collar.

Oh, the jacket collar. Thank you for your sartorial advice, Mr Chairperson. I am very happy to take this, the first call in the summing-up debate on what has been a significant discussion on issues related to housing, and we thank the Government for the opportunity to do so.

In the summing-up debate, of course, we debate the title and the commencement of this bill. I actually think that there is a different title for this bill. Perhaps we should call it the “Hasher Bill” or, in Nick Smith’s case, the “Hash-up Bill”, because just about everything that the Government does around housing is a hash-up. We have seen that today and yesterday and the day before—in fact, it has been ongoing for some time.

But what is interesting about this particular debate on this particular series of amendments that the Labour Party members have put forward is that although the Government members have no ideas of their own on how to deal with the housing crisis that New Zealand faces, they have voted against every single amendment and every single proposal put forward by the Opposition that would actually deal with the substantial housing issues that New Zealand faces.

But I want to turn in particular to the debate that we had on Part 2 of this bill, because, if anything, that demonstrates why this should be called the “Hash-up Bill” or the “Hasher Bill”. The Government told us all the way through that debate—all the way through, right to the bitter end of that debate on the changes to property rights—that it was not, in fact, changing anything. But let us be really clear. I want to know, because we have been researching this—and this is something that we would have raised during that part of the debate had it not been under urgency and had we actually had the time to consider it properly—about some advice provided to the previous Labour Government when it was preparing a national policy statement. The advice was very clear on offer-back provisions, in which it said that “The existing legislation does not provide an exception where the disposal [of the land] itself is part of the public work.”—i.e., a housing development. “This has significant implications for sustainable urban development projects which aim to create well-serviced parcels of land to sell to an end-user (e.g. a developer, an owner-occupier, or an institutional investor in affordable rental housing).”

In other words, the advice that the Government gave this House all the way through the Committee stage on Part 2 of this bill was wrong because it was inconsistent with the advice that previous Governments had been given, and yet there has been no change to that part of the law. So how is it that a previous Government could have been advised that the existing legislation did not provide exceptions when it came to the disposal of land as part of a public work—i.e., a housing development—and was provided with clear advice that that had implications for urban development and that the law would probably need to be changed, and yet the Government today said that that was not the case?

So I would like the Minister to take this opportunity, in the closing stages of the debate, to clarify exactly why the advice seems to be different now to what it was previously, although the law has not changed. I am looking forward to the Minister’s contribution to that because if the position previously—and I want to go through it again, where it says: “This has significant implications for sustainable urban development projects which aim to create well-serviced parcels of land to sell to an end-user (e.g. a developer, an owner-occupier, or an institutional investor in affordable rental housing).” If that was the case then, why is that not the case now? I would like the Minister to answer that.

The Government, basically, has pulled the wool over the House’s eyes by trying to say that “This bill does not actually change anything, and yet it is essential.” Those two things are actually contradictory. Either it is essential and it changes something, or it does not change anything and, therefore, it is not essential. So which is it? It cannot be both. It cannot be so urgent that the Government must push it through to avoid the potential that there will be litigation as a result of this loophole being identified, and yet it says that, actually, there is no loophole.

The Government is trying to run both arguments simultaneously and it did that all the way through the Part 2 debate, and yet we have now got clear evidence that the advice that it was giving the House is not true. Why did this bill not go to a select committee, where that could have been properly teased out? The Government could not answer that and it did not make any attempt to answer that. I am asking for the Government to now provide the explanations that it should have provided earlier on, because it has not done so, so far.

Perhaps in the Government’s summing-up in this debate and in the Minister’s contributions, he might like to also explain why those members voted against eight proposals—eight concrete proposals—that would have dealt with many of the issues that New Zealanders face when it comes to housing. Government members and the Government party chose to vote against all of them, and I would very much like to hear more of that contribution.

But the offer-back provisions—and I want to talk about this. This was not an issue that we had the opportunity to canvass, because the information was not available at the time. So I want to quote again from the advice that the previous Government received: “Any land acquired for an urban development project or existing council or government-owned land within that project is likely to be sold. So even if it could be argued that a particular site should be compulsorily acquired for an urban renewal project, the offer-back obligation may still complicate matters when it comes time to sell the land.”

So, again, I put that to the Minister: if that was the position under the previous Government and the law in this area has not changed since then, why is the advice the Minister is giving the House now so different to the advice that the Government of the day back then received? This is what the whole issue, and the whole, I guess, length of this debate, has been driven by. It is a concern that Parliament, under urgency, without any consultation with the public, is changing people’s property rights and they are not getting a chance to have a say on it. That is actually a very significant thing for any Parliament to do under urgency—to change people’s property rights—but not only to change them for now and for the future but to change them retrospectively, which is what this legislation has done.

So I hope that the Minister will take this opportunity to give us a detailed explanation as to why a position that was long standing, where the law had not changed, somehow has miraculously changed and the advice is now different. I look forward to that contribution from the Minister.

I understand we are debating the title and the commencement, but as a matter of courtesy to the member Chris Hipkins, I want to make two crisp points in respect of his question. His question was: has the law changed? The answer is yes, it did. In the Housing Amendment Act that was passed by this Parliament in February of this year, the very same provisions that are affected in this bill were in the Social Housing Reform (Transaction Mandate) Bill, which went to the Social Services Committee. I would draw his attention to the minority view from his own colleagues, who chose to make absolutely no mention of the change or of any concern about it. So it is ironic for members to be giving all this bluster and concern about a provision in respect of the Housing Act and its interaction with the Public Works Act when it was of absolutely no concern to Labour members earlier in the year.

The second point I would like to make is that I would like to table a very specific email that was provided in respect of the development of this bill, and I will quote it word for word from Treasury’s regulatory impact statement unit, which is required to report on all bills. It says this: “The minor avoidance of doubt provision in the Housing Act”—the one that the member has just claimed is so significant and is of such moment; let us hear what it says—“does not need a RIS. It is minor and does not change any rights.” Let me say that again. This is the independent Treasury unit, and it simply goes on and says: “It is simply a clarification of existing legislative intent.” I am going to read the words again: “It is minor and does not change any rights.” [Interruption]

The members ask a fair question: “Well, why is it important that there is clarity in the law?”. I will tell you why that is important. Right now, the Government is negotiating significant contracts for tens of millions of dollars to develop housing on blocks of Crown land across Auckland. I think there is broad agreement that that is actually a good thing to do. And in the negotiation of those contracts involving tens of millions of dollars of private investment—and, remember, these are blocks of land the Government owns, and so we are able to put definitive requirements about both social housing and affordable housing. Because we own them, we can say that you must do these things.

It is absolutely important for those investors that they have the certainty, without any uncertainty at all, over someone potentially challenging them. I actually think that if members reflect on that—if you were a major housing company, you would want absolute certainty in that area. That is the sole reason that those provisions are in this bill, and it is why, actually, if this Parliament is committed to getting more houses built in Auckland at pace, that certainty is required.

I think we have had the clarification now from the Minister for Building and Housing, Nick Smith, where he has just now—

💬 Hon Dr Nick Smith: I apologise to the member. I seek leave to table the email dated 3 August from the Treasury regulatory impact statement that makes that very clear statement that it is minor—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): No, no, that is all you need. Is there any objection to that? There is objection.

So I just want to—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! Sorry, we will start the whole speech again in a second. I am going to ask the member to reconsider. Members of the House have asked for that evidence to be tabled on repeated occasions. I think it ill behoves the Committee to refuse to have something tabled that is not anywhere otherwise available and has been asked for by a number of members from at least two parties. I am going to ask the member to reconsider his objection.

💬 Denis O’Rourke: Speaking to that, Mr Chair, the reason that I have objected is that on numerous occasions exactly the same situation has occurred when New Zealand First has sought to table material that would be just as valuable to the House as a whole and has been requested by members of New Zealand First and sometimes by others, and for no reason at all a member on the other side of the House—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): OK. It is all right. The member has a right to object. There is no reasonableness test.

The Minister has, as I understand it, just confirmed to the Committee and the public that in his initial negotiations over Crown land that he, in his wisdom, decided ought to be used by developers for the purposes of building housing, he failed, at that point, to ensure the legal certainty of the use of that land. That was his failure. I do not know what he said to those developers about the legal certainty of the use of that land or the status of that land in terms of the offer back. But what is clear from what he just said is that when he provided access to that land for building, signed the deals for the use of that land, watched as developers spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing that land, he could not give them any legal certainty about whether they could continue to use and on-sell it. So what he is asking from us now is to clean up that mess he created in his failed negotiations.

I wonder then whether the supposed legal risk is actually coming not from original owners of the offer-back provisions that he is taking away but from the developers themselves, because the developers themselves, as he has just confirmed, do not have legal certainty over the land on which they have now invested possibly hundreds of millions of dollars in building, infrastructure, resource consents, and all of those things. So is that, Minister, the reason why Part 2 is included in this bill—not because of a risk from the original owners who would otherwise be entitled to an offer-back provision under that land, but from the developers themselves, whom he has done deals with knowing he could not give them legal certainty? That is what it sounds like to me, especially given this Minister will not go into any further detail about the nature of that legal risk. In the Cabinet papers it is the detailed description of that legal risk that is redacted, and it is the only part of the Cabinet paper that is redacted—where it looks like it goes into describing the legal risk in some detail.

I think that if he has a particular legal problem to deal with as a result of his failure to provide legal certainty to developers from the first instance, then that may be a legitimate concern to bring to this House under urgency. It may well be. There may be a circumstance where he would talk to us about this in some detail so we understood the full story. Things do go wrong. Ministers make mistakes. This is the sort of thing that happens. The provision that we would expect him to build in the law would be specific to that particular legal problem, not as broad-brushed as this current provision is, which will remove for every possible original owner and their descendants their right to an offer back for any land that was given for State housing across the country—it does not matter whether it is in Auckland or for special housing areas. This provision is so broad that there could be hundreds, if not thousands, of original owners whose rights are being taken away. That is what he has created here when he could have more clearly identified the legal risk, come and spoken to the Opposition MPs about the nature of it, and we could have found a more effective and targeted way of dealing with that risk.

I have been here a long time—and others have been here a long time too. We know there are times when you engage in very specific detailed conversations—highly confidential conversations—with Ministers about some of these kinds of legal and financial issues. All of us who have been here for a while have been involved in something like that to some extent, at some point. There is an ability for Ministers to work with Opposition MPs to find credible and sensible ways through tricky legal problems and—often—tricky financial problems that are created through a genuine mistake. In those circumstances I, as co-leader of the Green Party, am more than happy to work with Ministers to find effective, logical, rational, careful means through those problems. But that is not what happened here. What happened here was that a bill was put forward under urgency. A very short briefing was provided.

I am going to start on clause 2, which is the commencement date, and the line in the bill as it states now says: “This Act comes into force on 15 September 2016.” To those people who may be listening on the radio or watching on Parliament TV that is 8 days away, but in the twilight zone that Nick Smith has thrust us into that is 9 days away. I can understand that the Minister will want this piece of legislation to come into force on 15 September when it comes to Part 1 and extending the housing accords and special housing areas, because if we do not do that, there is some risk for developers who have got plans already in train. But what I do not understand is why we have to have this Part 2 come into force in 8 days’ time.

We were told during the debate around Part 2 by Jono Naylor—I think he was the only National Party MP to stand up and take a call during Part 2—that this “is not a significant change”. So if it is not a significant change and we are passing this bill through to make sure that Part 1 gets through in time, why are we making sure that we are rushing through with Part 2? Why are we not having a select committee process where people who may have had rights affected by Part 2 can have their say? None of that makes sense to me. I will give to the Minister that Part 1 makes sense, because time was running out on that, but why Part 2?

As co-leader of the Greens Metiria Turei has just pointed out, we have got some suspicions around that. We have waited for some time; I think we were definitely debating Part 1 or Part 2 of this bill at this time last night, and we were wondering why this had to go through under urgency. We may have thought it was de-risking the Government from any liability, or de-risking somebody who may have bought a State house from any liability, too, but the Minister has come to the Committee now and said: “Well, it’s not de-risking those two classes of people; it’s de-risking the developers who are interested in getting their hands on the land that could be sold to them to develop.” That was not necessarily the story that we got 24 hours ago. It really does open up exactly why this is not getting the select committee scrutiny that it deserves.

To give that some local context from my area, we have got an empty patch of land in the Castor Loop that the Minister’s Government has done nothing with over the last 4 years. It has sat vacant—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Right. I am going to remind the member that although the debate was slightly extended—and while the member was replying to the honourable Minister’s comments he was OK—the title debate is a relatively narrow debate.

Yes. As to why we are passing Part 2 under urgency for 15 September 2016, I would like to know why, in the context of all of this, a Government that has sat on a piece of land for 4 years passes this piece of legislation under urgency. Essentially, what Part 2 of this bill would allow it to do is to not care about who may have sold that piece of land to it under the Public Works Act. It could sell it to anyone it likes. That is not what that community wants. I would like to acknowledge my other colleague from Mana, Jan Logie, who knows what that community wants. It does not want an empty piece of land. It wants the houses that it was promised were going to be built for it when the other ones were demolished. That is a commitment that was made by this Government but was not followed through on. The reality of what Part 2 does here is that that land now can be sold—de-risked for the developers, so there will be no issues for them.

I am going to call—how about Jan Logie?

Honestly, Mr Chair, I have been trying so many times tonight, and I have prepared so many speeches, that I really hope you allow me a little bit of leniency to give my six speeches that I have written on this title and commencement debate. This is a relief.

The misnamed Housing Legislation Amendment Bill—thank God, I have got a chance to speak. It is a misnamed bill because a Housing Legislation Amendment Bill, in the context that we are living in, in these days, in a generally acknowledged housing crisis—you would expect a Housing Legislation Amendment Bill to deliver more housing. Despite what this Minister says this bill is going to do, we really have no evidence that it is going to do that.

We have been told that this is about supply and that it is about affordability, but when the first tranche of this legislation was introduced 3 years ago—again, under urgency—the average house price in Auckland was about $730,000. We were told this bill was going through under urgency. We were pushing through these proposals that would override council decision-making and control of land use in their communities because we had to prevent the possibility that the average house price in Auckland might get to $1 million within 3 or 4 years. Ha, ha! Well, it turns out that this proposal and this method that we are extending around the country sped that process up to the quickest tranche that we thought was possible back then.

This is absolutely a failed initiative, for which this Government is again using urgency to roll-out in an extended way around the country. I think it has delivered maybe—if I address now the supply aspect—1,300 houses, I understand, over 3 years. Actually, you have got to think that maybe the market could have delivered that by itself. I am no fan of the market, so I really wonder whether this is the Government’s concept of intervention, of taking control and delivering for the people, because if it is, it is half-arsed. I would propose that as a better name for this bill than the Housing Legislation Amendment Bill.

I would like to say that it is particularly important to note that 1,300 houses have been delivered, while the Government has sold off 2,500 Housing New Zealand houses since 2011. So maybe this bill should be renamed the “Let’s Go Backwards Bill”. The Government’s housing agenda maybe is to put everyone on the streets. Maybe it is not enough that just 1 percent of the population, or over 1 percent of the population now, is homeless. Maybe the Government wants it to be more.

Or maybe, judging how this Government has voted on all of the brilliant, I might say, proposals that have been put forward by the members on this side of the Chamber, this could be called the “We Don’t Really Care Bill”. Actually, the Government wants to put up this tinkering thing, to pretend that it is doing something, but when it is given something substantive—like building more houses, like putting a plan in place, like ensuring emergency housing is available, like intervening to address inequality and the absolute rort of investment that is happening in our housing market, which is locking people out of the market—then it is “Well, we really don’t care. We don’t want to do any of those things.”

The Government says: “Don’t give us the regulatory impact statements because there is no detail.” This is apparent; I think I understand that the legislation has been developed in 6 weeks, whereas the proposals that have been put forward from this side of the Chamber—some of them have been considered through a select committee process that, of course, National did not want to participate in. Some of them have actually been through a select committee process. Some of them have actually been properly worked out and the details are very public. But the Government says no, and that we are being hypocritical in challenging it on not providing us with the information. But it is OK. The Government will ignore all of our information and all New Zealanders’ comments on this issue.

I do want to speak just a little bit to the Housing New Zealand decision to not return the dividend to Housing New Zealand.

I want to thank the Minister for allowing us to have this debate. It is the best debate on housing that I can remember in 8 years in this House. I think it has been very illuminating, actually, because in this Housing Legislation Amendment Bill debate there are two contrasting approaches.

The first is one very narrow policy approach based on the idea of drawing some lines on a map and declaring these to be fast-tracked consenting zones. That, in essence, is the Minister’s special housing areas policy. That has been the main solution that he has offered up to a housing crisis that now grips the country and has given us the most unaffordable housing in the world. It is based on the idea that the problem, the cause of the housing crisis, is slow consenting by councils, and I think that if it is not clear to you by now that that is not in fact the root cause of the housing crisis, then you—and I do not mean you, Mr Chairman—have not been paying attention. If the slow rate of council consenting was the cause of the housing crisis, then the special housing areas would have made a much bigger difference in the 3 years since the Minister unveiled that policy.

In the debate we have had this afternoon, Nick Smith’s special housing areas have been contrasted with a broad and deep reform agenda backed by the Opposition parties in this House, who will form the next Government.

We proposed to this Committee the building of 100,000 affordable homes for first-home buyers, and National voted against that. National and ACT voted against that. We proposed taxing speculators, and National voted against that. We proposed banning non-resident foreign buyers from buying existing houses. National voted against that. We proposed a bold and radical new approach to managing urban growth to reduce the cost of urban land and produce more competitive urban land markets that would lower the cost of housing, and National voted against that. We proposed to change the law to stop the Government from using our public housing organisation as a cash cow in the way that is has—withdrawing half a billion dollars out of Housing New Zealand in the middle of a housing crisis—and National voted against that. We proposed to this Committee a comprehensive approach to strengthening the system of emergency housing, because on this side of the Chamber we believe it is totally unacceptable for kids in this country to be growing up in cars and caravan parks, but National and its subsidiary brand Act have voted against every single one of those proposals.

But the reason that Nick Smith brought us here in the last 36 hours to debate this bill is that he wants to roll over his special housing areas. A measure that he described 3 years ago as an interim measure—he has asked us to roll that over for another 3 years. We agreed to that because we did not want to inconvenience the eight developers who otherwise would suffer because of Nick Smith’s incompetence, because he failed to anticipate the transition issues associated with the demise of the special housing areas.

So there are two very contrasting approaches to dealing with this housing crisis. I want to argue that the broad, systemic approach that is embodied in the range of housing reform proposals that we have debated here this afternoon is appropriate. It is appropriate because the housing market is a system. It is an economic system that involves the Government, councils, landowners, developers, builders, homeowners, and renters. It is a complex system that lies at the heart of the well-being of our people, our families, our communities, and our economic prosperity as a nation, but it is broken. It requires a deep, systemic approach to fix it, and it is only the policies of the parties on this side of the Chamber that offer that. People have a deep, basic need for shelter—for good-quality, affordable, and accessible housing. They are not getting that under this Minister for Building and Housing and this National Government. It is time for a change.

I want to begin by commenting on the Minister’s speech given just a few minutes ago, concerning his belief that this is just a clarification of the law and not a law change. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is this: clause 10 does use the words “To avoid doubt”, but that does not make it true. In fact, that term is superfluous and inappropriate, because the clause does not just clarify, it actually makes a substantial addition, and it does so retrospectively. I can prove this, because the current section 15 says only this: “Subject as hereafter provided in this Act, any State housing land and any buildings and chattels held for State housing purposes may be disposed of by way of sale, lease, or tenancy by the Corporation.” Only the first few words of clause 10 are repeated in section 15 as it now is, but the words added are: “if the land is disposed of as 1” of four specified categories of land, which are listed.

The term “State housing land” means, in section 2 of the Housing Act: “land that is for the time being held or set apart for State housing purposes; and includes land that at any material date was held or set apart for the purposes of Part 1 of the Housing Act 1919”. The term “State housing purposes” has a very long definition in section 2 of that Act—too long for me to quote here, but it has three land categories that are quite different from those that are stated in this bill. Look at them for yourself and you will see that I am right. Yet, strangely, it is section 15 that is being amended, not the definition in section 2 of the Housing Act. What does that mean? It means that that definition still remains. So how will that sit with the new section 15(2)? I say that it creates uncertainty. I say that it needs to go to a select committee because the select committee would sort out these sorts of things, and that is exactly what is not happening as a result of this process. So I say to the Minister: you may feel that this is just a clarification, but if you look carefully at what the bill actually does, you can see without any possible doubt that it is a substantial law change.

I want to go on to say this about the title—because that is really what we should be talking about here, and we should not be sidetracked by misinformation from the Minister. The short title that I would suggest is one that would be far more descriptive than the one that is there. It cannot be short, because this bill covers two completely different things, in my opinion, so I would suggest the title should be: “Ensuring continuation of failed Government policies in the hope it can find a way to make them work, and ensuring that Government panic measures relating to the fast-track sale of State housing land prevail over the rights of people who have rights to offer back.” That would actually describe what the bill is about. So why not have something like that? It may be very long, but it has to be long if it is actually going to inform people what this bill is about. Of course, the Government, I think, does not really want to inform people what it is about—it should.

Let us take that name that I have suggested bit by bit: continuation of special housing areas—they were originally 3 years, now to be 6. Have they failed? Yes, they have—1,300 houses over 3 years, and the other statistics that are available show the same thing. So that is the evidence that they have failed, and the reason they have failed is that the Government refuses to directly invest in housing land adequately for the purposes of those special housing areas. That is New Zealand First policy, and that is what should be done by this Government, but it is not doing so.

The second part of the suggested title—it is a panic measure, because here we are under urgency, with no select committee scrutiny, and the Government ought to have a good reason to change the law but what we have got is a very loud silence. And in the process, what we have is people’s rights being trodden on—rights that they should have for offer-back. That is a tragedy for law and order in this country. The Government should actually be protecting people’s rights, not removing them without any adequate reason being given.

I move, That the question be now put.

No, I am going to hear from Iain Lees-Galloway.

Wonders never cease, Mr Chairman. Thank you very much for the call. I would like to speak to the title of this bill. I tried to find the direct quote—I could not find it, but Sir Geoffrey Palmer once said something along the lines of “Titles of bills should be succinct and, as clearly as possible, articulate what the bill does.” So when looking at the purpose of this bill, I wondered why the title of this bill is not the “Housing Supply and Affordability Bill”, because that is what this bill purports to do. It purports to improve both the supply and the affordability of housing. So let us look through the bill and see whether or not it meets its purpose, and whether or not that title would have been a more appropriate title for the legislation.

Does this bill improve the supply of housing? Well, maybe a little bit—not a lot, but a little bit. By extending the provision of special housing areas and having the fast track provisions that go with special housing areas, perhaps there will be some improvement in the supply of housing. Not all of that housing will be affordable. In fact, there is very little provision to make sure that the housing is affordable. There is nothing to stop houses in special housing areas being flicked on by the purchasers of those houses after 2 years for untaxed capital gain, so that makes no difference to the affordability of housing. But nevertheless, the period in which special housing areas can be created is extended by this legislation. There may be some insignificant but nevertheless noticeable change to the supply of housing—not nearly enough to actually deal with the housing crisis, but, nevertheless, a change to supply.

The next question is: does the legislation deal with the affordability of housing? There is nothing in the legislation as it is now. Having gone through all the various parts and the debate that we have had, there is nothing in Parts 1 and 2, which remain intact in the legislation, that actually changes the affordability of housing. The minuscule changes to supply that are allowed for in Part 1 of the legislation will have no impact on affordability at all, and Part 2 has nothing to do with the affordability of housing whatsoever.

What would have had an impact on the affordability of housing were the various other parts that we have debated over the last day and a half. New Part 3, which was proposed, would have introduced, essentially, Labour’s KiwiBuild policy to build 10,000 homes a year—10,000 affordable homes—and put some parameters around what affordable homes look like. That would have had a significant impact on affordability. The parts to do with foreign investment in our property market, and the various other parts that were proposed by members on this side of the Chamber, would all have had a real impact on the affordability of housing, not just in Auckland but in other parts of the country as well. I recall, actually, an amendment that Metiria Turei offered to Part 1 of this legislation. It also would have added a definition of what an affordable house was and would have required special housing areas to have a particular proportion of affordable houses.

All of those changes were offered by Opposition parties and Opposition members. All the things that would actually have made this bill a housing supply and affordability bill were offered by members of the Opposition, and all of them were voted down by the Government. It is a bit rich to hear the Minister for Building and Housing and members of the Government say that members of the Opposition have come to the Committee and played games with this legislation, or that members of the Opposition have come to this Committee and voted against provisions that would have improved the affordability of housing. Actually, we voted in favour of the provision that would have improved supply and we offered all of the things that would have improved affordability, and it was the Government that voted them all down. So I am going to speak in favour of the Housing Legislation Amendment Bill title, because it tells us absolutely nothing and this bill does nothing. Indeed, it amends housing legislation, but it does sweet bugger all else. So let us stick with the title of Housing Legislation Amendment Bill.

I would like to take a particularly short call on the title, following on from my colleague Iain Lees-Galloway’s dissertation. I have just got some better options for the title, OK. They are the “Especially Complicated and Notably Useless Housing Bill”, the “Elephant is Still in the Room (But At Least the Elephant Has Got a Room) Bill”, the “Affordable Housing for Affordable People (Everyone Else Get a Cardboard Box) Bill”, the “Nail in the National Government Coffin Bill”, the “Halfway House to Nowhere Very Much Bill”, and the “We Have Abandoned You (Love Doesn’t Live Here Any More) Bill”.

💬 Hon Member: I like that one.

I like that one, too, because it is slightly melodramatic but it is deeply true. As the Guardian said, the whole world is watching. The National Government has abandoned the people that it is supposed to represent. Love does not live here any more.

I would also like, just before I finish this, to refer to the moral tale in our Pākehā history of the three little pigs. Remember the pig that built its house out of straw, and then the wolf came along? Well, that is what the Government is offering in this. It is offering a straw man, or a straw house, or a straw whatever. The big bad wolf of the collapse of the market will come along. The big bad wolf has already blown away the life of many people in terms of having a home. They already got no straw, no bricks, no whatever else—no timber. This bill does not provide anything except straw. It is not good enough.

The title needs to be changed. Pick whichever title you would like, but I just have to say to the people out there who are watching that although the National Government has abandoned you, love does live here on one side of this House. We will keep working for affordable housing.

Thank you very much. This might be a frivolous contribution, but my heart has been in this process, along with everyone else’s. Thank you to everyone who put up a constructive solution to actually make this piece of legislation worth having. The fact that the Government members voted it all down—let that be on their own consciences. “The whole world is watching” notes the Guardian. Good night.

I move, That the question be now put.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I wanted to move Supplementary Order Paper 212 dividing the bill.

Well, it is too late.

💬 Phil Twyford: Is it? OK. I missed my moment.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): You missed your moment, yes. And I did wait.

House resumed.

Bill reported with amendment.

Report adopted.

Third Reading