Special Debates — Housing

Thank you, Mr Chair. I’m delighted to lead off the Estimates 2021-22 debate on Vote Housing and Urban Development. Vote Housing and Urban Development in Budget 2021-22 consists of $4.694 billion in appropriations, which represents a 65 percent increase in actual spending from the 2020-21 year.

The Hon Dr Megan Woods is the Minister of Housing, and her ministry is the vote administrator. In keeping with our sector approach, we heard from Minister Woods. Accompanying the Minister were the three :Associate Ministers: the Hon Poto Williams, who is responsible for public housing, the Hon Peeni Henare, who is responsible for Māori housing, and the Hon Marama Davidson, who is responsible for homelessness. Ministers were accompanied by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development and also by Kāinga Ora. We appreciate the logistics of the four Ministers appearing together alongside their ministries, and we thank them and the select committee clerks for their approach, recognising that it was not a simple feat.

The Social Services and Community Committee covered wide-reaching topics. Our first was in relation to house price increases, purchases of land for housing by Kāinga Ora, including the proportion of buy-ins by Kāinga Ora. We heard that Kāinga Ora has bought 308 pre-existing properties—0.37 percent of the total real estate in New Zealand. We interrogated the substantial funding for Māori housing. Minister Henare discussed the Government progressing work alongside Māori providers and iwi and hapū to support Māori housing aspirations, and capacity-building was also progressing on the alternative pathways to greater development of papa kāinga housing and whenua Māori.

KiwiBuild was discussed, including that 934 KiwiBuild homes had been built, with 897 under construction. There had been an underspend. We inquired where this would be allocated. We heard that the money eventually returns to the Crown and can be recycled for use in other programmes.

We also discussed emergency and transitional housing. It was a very significant topic. We also asked how people with disabilities or with mental health and addiction issues would be supported within this system. We discussed the Aotearoa Homelessness Action Plan released in 2020.

We also followed a line of questioning on public housing and the register. We note that the waiting list is increasing. We heard that a target of 18,000 new housing places across the country by 2024 has been set. We heard that this will be achieved by standard public housing, greater use of higher-density housing, mixed-tenure models, and distribution of housing outside the main centres.

As the chair, I sincerely thank the Minister, the officials and clerks, and the select committee members for a thorough and robust set of hearings. Thank you, Mr Chair.

At the heart of this multi-billion dollar set of Estimates is an organisation called Kāinga Ora, and that organisation has been conducting itself in such a concerning manner that the Public Service watchdog has had to step in and investigate. So my line of questioning to the Minister tonight is going to be about how she can offer assurance to taxpayers, about how she can be confident, that that organisation—subject to a Public Service inquiry for the lack of conduct by its staff, their lack of integrity, and their lack of political neutrality—is worthy of the trust she has placed in it, on our behalf, whereby she trusts that organisation to borrow $8.3 billion of money and she allocates it hundreds of million dollars to spend.

What people listening to this debate need to know is that Kāinga Ora is a bloated, underperforming bureaucracy. It is an organisation that has grown from just over a thousand people to more than 2,000 people on this Minister’s watch. It has roughly doubled in size and so taxpayers have a right to ask, “Well, have we got double the results for that doubling of staff?” Well, no. No, we have not. We’ve seen a quadrupling in the State house waiting list, and that is the core function of Kāinga Ora—it’s to provide State housing. On this Minister’s watch, it has quadrupled. We’ve seen a complete failure on KiwiBuild. We should be having 16,000 houses by now, according to the promises made by this Government. But, actually, we’ve only just got 1,200 about the same number of staff that they’ve hired. We’ve seen Kāinga Ora go out and bid in direct competition with first-home buyers for homes, so that they can make the Minister’s numbers look good when it comes to State houses. That’s $824 million worth of homes bought by the Government in competition with first-home buyers. And what the Minister gets up and says, when I ask her about this, is she says “Oh, well as a percentage, it’s fine.” What people listening to this debate need to know is that over the entire course of the past National Government this occurred less than 10 percent of what this Minister is doing.

So what we have here is a bloated and performing bureaucracy. And so my first question to the Minister is, given the serious allegations and the serious issues that were brought to public attention by me last week, that she knew about since August but did nothing about, how can we be confident that Kāinga Ora can be trusted to deliver in the public interest for New Zealanders? And does that Minister have confidence in the board of Kāinga Ora and its ability to secure value for taxpayer money?

Thank you, Mr Chairperson. I’ll take a short call and address some of the statements, as well as the questions that were in there.

I think it’s been well canvassed in this Chamber, the fact that I was not satisfied with the conduct of Kāinga Ora in regard to a series of emails, and I in fact referred it to the Public Service Commission and asked them to have a look at it. But the member asks about how it is that the New Zealand taxpayer can have confidence in Kāinga Ora and their ability to deliver. I want to direct the Chamber’s attention to a series of numbers. If we take it back to 2016-17, the year of which our Government had nothing to do with delivering, 409 houses were delivered by then Housing New Zealand. We then see 2017-18, when there is a change of Government, that that goes up to 838. I then want to take us through to 2018-19: that goes up to 1,461; in 2019-20, 1,229; and in 2020-21, 1,866. So the member asked the question that we might have doubled the number of staff, are we doubling the performance? Well the answer is we’re more than doubling the performance when it comes to that core role of actually building houses to help New Zealand solve a housing crisis.

The member says that all that this agency does is buy in houses to improve the numbers. That simply is not correct. And I’d like to, again, take this House’s attention to another series of numbers. If we have a look through, for example, 2012 to 2013, 63 percent of all properties that Housing New Zealand—under the previous Government—bought were buy-ins. They weren’t building them; they were buying them off the private market. What we have done, through a programme of work, has got it down to 13 percent of all new properties being added by Kāinga Ora being buy-ins. So when the member talks about this very large number, $824 million, that’s what happens when you actually have an active acquisition programme around houses and you are a Government committed to adding to the housing stock, not flogging it off. I’d like to point that member’s and this House’s attention to the fact it’s around 0.2 percent of all real estate transactions in this country that are accounted for by Kāinga Ora. On this side of the House, in this Government, we think those that are in public housing deserve somewhere to live as well.

The Minister in the chair, Megan Woods, has just told the committee that she continues to have confidence in Kāinga Ora. So I want to ask the Minister whether that confidence is based on her understanding of what has gone on in that organisation since revelations were made last week. She has said she was concerned by those revelations, so I would like to know: is the Minister aware that no internal communications went out to staff at Kāinga Ora about what had occurred until Saturday morning, and that it was on Saturday morning that staff at Kāinga Ora were told that they best be careful to adhere to the expectation of political neutrality. Does the Minister think that was a timely intervention by the leadership of Kāinga Ora, or does she think that that should’ve happened days, weeks, or months earlier?

Furthermore, is the Minister confident that the leadership of Kāinga Ora has taken her concerns seriously in light of this email which I am about to read? This email says, “I feel compelled to email you this morning, Nicola. I work in a share space and I am surrounded by an increasing number of employees of Government departments, most of them from Kāinga Ora.” The email goes on to say, “While I was getting my coffee today from the kitchen beside one of our conference rooms, I observed laughing and joking from the main boardroom. It was one of the regular Kāinga Ora team meetings, and it soon became clear to me that the topic of conversation was the current Arena Williams - Kāinga Ora email saga. What was also clear to me was they all, including senior members, consider this a bit of a joke, and the tone and theme of conversation was ‘Bummer we got caught—bit of a laugh.’, etc., which indicates to me that this event is clearly not being taken seriously with the agency.” I would like the Minister to respond to that.

I will just address some of the inaccuracies in the statements that member has just made, that in fact there may have been another email sent out on Saturday of this week but, in fact, there were one-on-one conversations with the staff members that were directly involved with it several months ago. But, of course, this is all now subject of the Public Service Commission and the work that they are doing to look at that question. The member asks how I can have confidence in that board and the fact that things will change. I think that I can have absolute confidence that the communication I have had with the chair of Kāinga Ora is that he absolutely accepts what happened was unacceptable, it should not have happened, it will not happen again, and that we need to take a robust look at it.

But I will note that this is actually not something new. If we look back to the Mt Roskill by-election, actually, Nick Smith, as the then Minister of Housing, was pulled up for directing housing officials to help with Parmjeet Parmar’s by-election at that time. I think documents revealed that “Parmjeet Palmer has expressed a keen interest in hosting a roadshow. She is keen to raise a local profile in Mt Roskill in case of a by-election.”, an email from housing Minister Nick Smith’s private secretary said.

Now, I can accept that what happened within Kāinga Ora was simply unacceptable. But I’ll tell you what did not happen: my office was not involved in it; I did not know about it until I read the email. So I think that we can accept things go wrong, but I think some members should be careful of throwing stones.

I want to know if the Minister of Housing remembers a Social Services and Community Committee hearing where she sat next to the chief executive of Kaīnga Ora, Andrew McKenzie. That hearing took place on 9 June, and at that hearing I put to the Minister and Mr McKenzie allegations that have been put to me repeatedly by housing developers across this country, who have come to me on multiple occasions to say, “You know, the problem is this Labour Government has filled Kaīnga Ora up with so much money, they’ve put so much cash in the piggy bank, that those guys are going around the country, spraying the money around it, outbidding the private sector for land such that we can’t compete.” They’re outbidding, they’re pumping up the price of land, and they’re doing it with no commercial discipline whatsoever.

I said to Mr McKenzie, “How do you respond to these allegations that you’re flinging the taxpayer’s cheque book around?” And I got specific. I raised the specific example of Swanson Road, a property that I had been told on good conviction that Kaīnga Ora had allegedly offered around $36 million for, whereas the nearest underbidder allegedly made a bid of $26 million dollars. And I put to Mr McKenzie that the story being told around New Zealand boardrooms is that what then happened was that the developer community got wind of this overbid, threw their toys, Kaīnga Ora got ear of it, the heat went on, and they found a reason under due diligence to withdraw their bid. And I said, “I’m troubled by this, because what that tells me is that Kaīnga Ora was prepared to pay $10 million more than the market for that property.”

And Mr McKenzie, he dismissed my concern. He said, “The winning tenderers were a small amount below us.”, and, “The purchaser purchased it for within $2 million of the amount that we had assessed it, subject to due diligence.” So you can imagine that I was pretty upset when some time later, Mr McKenzie wrote to that select committee to say that the comments he had made were incorrect—that, in fact, Kaīnga Ora had been told that the final purchase price was $8.3 million less than the offer they had made. That is to say, that the allegation I had put was substantially backed up by the real numbers.

So what did we do? We saw that Andrew McKenzie, whether knowingly or unknowingly, had mislead a parliamentary select committee on aspects of fact. He had misled that committee, so we wrote to the committee and we said we would like the chief executive of Kaīnga Ora to appear before us to explain this, to explain this, and—

💬 Angie Warren-Clark: Point of order.

CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): A point of order, Angie Warren-Clark.

💬 Angie Warren-Clark: Thank you, Mr Chair. I’d just like to—

Cover up again, like you did?

CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! This will be heard in silence.

💬 Angie Warren-Clark: I’d just like to raise that the official does not have the opportunity to defend themselves from this House, and I would like to also advise that the official wrote to us and noted the matter without prompting from anyone.

Ha! Mr Chair, I’ll respond to that.

CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): No, no, e noho! I’m going to rule on this. You don’t get to interrupt. The member is quite right: officials don’t have any ability to respond. However, what I say to the member is she is sailing really close to the edge, and she should be very careful and not let the emotion tip her over that line.

Mr Chair, I take your point entirely, and I take the point that Angie Warren-Clark has made, because I think there is a very important principle here, and that is that officials should have the opportunity to address issues of this nature. That is why I, together with my National Party colleagues, wrote to the Social Services and Community Committee, asking that Mr McKenzie be recalled, pursuant to Standing Order 191, so that he could better explain these matters for the House. And I would note, for the record, that Labour members voted against that.

I find that I find that very upsetting because I think there should have been the opportunity for Mr McKenzie to explain how this error was made. And I make no judgment on whether the error was his or someone who advised him. What I note for the record of this House is that the allegation I made in the select committee was substantially backed up by the facts, but only after the fact, and I find that troubling. I find that troubling in the context of an organisation that the Public Service watchdog is investigating on issues that, in his own words, go to trust and confidence in the Public Service. And I put to this committee that we have evidence before us in the letter from Mr McKenzie that demonstrates this is not the first time that Kaīnga Ora had, willingly or unwillingly, mislead members of the public. I find that very troubling.

But the bigger issue that I would ask the Minister to address is this: is she confident that Kaīnga Ora, with the billions she has allocated to it in this Budget, will not be bidding up the price of land in New Zealand, that Kaīnga Ora will not be grossly outbidding other private housing developers for land, that it won’t be squeezing out those who wish to get on and build housing, and that when it does acquire land it will do so having demonstrated that it will build houses quicker than those private developers could have? I think those are very legitimate questions for this committee that the Minister should answer.

Thank you, Mr Chair. While this is an incredibly important topic and the Greens do have concerns, I will try and keep my volume to a bearable level. So noting that there’s been a net increase of 2,490 public houses in the September 2020 to September 2021 year, Kāinga Ora has been delivering at about this rate steadily for three years but has not scaled up. So the Green Party would like to know: could Kāinga Ora, local councils, and community providers, including iwi and Māori providers, be delivering more public housing if additional funding was provided? If not, what other constraints are limiting capacity and how will the Government be addressing these factors? More specifically, are there any steps being taken to build capacity of iwi and Māori providers to deliver housing on their land?

Thank you, Mr Chair. I want to put some recent announcements of the Government to the Minister to ask how they square up. So if I look at a recent Beehive press statement made by the Hon Dr Megan Woods about the Housing Acceleration Fund, she’s stated that, “Between the Government and Auckland Council we have identified that these are the places where we want more growth.” It then goes on to say, “As part of the Auckland partnership, the Government and Auckland Council have agreed these areas as joint spatial priorities for growth.”

Now, these are for five suburbs that the Government and the council together have decided should be spatial plans where there’s need for housing and a need for infrastructure to go with it. I’d like to know how that squares up with the recent announcement of the Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Bill, which essentially makes it a free-for-all, ripping up the rules that are in place within Auckland Council, the plans that are in place, the priority areas that have been drawn up over years of work for suburbs that the council has deemed to be important places for growth that need infrastructure funding, and I’d like to know how it is possible that these two different things could be happening at the same time. There is a need for infrastructure, so why on earth is she ripping up the rules when she thinks that infrastructure is important, and when she also thinks working and engaging with the local councils is also important?

I will take a short call here and address some of the questions that have occurred over the last three or so speeches. I would like to make the point that when a member wants to hold a public servant to the level of political neutrality that I also believe they should be held to, then there are actually some conventions of this House around attacking politically neutral public servants and not dragging them into a debate in a space where they cannot defend themselves. I think it has been deplorable what we have seen from that member in the Chamber tonight. That person is not here to defend themselves, and of course there is an active Public Service Commission investigation under way, which is the due and proper process in which that should be done. So I am very disappointed.

The Opposition spokesperson from the National Party did ask me if I remember the select committee and being there when she was asking questions about a purchase of a property at Swanson Road. I remember it very vividly, because the member was convinced that she had a smoking gun. It was when she was told that, actually, Kāinga Ora hadn’t actually purchased the property that the wind went out of the sails of the member a little bit. She then asked the chief executive what the valuation had been. He said, off the top of his head, he thought this was the number. He then found he had made an error, and he wrote to the committee, off his own back, saying he had made an error in an answer and wanted to correct it. I come from a school of thought where I believe humans are human, and people sometimes do make errors when they’re recalling numbers from the top of their head. And when you have the chance to correct it and you do of your own volition, then actually I think that is called putting it right.

I’d also like to address some questions that were put to me by Jan Logie, who asked about some of the constraints that we were seeing—was it funding or were there further constraints? And the member said that we’d seemed to have only scaled up and been delivering at the same scale for the last three years. I’d like to point the member to the figures that I read out at the beginning of this session, that, actually, we’re tooling up our public housing organisation from being an organisation that sold off our public houses over the tenure of the previous Government and had forgotten how to build houses—it didn’t have the skills, and it had to be rebuilt in order to do that. I think we’ve seen a phenomenal turnaround of that organisation in the ability to deliver at the very high levels that we are. Of course, there are going to be COVID implications and lockdowns that have to be taken into account. But of course there are constraints that exist out there, one of which is sector itself. Workforce is a critical one, and it’s why this Government has put so much effort into apprenticeships and why Kāinga Ora itself is a leader in terms of the build partnership agreements it has with the private sector that it works with. There have been many, many apprentices that have gone through and are part—every time I visit a Kāinga Ora site, it seems that I’m meeting more and more apprentices who not only are building and rebuilding the public houses that were sold off under the previous National Government, but are actually learning a trade and the skills required to do it.

She also asked, “Could we do more if we work with councils and iwi?” Well, we are. The community housing sector is receiving funding unlike they’ve ever seen before simply because we are building at a scale that has not been seen since the 1970s. And, of course, we have put significant money into iwi partnerships, papakāinga, but also with iwi Māori organisations. We also know that there is more work that we need to do around this, and there’s new challenges such as supply chain constraints that have been thrown up. And I’ll leave my answers there.

As I say, we offered the opportunity for Mr McKenzie to come before the Social Services and Community Committee to explain himself, and that opportunity was denied by Labour members. My point is one about Government policy, and it is an issue that that Minister is responsible for. It is about the Kāinga Ora land acquisition programme.

Now, we know that Kāinga Ora has previously had access to funds to purchase land for housing. And this has led to the spectacle at Ihumātao of that fund being raided to sort out a political problem. And in that matter, the Auditor-General did find that, actually, there hadn’t been proper process. So there is concern here historically about the way these land acquisition funds have been used. But my question for the Minister is about the Kāinga Ora land programme that was funded in this Budget, because I would like to know why it is that a Budget passed in May then led to a meeting in August between the Minister of Housing, the Minister of Finance, and their officials to clarify the Minister of Finance’s expectations in relation to that programme, because I would like to know: why weren’t the expectations for that land programme clear before that Government allocated billions of dollars for the programme? I would like to understand that.

And I would like to understand if the Minister has had raised with her by Treasury or others concerns about the way that land acquisition programme will occur, and whether or not there is adequate coordination across Government programmes, whether or not the decision-making processes and consultation for those billions of dollars have been properly formed, and whether or not the role and emphasis for that programme is correct. And I ask the Minister these questions in light of this knowledge: that Minister and the Prime Minister have received letters raising with them serious concerns about Kāinga Ora’s approach to land acquisition and its willingness to outcompete private developers in a way that cuts off their ability to access the land they need to build housing on.

And I raise these questions in light of the record of this Government when it comes to actually getting houses built on land. I’m lifting up an article about the Unitec development in Auckland. Years and years and no houses. So my question is: why should we have confidence that that Government allocating itself billions to outcompete with private developers will deliver more housing than the market would without taxpayers having to foot the bill?

I’m just going to address a couple of things. One is a simple inaccuracy by that member and, I think, a lack of understanding of how the various funds work. So the fund that was used, the Land for Housing fund, which was, in fact, a fund set up under the previous National Government, was the fund that was used to purchase the land at Ihumātao. It was nothing to do with Kāinga Ora. It is a fund that is administered for the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, so absolutely nothing to do with Kāinga Ora there.

In terms of the question she’s asking about the meetings between the Minister of Finance and myself to discuss the continuing governance and setting up an exciting $2 billion fund so we can start doing some property development: yes these happen all the time, not just in August. This is an ongoing piece of work that we have Ministers from across Government having conversations on, just like I have conversations with the Minister of Transport around a lot of this. We have a group of urban development Ministers, and, of course, the Minister for Infrastructure, who is also the Minister of Finance and the Deputy Prime Minister, is a critical group of those urban development Ministers that need to be continually talking to each other to make sure that across the massive investment we’re making in infrastructure, whether it be through three waters, whether it be through Waka Kotahi, whether it be shovel-ready, whether it be the Housing Acceleration Fund, we are lining these up. And I’m pleased to say that we are.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I would just like to simply raise the same point that I raised before and hope that the Minister will actually answer my question that I know will be on the minds of many New Zealanders when it comes to the Housing Acceleration Fund and how that works against the recent announcement of the Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. In one case, you have the Government saying that it’s really important to work with councils and that when we’re building new homes, it’s really important that we have the infrastructure there, and it’s funded, so that we can actually have a city that works. Now, under the recent announcement of the enabling housing supply legislation, they’ve ripped up the rules, they haven’t consulted councils, and they don’t know how they’re going to fund the infrastructure. So how do these two positions add up?

I return to the line of questioning that I raised earlier because I think it’s very important that the Minister provide assurances about the billions of dollars that have been allocated in this Budget for land acquisition. The concern I raised was a substantive one. It was: how can the Government be confident when it goes out to purchase large tracts of land for housing, multimillion-dollar plots of land, tens of millions of dollars being spent on land, that when it does that, it is adding net benefit for taxpayers? Because the alternative, in most of these scenarios, is that a private developer purchases that land, then builds housing on it. The record that New Zealanders are very well aware of, whether it’s KiwiBuild or the failed State house bill targets, whether it’s the slow build at Unitec, is that actually the Government isn’t as good at building houses at scale and pace as the private sector is.

So the question is: how can the Government be confident when it purchases large pieces of land that it is not simply pumping up the price of land by outbidding private developers, robbing them of opportunities to build urgently needed housing, and stopping houses being brought to market as quickly as they would otherwise? This is a critical question. I know these are questions that officials across Government have also been asking. I would like to understand how the Minister can give taxpayers confidence that these funds will be spent prudently, and that these funds will create value for taxpayers.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I’m interested in exploring a bit around rental costs, which we know have increased by 10 percent in the year June 2020 to June 2021, according to TradeMe’s property index. If I think about my neighbourhood in Cannons Creek, a traditionally very low-income community where for rental houses now they’re asking almost $600 for an ex-State house for low-income families, it’s completely out of reach for most people. I note that Te Puni Kōkiri advised the Government to implement a rent freeze during periods of alert level 4, but this was not implemented. So I’m interested in what projections the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development have regarding future rental increases for the coming year, and is the ministry considering further measures to regulate rental increases?

Thank you, Madam Chair. With the time I have left, I’d like to talk to one other issue, and this is in regards to the healthy home standards. I know that the associate housing Minister said that she was aware that some landlords won’t be able to meet compliance deadlines, because of COVID restrictions, and she had received advice on that. However, she was not willing to release that advice publicly to let landlords know whether the Government should believe that there should be an extension, so landlords who might not be able to comply, through no fault of their own, would actually know what the rules are going forward. If the associate Minister is withholding that advice, will she release it?

Thank you. Just a quick follow-up to that, actually. The Greens are interested in the implementation of healthy homes standards, because they make such a profound difference in terms of money in the family and the health of people, being able to go to work and to school. So we were pleased to see the introduction of the new standards from July this year. We’re just wondering what proportion of new tenancies entered into since that date are fully compliant with the healthy homes standards, and what enforcement action, if any, has been undertaken against non-compliant landlords.

I want to note for the Hansard that I have given the Minister multiple opportunities to address what I think are substantive questions about how taxpayers can be assured that value for money will be achieved for the billions of dollars that this Government has allocated for the purchase of land by Kāinga Ora and that the Minister has not chosen to address those questions. I find that very concerning. I think this is a matter of public accountability and that it would be appropriate for the Minister to share with this committee the advice she has had on those matters.

None the less, given that she doesn’t want to address how this $2 billion piggy bank will, in fact, face constraints, I will ask her some other questions. I would like to know from the Minister whether she can confirm that she was provided advice that tax changes put forward by that Government to remove interest deductibility for housing and to increase the brightline test could have the effect of increasing churn in the rental market, with the impact being felt mostly by those at the lower-income levels of the tenancy market, with the likely outcome that it could lead to an increase in demand for social housing and an increase in demand for emergency housing.

If she can confirm that she received that advice, I wish to know what she makes of the fact that the State house waiting list has continued to increase at a rapid rate and that rental prices have continued to accelerate. And I wish the Minister to give this committee an assurance of by what date this Government will finally succeed in reducing the State house wait-list, at the very minimum, to the levels it was at when that Government took office.

I will address some of the issues that have been raised. The issue around the relationship around the Housing Acceleration Fund (HAF) and how that works with the up-zoning legislation that is currently going through this fund—yes, there is some relationship in some places, that there could be either through the money that is being paid to large-scale projects, where we’ve seen that both in Porirua and in Auckland, that there has already been allocations to those large-scale projects. There could be some interplay there. But then, also, between the Infrastructure Acceleration Fund and the up-zoning, there also could be interplay.

One of the things that we’re also very aware of is that one of the things that this legislation is doing is bringing forward the National Policy Statement on Urban Development. And, of course, this is one of the first times that a requirement was put on councils to account for infrastructure costs associated with projected housing needs in their areas, and they needed to account for that in their long-term plans (LTPs). So, yes, some of it will be through central government funding, and I think we’re seeing, across a suite of Government funds, that there is funding available for local authorities around infrastructure, for housing—of course, that’s just a fancy name for roads and pipes. So there’s various ways—the three waters funding. There’s the Waka Kotahi and the transport funding as well as our HAF funding. But then there is also a requirement for councils to start accounting for this in their LTPs and making provision across projected housing needs in their needs as well.

The Green member asked me about why it was that we didn’t take the advice from Te Puni Kōkiri about putting in a rental freeze with the lockdown this year, as we had, actually, in the March 2020 lockdown. The reason for that was that, in the intervening period, between the March 2020 lockdown and the lockdown this year, there had, of course, been the amendments to the Residential Tenancies Act, and there was only the ability for landlords to raise rents once a year. It did not exist when we went into lockdown in March 2020. So it was under quite a different environment that we were operating there, as well.

I’d also like to address some of the other questions that were raised. One was about the State house waiting list and how we account for it being so large. Part of that is the fact that there weren’t simply enough State houses when we came into Government, because the previous Government had sold off so many. In fact, over a period of nine years, not only did they not add to the stock at all but they ended up with 1,500 fewer State houses than they started with. That is less State houses than we are adding every year. So I would like to point to the fact that if the previous Government had not sold off State houses and if they had built at the rate we are—or actually below the rate that we currently are—we would have nearly an extra 16,000 State houses. So when I look at that State housing waiting list and I think about the families in my electorate whom I represent who can’t get into public houses, I also get a little bit angry. And I get a little bit angry that we had a Government that decided it was better to flog off our State houses and to end up with 1,500 fewer than when they started.

So, in terms of a commitment of when it will be that we will get the State house waiting list back to what it was when we came into office, well, what we won’t be doing is having a State house waiting list, like when we came into office, that suppressed the demand, that did not show the real demand. I know there were people in my electorate that were too scared to come forward and go on the State house waiting list, because they were living with other families in a State house in the electorate and they knew that that family would get evicted because they were breaking the terms of their lease. So there was so much suppressed demand. So I can give that member an assurance there will never, on our watch, be a State house waiting list like we found when we came into office. If there is a problem, you have to know what it is and you need to actually add to the houses and not sell them off.

The member also asked about what the arrangements around the Kāinga Ora fund, the land acquisition fund, are. She had asked in previous contributions, with a conspiratorial lens, around meetings between myself and the Minister for Infrastructure and the Minister of Finance—what we were talking about. We were actually talking about the governance arrangement that goes around that fund—what the tipping points before it needing ministerial or Cabinet signoff would be, and what that framework looked like. So there is a very clear process that involves governance, and it involves triggers of who it is that needs to sign it off. And of course this is something that we’ve given a great deal of thought to, and Ministers do, from time to time, gather in the same room, talk about it—it’s called a “meeting”—and put together what that framework is going to look like, and they ask officials for advice.

I find it very rich that the Minister is talking about people who are scared, in relation to State housing, in the very week where we’ve had the spectacle of a pensioner couple telling of how an intimidation campaign by their State house neighbour, a Black Power member who threatened to slit the throat of an 82-year-old man and watch him bleed out, are now too scared to live in their State home, because that Minister has presided over a change in policy which means that tenants can no longer be evicted from their homes. I find that pretty rich.

💬 Hon Dr Megan Woods: Incorrect.

If the Minister thinks that’s incorrect, I welcome her addressing, in this debate, why it is that there have been zero State house evictions in the past three years. And when it comes to the State house waiting list, which is the core issue in this Estimates—

💬 Hon Michael Wood: Point of order. My point of order is to draw attention to the fact that the matter being raised by the member is clearly, as described by the member, a policy matter. It’s not clear to me that it’s actually a matter that goes to the question of the Estimates of Appropriations that are supposed to be subject to this debate.

💬 Chris Bishop: Speaking to the point of the order, there could be nothing more fundamental than the issue of the expenditure, or lack of expenditure, in the Estimates, of State house evictions. It’s well within the parameters of the annual Estimates debate, which considers the appropriations that the Government seeks from Parliament, and the issue of whether or not Kāinga Ora has been using the money appropriated by Parliament to its agency in order to do evictions or not is well within the scope of the debate.

💬 Hon Michael Wood: Speaking to the point of order, if I may, Madam Chair. I’ll simply refer back to the actual comments of the member concerned, who specifically framed her comments as a question of Government policy, and had no reference at all to the way in which it was being implemented through appropriations.

💬 Chris Bishop: Speaking to the point of order.

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jenny Salesa): One more time. Point of order, Chris Bishop—and then I’ll go back to the person who was actually asking the question.

💬 Chris Bishop: The issue of Government policy is, of course, expressed through the Estimates. I think the member is dancing on the head of a pin. Government policy is expressed through the Estimates. Government policy is part and parcel of what is being debated in Parliament. This is Parliament doing its constitutional duty to scrutinise the actions, or lack of actions, of the Government.

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jenny Salesa): Estimates is a forecast of how it is that the Minister of Housing and Urban Development is actually going to invest in this portfolio. I will let Nicola Willis finish her question.

Perhaps I can be helpful and ask the Minister this: how much does she forecast Kāinga Ora will spend in the next year on security guards for tenants who are too scared to live in their homes because of the abusive Kāinga Ora tenant next door? How much does she forecast in the next year that Kāinga Ora will spend compensating tenants because they are having to live in fear? How much money does she expect the Tenancy Tribunal will order Kāinga Ora to pay because it hasn’t met its basic obligations as a landlord to protect the safety of its tenants?

Thank you, Madam Chair. I hoped maybe I could just simplify one of the Kāinga Ora matters by asking a very simple question of the Minister: does Kāinga Ora ever bid against private developers, and, if so, why?

Now, I’d like to go back to my second question of the night, which I note the Minister once again didn’t answer, and that was a simple question about the healthy homes standards. I know it might be easy to answer the easier questions here, but I can’t help but be part of the ACT Party and ask the hard ones. But we do expect answers.

Now, this goes to the heart of the matter for landlords, New Zealanders who are providing other New Zealanders homes. They had a deadline of 1 July to make sure that their homes for tenants comply with the healthy homes standards within 90 days of any new tenancy. Now, some landlords have said that they will be unable to comply with that standard because of COVID restrictions and the delays that have been put in place because of those restrictions. They are asking for more certainty to know that they will not be unfairly penalised, through no fault of their own, because they couldn’t meet those standards.

So I’m asking: will the Government provide an extension for those landlords who’ll be caught out through no fault of their own, who may be outside—these are law-abiding people who want to do the right thing, but they’re unsure what the Government is expecting for them to do the right thing. Because when the ACT Party asked for advice on whether they would give these landlords an extension, the Minister withheld the advice that she has received, even though she admits that there could be a problem. So will the housing Minister commit to actually allowing these landlords some peace of mind and give them the advice that the Government has received and let them know whether this extension will be granted?

Thank you, Madam Chair. In response to the question around time frames and whether or not an extension will be granted, as the member herself has identified, it’s the Associate Minister of Housing who’s responsible for this piece of work. As she’s also acknowledged that that Minister, Minister Williams, has acknowledged that there is an issue here and it is a continuing issue that she is looking at. But what I can reassure both that member and tenants is that there does need to be a degree of pragmatism around this in terms of how the tribunal would need to consider such matters, what would be reasonable. Now, there will be tenancies that swapped over before the deadline and before the country went into lockdown. I don’t think the tribunal would be granting leniency there because there wouldn’t be a reason that was associated with the lockdown that would’ve got in the way in terms of complying with that standard. But, as in all things, we will be pragmatic and continue to look at the issue, and the tribunal will apply a degree of pragmatism and consideration and be reasonable there as well.

In terms of the questions that came from another Opposition member around whether or not there had been a change that prevented Kāinga Ora from—well, it wasn’t so much a question; it was an allegation that there’d been a change that prevented Kāinga Ora from evicting tenants. That simply is not true. Kāinga Ora can evict tenants. In fact, it has made three evictions since 2017. So to state that there has been a change that prevents it is simply misleading and untrue.

But I think one of the approaches since we came into Government is that we know these are some of the most vulnerable, and if these people cannot be housed here, more work needs to be done to ensure that these people can be housed in a way that is suitable. I think one of the things that I have always failed to understand or even hear a solution from those that oppose, that just advocate for evicting people, evicting people, evicting people, is these people still exist and they live somewhere and they’re going to be someone’s neighbour. So how about we put in place the right supports in order to make sure these people actually can sustain a tenancy? Of course no one is excusing the kinds of behaviours we’ve heard about in the media, but I think the member showed her true colours when she asked what budgets we had in the appropriations for security, for coming down with a heavy hand.

In fact, what I would instead point the member to is the part of the appropriation that shows an increased budget in our new builds, where we actually provide wraparound services for those living in transitional and public housing. I would point to the fact that now in many of our new Kāinga Ora developments we are building in space to have on-site community development, to work with the tenants as well as provide the wraparound services. I think this is what will benefit New Zealand as a whole.

Noting the significant allocations in this Budget with a purpose of provision of State housing, I wonder whether the Minister thinks it’s acceptable that, on average, people now wait 293 days to be housed in a State house, having been judged as eligible for one, and whether, given in September 2017 that figure was 104 days—so around a third of the waiting time—the Minister would consider reinstituting a Public Service target to reduce public housing wait times, as existed when that Minister came to office. Or does it remain the Minister’s position that, as long as she keeps allocating hundreds of millions, if not billions, to Kāinga Ora, then one day, someday, things might get better—even though the evidence month after month, year after year, is that the waiting list keeps growing, the waiting times keep growing, and that every time they pile more costs on to rents, more people turn up in need of a State house? I wonder if she’ll answer that.

I also return to the point that the Minister has refused to address while asked by me and other members tonight, which is whether she will address the widespread view in the community that Kāinga Ora is routinely over-bidding for properties. Land prices are skyrocketing in New Zealand, stifling housing supply, and the Government’s housing arm is out-competing private developers for land, and that Minister in this debate has refused to address how that provides value for taxpayer money.

I call—

💬 Hon Dr Megan Woods: Madam Speaker, do we still have any time?

Yes. I call on the Minister Hon. Dr Megan Woods.

Thank you. In the final seconds that we have remaining in this debate. I’d just like to say that we are a Government that do not believe that the market alone is going to fix the housing crisis. Over a series of decades, it has served up a crisis, and we on this side of the House do believe that you need an active Government that is involved and committed to solving it. I don’t think it comes as any surprise that there will be other property developers who are competing for the same land that might sometimes write a letter to a Minister and a Prime Minister because they don’t buy that piece of land. This is the price of having an active Government, and one we do not resile from.

The ACT Party have a few more minutes for this part of the debate, so I’ll allow Brooke van Velden to ask the last question.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’ll make this quite quick, because I just have one point to raise to the Minister. I think this is really important for all New Zealanders, and I want to just ask the Minister, for the record: did she just tell New Zealand that the Tenancy Tribunal should not enforce the law if landlords have not met the healthy homes standards due to COVID? Madam Chair?

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jenny Salesa): Brooke van Velden.

Will the Minister just answer the question?

No. That is not what I told the House.

Thank you. We will now move on to the next part of the Estimates debate.

Thank you. We will now move on to the next part of the Estimates debate. If we can have the Minister for Children in the chair.

Oranga Tamariki