Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Bill.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

I move, That the Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

As a new Government, we accepted that New Zealand faced a housing crisis and that it is our duty to turn around these long-term trends. I think we all now accept in this House that many people have been experiencing stress from housing costs, resultant overcrowding, and homelessness. Today, we deliver legislation that builds on the Government’s existing National Policy Statement (NPS) on Urban Development, bringing that forward faster and amending the Resource Management Act to deliver better outcomes. This bill will mean that more New Zealanders can have a healthy home sooner, whether they’re owners or renters. I’d like to thank the Environment Committee and officials again for their work on the bill.

There’s no doubt that the bipartisan approach of Labour and National to this legislation, supported in the House today by the Greens and the Māori Party, is important. It will help provide greater long-term certainty and stability in respect of this important setting.

Before I turn to the details of the bill, though, I would like to respond to what I thought was a slight over-egging of the pudding by the deputy leader of the National Party in the House last week, where she claimed that this bill will make greater inroads into the housing crisis than other measures that the Government has already taken. Although its impact is significant and will be beneficial to housing supply, it should be seen in context. It’s a welcome addition to the heavy lifting that’s being done by some other policy initiatives altogether. The cost-benefit analysis done by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) showed that the existing NPS on Urban Development will add 72,000 dwellings as a consequence, and PwC now think that that’s a conservative estimate.

In addition, as a Government, we’ve also introduced a suite of other actions to increase housing supply to get people into warm, dry housing, and, as I’ve said, it was us in 2017 who were willing to acknowledge a housing crisis that had been denied, in the face of people sleeping in garages and in cars. We’ve invested taxpayers’ hard-earned taxes wisely. We’ve had a $3.8 billion Housing Acceleration Fund to speed up and scale up home building by enabling infrastructure needed to support housing. Most recently, this has included $136 million allocated to large-scale projects in Porirua, and $282 million in Auckland. In our first term, we established the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development to lead our housing response. We established, also, the Urban Growth Agenda and Land for Housing Programme to improve land supply. We established Kāinga Ora to provide a joined-up approach to housing and community development. We passed the Urban Development Act, the Infrastructure Funding and Financing Act, and, as I’ve said previously, put in place the NPS on Urban Development. These measures have enabled housing development, they’ve ensured that more capital is available to build infrastructure, and they’ve supported well—or they are going to support—well-functioning urban environments. We also passed the COVID Recovery (Fast-track Consenting) Act, and projects referred under that Act have included more than 3,400 residential units in the 2021 year. We’ve required the Reserve Bank to consider housing and monetary and financial decisions, and we’ve amended the Overseas Investment Act to ban most overseas buyers of existing residential property, to curb offshore speculation in our home, whilst encouraging investment into new housing.

This term, we’ve continued at pace by continuing with the comprehensive reform of the resource management system, we’ve dedicated $400 million to the Progressive Home Ownership Fund to help families into their first houses, and the next phase will see Kāinga Ora offering support for shared home ownership for households earning less than $130,000 a year. In March this year, we released our housing package with that $3.8 billion infrastructure fund to accelerate housing faster, with more support for Kāinga Ora, and with higher income and housing caps so that more people can access first-home grants and loans. We doubled the brightline tax test and we phased out interest deductions for residential investments in existing homes, again tipping the balance in favour of homeowners, and encouraging investors into new homes rather than bidding up the prices of existing houses.

As a Government, we boosted apprenticeships and support for trades training. This has been hugely successful, with more than 100,000 people extra in training, and many tens of thousands of those are in full-blown building trade apprenticeships. We’ve launched the Construction Sector Accord to help meet the challenges facing that sector as it’s rapidly expanded. We announced the $350 million Residential Response Fund to help balance our finance sector through COVID-19. We amended the Building Act to exempt smaller projects and lift the efficiency in quality building. We established the Māori and Iwi Housing Innovation programme to enable the building of more homes on Māori land. We introduced the healthy homes standards and amended the Residential Tenancies Act because renters deserve healthy and secure housing. We funded over 18,000 public and transitional houses to be delivered by 2024. We launched Housing First, working with councils to support housing providers and we’ve delivered an action plan for homelessness, which is actually one of the many reasons why we’ve succeeded as a country to overcome COVID, because we enabled a lot of homeless people to come off the streets.

The impacts of all of these policies on the supply of homes are clear in the numbers. There are now more than 74,900 public homes, 8,770 more than before the 2017 election. Building consent numbers are running at record levels with more than 155,000 issued since October 2017. More than 47,000 consents were issued in the year to the end of October, and an average of 44,000 is expected over the coming year according to the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s national construction pipeline. So that will be about 265,000 additional houses or homes after the next six years. In Auckland alone, the number of houses being built has almost doubled over the last five years, from 10,000 in 2017 to 19,000 per annum now. This is all very substantial progress, and for the first time in a long, long time, New Zealand is building more houses than needed to accommodate population growth, so we are making progress.

That is the background to this bill. This bill builds on that strong foundation of housing action. PwC modelling found that the medium-density rules in this legislation will add tens of thousands more dwellings in the next five to eight years than the five tier 1 urban areas. That strengthens our plan to improve housing supply by bringing forward and strengthening the NPS on Urban Development, and it makes land use and infrastructure more efficient.

This approach was reinforced by the Infrastructure Commission in their submissions to the bill. They highlighted that demand for infrastructure is driven primarily by population growth, and made the point that this bill is unlikely to increase the total cost of infrastructure in the long run, as it shifts where development happens, rather than whether it happens.

Intensification in cities, rather than sprawl, is shown to bring economic benefits, as well as environmental and wellbeing benefits. This bill introduces the medium-density residential standards, which will mean that more people in our cities will have more housing choices—not being forced to do anything; they’ll have choices—at more price points. Importantly, these homes will be in areas close to transport, schools, jobs, hospitals, and other services—in other words: where people want to live. The Environment Committee has strengthened the bill to ensure that density and livability go hand in hand. Intensification will also help low-carbon urban form and the protection of valuable productive soils outside of cities that we need to grow food.

Finally, the bill makes things easier and cheaper for councils and their communities by streaming this part of the council plan-making process, and so will, in turn, make sure that the houses that we need can be built sooner.

We’ve heard for many years now that too many Kiwis are locked out of the housing market. They will see this bill as a further opportunity to get a foot on the housing ladder and obtain a healthy and secure home to own or to rent. With this bill, we can look forward to more housing choices, like an extra home out the back for a parent or to provide a home for a renter or a first-home buyer; houses with easy transport options nearby so people can get to work, businesses, school, or the places that they recreate. We’re going to have easier development options for papa kāinga and to support extended family and multigenerational living, and we will do this with increased amenity and, I think, better housing, because if people aren’t spending as much on land, they can afford a better house. All of this is enabled; not required. The choice is for the landowner or developer.

The final point I’m going to say is that I find it incredibly odd that the party that claims it wants less regulation and favours greater autonomy for property owners is now tripping over itself to argue—

The member’s time has expired. The question is that the motion be agreed to.

This bill is the unique product of a negotiation and bipartisan accord between the National and Labour parties to ensure that more housing can be built in New Zealand. And it is right that people listening to this debate today will say, “Well, why has National chosen to work with the Government in this way?” And so I think it’s important that I put on the record for this House the context in which we are debating these changes to the Resource Management Act (RMA), because here in New Zealand, today, we are facing a housing emergency. This is despite the election of a Government in 2017 that had at the core of their manifesto a commitment to solve what they then described as a “housing crisis”. Since that point, we have seen rampant house price inflation at levels far beyond that seen around the rest of the world. This has led to immeasurable social harm, with more than 4,000 families now raising their children in emergency housing, prices up 26 percent in the past year alone, reaching a staggering, eye-watering median of $925,000. We now have a State house waiting list of historic levels, with more than 24,000 New Zealanders squeezed out of the private rental market and forced to line up at the Ministry of Social Development for a house. Things have never been worse for first-home buyers. Whereas in 2001, the average house was worth around three times the average income, today that ratio is more like eight to one. A first-home buyer today wanting to purchase a median-valued property would need to save $185,000 in deposit—that is an extraordinarily steep mountain to climb.

In National, we think it is untenable to have the property ladder pulled out of reach for so many New Zealanders. That is why we support this bill’s measures to make it easier to build more housing in New Zealand, because we believe that only by building more houses and building more affordable houses in the places where people want to live, will we be able to truly restore the idea of an egalitarian property-owning democracy.

This bill will allow our major cities, in Wellington, Auckland, Tauranga, Hamilton, and Christchurch to grow both up and out. It will allow people to add more housing to existing residential areas and to add the kind of housing that first-home buyers can more readily achieve—that is apartments, townhouses, smaller dwellings. We need more of those choices for the first-home buyers of today and tomorrow, and this bill will enable more of them to be built. It also allows for the fast-tracking of greenfields development on the outskirts of our major urban areas so that more housing can be built on the outskirts of our city. In short, taken together these measures will reduce the cost, the complexity, and the delays that currently face too many people when they set about trying to build a new house on an existing residential section. It will make it easier and it will unlock more homes.

The bill has not been without its critics, and I want to acknowledge today those who have raised their concerns about how this bill will work in practice. At the Environment Committee that considered this bill, we listened to and scrutinised hundreds of submissions, and I want to make it very clear to those who submitted that your contribution, your analysis made this a far better bill than it would have otherwise been. We were given a range of perspectives, both at a detailed level and a higher concept level that we listened to as a committee. As a result, we have made extensive amendments to this bill, through 50 pages worth of amendments in fact, which I think make this bill much better and therefore much more enduring than it would have been in its original form.

The key areas that have been reformed and made better are around design standards. It was the view of members across the House that those New Zealanders who came to the committee and said, “There must be good design standards when you’re having more intensified housing in your urban areas”—it was our view that those submitters were right. So we have made changes: to allow for landscaped areas, to allow for greater outdoor living spaces and outlook spaces, and to reduce the height of housing in relation to boundaries. We also listened intently to local authorities who said that they needed to maintain some discretion so that they could exclude areas from intense housing development that were not properly suited to it—areas, for example, that were subject to natural hazards, areas that had particular historic heritage, areas which would not be able to support the level of housing that this bill implies. So we tidied up the qualifying matters section of this bill to ensure that local authorities were able to carry over assessments formed during previous planning processes.

A third area where I think we have improved this bill is that we have fixed up some of the transition measures around private plan changes that are already in process that will bring on new housing development. And we have allowed for local authorities to put in place district-wide standards around things like hydronic loading and permeability. These are technical terms and I talk about them in this third reading speech because I acknowledge all of those in the engineering departments, planning departments, and other departments of our local authorities who told us these things matter. We have heard you. We have also heard the voices of the hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders who have said to us that “We can no longer tolerate a situation where it is too difficult to build new housing in the suburbs of our New Zealand cities.” We have heard those people, and this bill sticks fast to its purpose of ensuring that more people will be able to build a home without facing the disincentive of a laborious resource consent process, while having the certainty that development can occur.

I want to acknowledge the constructive approach our select committee took and, in particular, I want to acknowledge Eugenie Sage, the chair of the committee, and Rachel Brooking from the Labour Party. It is an unusual situation when National and Labour work so closely on the development of something, but I think that it has meant that concessions on both sides have made this a more enduring piece of legislation. But I do want to put this on the record of the House, particularly following the contribution from Minister Parker: the truth is that Labour had an approach to housing that today, as we stand here, has failed. They promised 100,000 KiwiBuild houses; they have not and will never deliver them. They said that removing interest deductibility from landlords would somehow improve things; all we have seen since then is further house price appreciation. They added a maximum sustainable employment goal to our monetary policy, and subsequently we have seen extraordinary house price inflation.

So here on the National side of the House, we will continue to raise our concerns about this Government’s approach to housing. We will continue to be constructive critics where we see their policies failing. But, most importantly, we will continue what we see as a solemn duty to keep putting forward the constructive policy solutions needed to restore the dream of home ownership in New Zealand, whether it’s further reducing consenting processes, enabling more greenfields development, bringing on more community housing, exploring cooperative housing models, looking at actually legislating for build-to-rent housing, doing more in the building supply chain, reforming unit titles. National will keep putting forward solutions; we will do that work. We have said for many years that RMA reform of this sort was necessary. Labour heard our cry. It took four years, but today is a good day. Our communities will have their character enhanced by this bill—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Order! Order! The member’s time is up.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’d like to briefly touch on the why, where, what, how, and a little bit of thanks, as well, in my contribution today.

Why are we passing the third reading this afternoon? We’ve heard from both the previous two speakers, Nicola Willis and the Hon David Parker, about the huge problem we have in New Zealand that I think everybody in this House acknowledges about our lack of housing. We also have a climate emergency. The intensification of our cities goes some way to help with that issue, and that is that when you incentivise transport mode shifts, so that you have people taking public transport, people walking, people cycling, that that can help with reducing our carbon emissions from transport, which are 40 percent of our carbon emissions. It’s also important that we don’t sprawl and build on very productive land. Those issues are ones that the National Policy Statement on Urban Development 2020 (NPS-UD) was made to address, as well as this housing issue. What we have with this bill is speeding up the process for the implementation of the NPS-UD, and also this new tool, which is the medium density residential standards (MDRS).

Where does this apply? Well, it applies to cities. It applies to the tier 1 councils. It doesn’t apply to islands. It doesn’t apply to Waiheke Island—that was a change that the Environment Committee made. It doesn’t apply to towns near centres like Christchurch, including Oxford and Akaroa.

What is it? This bill, it enables more development. It doesn’t require people to develop sections that they don’t want to. All it does is mean that they can build somewhere without requiring a resource consent if they are meeting the MDRS. Or maybe they have some sort of consent requirement as a restricted discretionary activity, which is a simpler consenting process than some others. So it’s good for developers.

What is it? So, by August of 2022, which is approaching at speed, these tier 1 councils will notify an intensification planning instrument. That will do both the implementation of the MDRS but also the implementation of that NPS-UD.

How will it do it? Well, I think there’s a couple of points I want to touch on in the “how”, and that is we’ve heard a lot about qualifying matters. The previous speaker, Nicola Willis, spoke about them in part. The MDRS doesn’t have to apply to every single area of a relevant residential zone. There may be qualifying matters that mean that it’s not appropriate to intensify a certain area. So one of the qualifying matters—and these are found in new section 77L—is any section 6 matter of the Resource Management Act (RMA). Section 6 matters are those of national importance, and they include historic heritage.

I just want to dwell very quickly on that term, “historic heritage”, because this is defined in the RMA. The definition includes a contribution to the understanding of New Zealand’s history and culture. That’s quite a high bar to reach—a nationally important historic heritage measure.

So areas that a lot of submitters talked to us about in front of the Environment Committee related to special character areas. So these are areas where planners have said, “Not quite historic heritage, but still some very important amenity values.” Some of those areas might have some historic heritage. So the section 6 qualifying matter won’t necessarily apply to those areas. Instead, they’ll have to rely on a different qualifying matter, and that is “Other matters”. I mention this because if the council is going to use an “other matter” as a qualifier, then it has to produce more analysis and justification for why it’s relying on that as a qualifying matter—so reducing the enabling powers of the MDRS and the NPS-UD. It will have to do this at a site-by-site level. So that’s an important part of this piece of legislation that planners in our biggest centres will be grappling with, no doubt.

Also important to note that where a development doesn’t meet the standards in the MDRS that then it’s a restricted discretionary activity. As I said before, that means that you need to get a resource consent, but the decision makers, their discretion is restricted to the issue that’s been breached. So if you want to intensify your land more than what the MDRS allows for, then you can apply for one of these resource consents. Of course, it’s more time-consuming, but it’s very much still on the table as an option.

Finally, I’d really like to thank the Ministry for the Environment advisers, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development advisers that we had working on Saturdays in front of us in the select committee, but I’m sure they worked all the weekends in the short time that we were looking at this bill. Also the Parliamentary Counsel Office—the same can be said for them. And, of course, our wonderful clerks. So thank you to all of them, and I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. In rising to support the third reading of the Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Bill on behalf of the National Party, I just want to commence my contribution by picking up where the deputy chair of the Environment Committee, Rachel Brooking, who has just resumed her seat, left off, and that was to acknowledge with grateful appreciation the very hard work that was done on this piece of legislation by officials, who worked extraordinarily long hours, under significant time constraints and pressure—to the Parliamentary Counsel Office staff, who were grappling with some quite technical issues around planning, and I recognise that that tested their remarkable skill. They are incredibly talented people, and at this time of the year, it pays sometimes just to acknowledge some of the people that don’t have a public face around this place but are integral to the effective working of our Parliament but also to the creation of enduring legislative drafting that actually does the job that select committees and Parliament wants done.

This piece of legislation is an interesting culmination of work that has actually transpired over several months, and I think it’s worthwhile just traversing some of the history as to how we got to what is, in many respects, quite an unusual situation where the two major parties in this Parliament—and I think actually all but one of the smaller parties in the Parliament—are supporting this legislation. On this side of the House, we have long argued that the answer to our housing challenges and to getting more housing built, and to providing the opportunities for young people and first-home buyers, in particular, to get into the property market was reform of the Resource Management Act (RMA). And we have long argued that that piece of legislation needed work. So it was that, in the last election campaign, when our former leader Judith Collins was spokesperson for housing, she actually wrote to the Government and offered a bipartisan approach to solving housing issues. Now, that of itself was, I think, an important step forward, because, throughout the nine years of the National administration, every single time that the John Key and Bill English - Government tried to reform the RMA, it was universally opposed by the then Opposition—every single time, every single time; oppose, oppose, oppose. And there was never any sense of collegiality or a sense of Parliament trying to act as a unifier to solve some of these issues.

Well, on this side of the House, we think that, when an issue as important as this becomes apparent and an opportunity for a bipartisan approach presents, we should take it. So, during that 2020 campaign, we announced that we would introduce emergency measures to cut back on red tape and make it easier to build houses. So this is, effectively, what this piece of legislation does. This is National Party policy that we campaigned on, and I’m surprised that that has come as a surprise to some people who have been commentating and passing criticism about this legislation. And then, in January of this year, Judith Collins actually wrote to the Prime Minister offering to work together on emergency legislation, and in April she introduced into the members’ ballot our own bill that would have required councils to zone at least for 30 years of growth. That bill in the ballot actually incorporated much of what is being proposed and will be passed by this piece of legislation. Then not much happened through the next several months, until, in June of this year, my colleague, the deputy leader of the National Party, Nicola Willis, and I received letters from Ministers Woods and Parker, responding to what they say had been their own proposal on how to achieve the aims of National’s bill. And we actually welcomed that. It’s understandable that we were initially a bit surprised, but we were welcoming of the fact that they were open to discussing elements of our proposed legislation and our solution, and, as a result, negotiations ensued and the legislation was introduced to Parliament.

And it’s fair to say that this actually, at third reading, is a very much improved and better bill than the bill at first reading, and that’s largely due to the good efforts done at Environment Committee, and I too want to acknowledge the role played by my colleagues on that select committee, but in particular I want to acknowledge the chair of the select committee, the Hon Eugenie Sage, who, I think, did a terrific job reading, literally, a thousand or more documents. We received close to a thousand submissions, and we heard from nearly 200 submitters over a very condensed period of time. Some of the most compelling submissions, from my point of view, were not those submissions that came from people who, for one reason or another, objected to the general concept of intensification, but those submissions that came actually from young people, I found most compelling—those people, those young people, who said, “This bill gives us hope. It gives us hope for the potential that one day we too can be property owners, and that we can buy a house and that we can get a foot on to the property ladder.” We are interested, actually, they said, as young people, in going further than this bill has gone. They wanted, actually, even more radical reform than this bill proposes. So I was heartened by that response and encouraged by it, and I was less compelled by those who came to the select committee and actually said, “Oh, no—well, enough is being done” and, “We’re working towards it” and, “Things are happening”, and “We’ve got a plan.” Well, actually, more than 4,000 people tonight will be asleep in a motel unit because we have such a shortage of affordable and easily obtained, purchased houses in New Zealand.

So this is a bill that’s all about freeing up land markets. It’s all about property rights, actually. It’s all about the ability of a property owner to free up the capital that lies currently buried on their back lawn. And I heard one commentator say that the answer to much of what is our housing crisis literally lies in our backyards, and this is what this bill is about: it’s a bill that enables property owners to add an extra dwelling, two, or three on to an existing property. And, for many property owners, that’s something that has been impossible to achieve, because there has been so much red tape. There have been so many barriers. There have been so many hurdles for them to overcome. So this is a piece of legislation that changes the balance of influence and power, if you like, from those who plan, restrict, and constrain intensification in our major urban cities, to one where the presumption now is to build and to allow homes to be built. And I for one, and we on this side of the House, think that that is a good thing.

I heard a term mentioned by my colleague the deputy leader of the National Party, Nicola Willis, that I hadn’t heard actually for probably several decades, and it’s a term that we need to hear more of, because I can certainly remember, as a younger person at university when we were discussing weighty issues about Parliament and legislation and law reform and democracy in our great little nation, we would often talk about how proud we were to be members of an egalitarian, property-owning democracy. And it’s that term—“egalitarian, property-owning democracy”—that I heard Nicola Willis mention in her contribution today, and I think that’s important. That is something that is good, it’s aspirational, it’s positive, and it’s future looking.

And this is a piece of legislation that does a whole lot of things, and the deputy chair of the select committee went through some of the detail; I’m not going to repeat it. But what this piece of legislation does is give hope to people who currently are locked out of the property market—that they too, soon, will be able to buy a home. And why is that important? Well, it’s important because homeownership is good for people, good for individuals, good for families, good for neighbourhoods, good for communities, and good for us a nation. Property ownership is something that we should aspire to, and we should be encouraging and making it as available as possible to as many New Zealanders who want to be property owners—then surely we should be creating the environment that allows for that to occur.

So this is a bill that’s all about reducing red tape, changing the presumption from one of not being permissive to one that permits and encourages building and development in our urban environments, and it’s a bill that, on this side of the House, we are very pleased to support in the bipartisan nature that it has been presented.

I’m very pleased to take a call on this. Can I start by acknowledging the Ministers and the role that they’ve had to play in this—both Ministers Parker and Woods for their leadership in this space, acknowledging that this problem that we are dealing with through this bill is a hangover from previous Governments of both colours and it’s those parties that have worked together around the Environment Committee table to be able to try and navigate a pathway forward. It’s good, actually, for us to be able to put our politics aside and actually focus on the real need. That’s the number one thing that Kiwis want us to come to this House and sort out is what’s happening with our housing situation around the country. The Minister earlier talked about some of the great initiatives that are happening, but this is a really big problem and it’s going to require lots of tools in the tool box. I listened to the previous speaker from the National Party, the Hon Scott Simpson, who talked about homeownership. Māori have only ever faced insecure homeownership situations. The highest rate of Māori homeownership was back in the 1980s where people could capitalise on the family benefit to be able to get themselves into homes, but it hasn’t been that way for a very long time.

What this bill does is it will enable multigenerational families, whānau, to be able to live in the same space. It will create medium density in our cities but also for our tier 2 councils as well, of which Rotorua Lakes Council is proudly stepping up and saying, “We want to be involved in this.” Just before they were talking about motels. Yeah, back home in Rotorua we have lots of people that are currently using motels as accommodation. It’s not the way forward; we need other things to be able to pivot to. This creating medium-density residential areas in our big cities but also our tier 2 councils is going to be a crucial part of that. Māori that are listening in from around the country should feel safe in the knowledge that we’ve cast our eye over that too. We’re making sure that these changes give effect to the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. We’re making sure that tangata whenua have access to their ancestral lands, their waters, their sites, their wāhi tapu. All of those become qualifying matters and, therefore, handbrakes on any kind of development, and that is the right thing to do.

Enabling housing through this bill and making opportunities for Māori to be able to get on the property ladder has been at the forefront of my mind as I’ve sat through countless hours of the select committee process, and I want to acknowledge our chair who did a stunning job of navigating the politics of the committee, navigating through all of the submissions, and hearing from the people out there that want change so desperately in this area. So I commend this bill to the House.

E te Māngai o te Whare, tēnā koe. The Green Party’s really pleased to be supporting the Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. I just acknowledge the comments by other speakers, because even though the first we found out about this bill was when it was introduced, about the same time that councils did, it has been an incredibly constructive process by the Environment Committee and by the Parliament in improving the bill. I really acknowledge too the strength and the expertise of public submissions—councils, individuals, the urban design community, young people, and many others—and the thorough process that all members of the select committee really put their hearts into, improving the bill, to develop the themes that were coming through in submissions and then to amend the bill accordingly.

Like others, I would also like to place on Hansard and on the record the huge debt that we owe to the massive mahi by officials from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, the Ministry for the Environment, the Parliamentary Counsel, and the select committee secretariat of Edward, Jacob, Izzy, and Charles—just all of the work that they put in behind the scenes to actually deliver, with Parliamentary Counsel, a much-improved bill.

This bill builds on the National Policy Statement on Urban Development (NPS-UD) and brings forward its implementation, recognising the real need for urban renewal and densification in our cities to crack through and respond to the housing crisis. It was a very impressive list of initiatives that the Government has taken over the last four years to tackle the housing crisis. But we still have far too many people, as the Hon Scott Simpson noted, sleeping in motels, sleeping in cars, sleeping in places that they can’t afford because the rent takes far too big a portion of their weekly income. This bill is about providing as a permitted activity the building of three dwellings of up to three storeys across most of the residential areas in our largest cities, enabling housing to happen as a permitted activity and encouraging more duplexes, walk-up units, terrace houses with common walls, and the like.

We got quite a lot of evidence from councils and others about the extent of housing construction that was already occurring in the year to September 2021. A record 47,333 new homes were consented, and that was up 25 percent from the year to September 2020, and multi-unit homes accounted for 46 percent of these. So we are seeing already an increase in more townhouses, duplexes, and the like.

Some of the changes that the select committee made in response to submissions were, obviously, in relation to the density standards, providing a 20 percent landscaped area, providing increased outlook space, increased outdoor space, changes to the building envelopes through reducing the height at the boundary to four metres, and also major changes in relation to qualifying matters. These are the matters, as the deputy chair of the committee, Rachel Brooking, noted, that can be used through the intensification planning instrument to show that some areas are not suitable for medium density residential housing—things of national importance such as the natural character of the coast. But it is on those matters that there were changes to the bill to provide a little bit more flexibility for councils to ensure that medium density happens in more suitable—well, doesn’t happen in unsuitable areas. A lot of effort too on ensuring that some of the smaller towns weren’t included, because it wasn’t intended that they be subject to the same sort of development as in our big cities.

Papakāinga houses—encouraging councils to use the intensification planning instrument to facilitate the building of papakāinga houses, rather than plans providing the barrier that they do at the moment. There is a lot of work that is going to have to be done by councils, particularly the planning staff and others, and also the public in response, through these intensification planning instruments. So I would really like to acknowledge in advance all of that work.

There was a suggestion from some submitters that the medium-density residential standards be inserted directly into plans, because there is, of course, no ability to change these new density standards in new Schedule 3A of the Resource Management Act, inserted by Schedule 1 of the bill. So I would really encourage agencies to very closely monitor the way in which the bill is implemented and how it operates in practice, because the select committee has tried to foresee issues. But there may well be things which need to be changed, and if it’s well monitored, then that can be addressed, potentially, through the Natural and Built Environments Bill and the reform there.

We need to do density well, if people are to move away from having a dream of having a single-storey house on what was once a quarter-acre section but is now much smaller. And if families, single-person households, and others recognise the opportunities in living in two- or three-storey units and apartments and duplexes and the like—so doing density well, the Green Party believes this bill was a bit of a lost opportunity. We tried really hard to get things like Homestar standards included in the density standards, because it is puzzling that when Kāinga Ora committed last year to all of its new homes—and it builds at least 1,100 new homes annually—being built to the Homestar 6 standard, we want, in the Green Party, to ensure that everyone has a right to a warm, dry, healthy home with low ongoing energy costs so that we reduce energy poverty. The Homestar standard can save households up to $570 in power costs annually, but at the moment only 5,000 of the 43,000 homes that are built each year meet those Homestar standards. We need to tackle our climate emissions. With an increasing electricity demand growing by at least 70 percent by 2050, anything that we can do to reduce energy use helps to reduce those emissions.

We need to reduce waste. Housing and construction contributes 40 to 50 percent of the waste that goes to landfill each year. Again, we heard from submitters that because demolition is a permitted activity in areas like Auckland, there is no control or encouragement for construction waste to be reduced, for sorting to occur on site, for materials to be recovered. Things like Homestar standards do improve that commitment to sustainability. The Labour members have said that things like improvements to the building code belong in the Building Act. Yes, they do. But where there are provisions which prevent councils from using their plans to put in place higher standards than apply in the building code and when there is no regular periodic review of the building code to catch up with what is being done in housing developments overseas, we think we need to use the opportunities that bills like this provide to have more warmer, more pleasant, and more energy-efficient homes. So it was disappointing that that did not happen.

There is already quite a lot of intensification occurring. We hope that councils with their intensification planning instruments, with the new policy and objective framework that the bill has, that relates back to the NPS-UD—that that process is not too complicated. But I would just finish by, again, thanking all of those who made the submissions and the really constructive work that every single member of the select committee did to improve this bill, working alongside Parliamentary Counsel, the select committee secretariat, and officials.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of the ACT Party in opposition to the Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Bill at its third reading. The ACT Party wants more homes to be built in New Zealand. We want people to have access to warm, dry, affordable homes so that all New Zealanders feel like they can have a future in this country and so that young people don’t feel like they’re being priced out of the market and that their best hope to have a property-owning future is to move to Australia. And we’re hearing so much of that happening from our skilled tradespeople and our skilled workforce at the moment. And ACT wants young New Zealanders to be able to feel like they can someday own their first home, because that provides stability for families. It provides stability that a lot of people are looking for as they want to settle down and raise children in suburbs and communities with their family around them.

We often think of the people who send us emails, who we meet in the community, who tell us, “We don’t feel like we have a future in this country.” And we have to change what we’re doing so that people do feel like there is a future in New Zealand because they have homeownership. I often think of a man that I met in Ōāmaru who was a 30-year-old tradesman who told me that he was moving to Australia because he didn’t actually feel like he had a future here.

💬 Hon Member: Shocking.

And I think that is—it is; it’s shocking and very saddening.

But while we know that there is a problem in housing and how many homes we are building in New Zealand, this bill is not the solution to the problem. And that’s for two reasons. The first is that it focuses on changing our planning laws, when we know it’s not the planning laws that are the issue. It is infrastructure financing and funding. The second reason that we have for opposing this is because of the process that came about while we’re passing this law. Now, ACT has stood in this Chamber and opposed a range of laws that have been rushed through with limited consultation. Rushed law seldom leads to good law, and that’s why we oppose it.

So I first want to start off by talking about the shoddy process that’s led us here to the third reading, because I think it gives context to the issues that we’ve found in the bill throughout the process. Not only was it rushed, it was put forward in a very unusual manner. This is a bipartisan approach with two parties that have zero credibility on solving the housing crisis. That’s why they stood up to have a bipartisan approach, because they wanted to abandon attacking each other on an issue that they both have no credibility on. They considered the benefit of standing up on podiums side by side in the media, saying that they had found a solution, before they considered the people that would be affected by their law change. They considered themselves before the people of New Zealand, and that’s why we ended up in a process that was secret, because it was so much more important that they wouldn’t spoil the surprise and the announcement that they’d somehow just solved the housing crisis, and they couldn’t possibly tell anybody what they’d been up to because, you know, that would spoil it for everybody. And that’s a shame, because bipartisan approaches shouldn’t be a bad thing, but the result is a bad policy that won’t actually work and it won’t solve the problem, because they’ve misdiagnosed it.

So what should have happened? Well, they could have started by consulting with people who actually build homes in this country: the builders, the developers, the architects, the local councils, and the planning experts. That’s what the ACT Party did as soon as we heard of this announcement. And would you believe it? They told us that this policy won’t do anything. It won’t deliver the houses that it promises to a generation. It won’t deliver a single more home. It promises more theoretical homes. But you can’t live in a theoretical home, and that’s because they’re adding more zoned land when zoned land isn’t the problem to build more homes.

Now, when we looked through the very short select committee process, I was amazed with that shortened time frame that people were able to express the flaws in this problem—even with such a short process. And the councils and developers pointed to the lack of infrastructure, which doesn’t allow them to intensify in existing town centres close to community services. So this enabling housing supply bill, which says “enabling housing supply”, doesn’t do anything to enable housing. But what would enable housing is more infrastructure.

There are many issues, but I’ll just touch on a few. The first is, obviously, that it doesn’t touch on infrastructure funding and financing, which actually holds up development. Because if you look at the Auckland Unitary Plan, which came into effect in 2016, it has zoning for up to 400,000 more homes. The zones are there, but some developments still can’t occur because of the infrastructure that’s holding it back. And we heard of a wonderful example from a person who lives in Grey Lynn, and they would love to see more intensification happening in their suburb, but the issue that’s holding them back is the infrastructure. They already have overflowing sewage, overflowing pipes. We don’t want to see that happening across our cities. The ACT Party does want to build more homes, but we don’t want sewage in the streets. We also want to make sure that we live in a democracy that listens to people and listens to local knowledge and the experts.

A second example is the Hamilton City Council. That is a growing city, but it also lacks infrastructure for its older parts of the city. They’ve said that it would cost about $4 billion just to bring up their infrastructure to intensify under the National Policy Statement on Urban Development that already exists, before you then go and change the rules again for more intensity. I think that is a huge issue, because it is not good for planning and certainty and it’s not good for councils. The medium-density residential standard creates a completely new zone that would allow three three-storey homes in any suburb in our five largest cities, one metre from the boundary. That won’t be more homes; they’ll just be in a different place to where the councils had expected them to be when they were planning for communities. People want to live in a home, but they also want to live in a community that’s serviced by their community, that has access to transport—access to being able to go to work to school, the shops, the libraries, the public parks. People want to live in a community, not just a home.

The last aspect is that this was divisive rhetoric, and we’ve been seeing this in a whole range of policies that this Government has been pushing through. It was supposed to target the nimbies, the people who said, “Oh, they couldn’t possibly like another home in their suburb, and that’s terrible because they don’t want other people to have a home.” That’s not the case. They’re not listening to the actual problem, which is that people have identified that intensification in their area won’t work because of the infrastructure problem. The ACT Party doesn’t just oppose; we propose. We reached out, we told the select committee, we told National and Labour that we would want to see infrastructure added to this bill, and they rejected that. They rejected a policy that would actually work. We are not opposing this because of politics; we’re opposing this because of people and because we want policy that works. New Zealanders deserve policy that doesn’t just say it enables; it does—and this policy won’t deliver a single more home.

Kia ora, e te Mana Whakawā. I’ll just make a brief contribution to this, the third reading of the Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. I must respond to the person that just spoke, the deputy leader of the ACT Party. She said—and I quote—“ACT want younger New Zealanders to someday own their own home.” Anyway, this bill, enabling housing supply, will make that someday sooner. As a matter of fact, sooner is like next month.

In my brief speech, in 1874 seven Tongans lived in New Zealand, almost 100,000 Māori, and then the rest were migrant settlers from England that came. According to Stats New Zealand, 4.7 Aucklanders lived in either a single dwelling or a tent. Well, fast track it here, after Labour had built the State housing in the 1930s and the most houses built ever in the last four years—after we’ve done that, and I want to acknowledge the leadership of Dr Megan Woods and, of course, Minister Parker in the leadership of where we are today.

Young people told us at select committee (1), we would hope to buy our own home, and, (2), we want to live closer to where we work. We want to contribute to climate change by having low-carbon community living and public transport. And in response to infrastructure, the infrastructure community came and said to us that building higher would mean less pipes needed. If we built the way the ACT Party had wanted, it would mean more pipes and so contributing to climate change. I want to also acknowledge that in this bill the committee has also enabled developers to think in terms of communal living—so communal areas for barbecues, for hāngī, and for umu pits so that the next generation will live in a community that is built for people. And on that note, malo ’aupito.

Mālō ‘aupito. The next call is a split call. Erica Stanford—five minutes.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This is a relatively historic occasion, where National and Labour have come together in a bipartisan approach to try and fix what has become our housing crisis. Can I start by acknowledging our new deputy leader and my colleague, Nicola Willis, for her extremely good work on getting us to a position where we can support this bill.

In my community of the East Coast Bays, you can’t really buy a home for anything less than $1.5 million. So you’re looking at somewhere around $300,000 for a deposit on a home. And the one thing that the people in my community tell me is that they are worried. They’re worried for their children and their grandchildren who won’t be able to buy a home in the community where they grow up and that they will be forced to go to places like Australia. That is one of the biggest concerns people say to me, that their children and their grandchildren will be forced offshore to places like Australia, where there are better opportunities, lower cost of living, but—critically—much lower house prices. That’s what they’re worried about. They are desperately worried that they won’t see their grandchildren grow up because their children have moved offshore.

Not only am I worried about the people in my community, I’m also worried about workers in our big cities. Workers like nurses and teachers, policemen, firefighters who are facing the same issues—can’t buy a home in their community and are looking to move to Australia. We see that all the time. I get contacted by nurses all the time who are shifting to Australia for the reasons I mentioned earlier. We’re also losing migrant workers before they even get here because they look at the cost of housing and they choose to go elsewhere. In a global war on talent, we need to have affordable homes so that we can attract quality migrant workers to this country. Currently, in our housing crisis, with house prices that have exploded in the last year, up 30 percent, we’re not able to attract those workers, keep our own workers, and keep our children and our grandchildren here in this country.

As was mentioned earlier, the last four years have seen a failure to act on any of the problems that we have with our housing crisis. No matter if you look to KiwiBuild, if you look to banning of foreign buyers, ring-fencing of losses for landlords: none of these things have worked. The single most important thing that we can do at the moment in this approach is to cut the red tape; is to allow people to build on their existing residential properties, more homes—and the kind of homes that we need, terraced homes, apartments, multiple-storey buildings on small sections. These are the kinds of homes that our children and our grandchildren will be able to afford to buy to keep them in our communities. I would like to respond to Brooke van Velden, who spoke earlier, about how important it was to keep families close in communities and in our existing suburbs. And the point that I want to make is that that is what this bill does. It removes that red tape so that we can build more houses in the suburbs, where parents can keep their children and their grandchildren close to them—which is the one single thing that I get day in, day out in my community. It’s that they want their grandchildren and their children to grow up in their communities. This bill allows that to happen.

Of course, there are concerns around infrastructure. Part of those concerns were acknowledged in the bill, where we give councils the ability to restrict areas where this can happen if there are issues with the area and infrastructure. But also we acknowledge that this bill is one part of a much bigger puzzle, and that much bigger puzzle includes things like infrastructure. But this bill is about cutting the red tape; something that you would have thought that the ACT Party would have supported. It doesn’t fix all the problems, we acknowledge that, but it is one part of a much broader puzzle that we have to continue doing work on—but it is no reason not to support this bill, to allow more housing in our residential areas and more housing in greenfields developments.

I look forward to a future where my daughter and my son can afford to buy a home, a first home, in the community that I live in. This bill, and the work that Nicola Willis has done, will allow that to happen. Thank you.

I rise in support of this bill, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I will say very similar things that have been said on the other side of the House, because the reason that there’s a consensus over this bill is that the major parties understand the depth of this problem.

This bill will mean that my children can actually afford to live in my suburb. They won’t have to live a long way away. That’s really important to me, and it’s very important to them. If we did not do this, it would really create a very vast gap between our older generation and our younger one. Our younger generation are pretty angry that they’ve been locked out of Auckland. This is a really important bill for Auckland. It means that we’re going to have a lot more affordable houses, and they’re going to be close to our city. And they’re going to be able to be part of a solution to climate change, because we will live in places we work, and that will be good for everyone.

I am absolutely admiring of the capacity of the two major parties to have got together and made this a reality, and I am absolutely shocked that ACT would take the position it would, in a city that’s desperate for housing. It is absolutely contrary to their ideology, if it wasn’t for their own self-interest in Epsom. Thank you.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): This debate is interrupted. I will resume the Chair after dinner at 7 p.m.

Sitting suspended from 5.56 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Members, the House is resumed. When the House rose for the dinner break it was considering the Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. The next call is a Labour Party call and I call Tangi Utikere

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Look, as we head towards Christmas, I thought there would be some Christmas cheer around the precinct, but after listening prior to the dinner break to the ACT deputy leader’s contribution, it is clear to me that there is no Christmas cheer anywhere near the ACT Party caucus. What I want to say is we have actually been listening as members of the Environment Committee to councils, to developers, and to people for whom this will make a real difference.

💬 Simon Court: You want to see our video. Wait till you see our video. Our Christmas video is the best video you’ve ever seen.

And while Mr Court is there giving us his contribution, perhaps that’s at odds with his deputy leader, because it was something quite different prior to the dinner break.

This is a particular bill that will make a huge difference. I’ve had contributions on the first, second, and now third reading. I’ll leave it there. I commend this bill to the House.

I was actually looking forward to a little bit of Christmas cheer from the other side, but we obviously got cut off a little bit early. But I’ll do my best to convey a little bit more of that in my short call.

I’m speaking on the Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Bill third reading, and I had the pleasure to speak on this at the second reading as well. And it doesn’t seem that long ago, but I think we covered off a little bit of detail. So I just want to go through a little bit more of that, because I think things have moved on a little bit, subsequent to that. But, in essence, National supports this bill, and that’s because National understand that housing is a significant issue for this country. It is a significant issue, particularly for our young people, and in my home city of Auckland, which many of my colleagues around here are from as well, it is a massive issue there as well.

In my home electorate of the North Shore—which is a beautiful electorate, absolutely stunning, you know, surrounded by water—housing is a massive issue. The affordability of housing is a key issue that people raise, and, as I said, particularly with those who are younger, the dream and the aspiration of being able to buy their own home. But the reality is: entry price in my electorate is over a million dollars. You know, that’s where you start. So it is a significant burden, and I think we have an obligation and a responsibility in this House to do what we can in order to make that a little bit easier.

I think no one’s under any illusion that this is the silver bullet that’s going to solve everything in regards to this challenge, but I think what we do need to reflect is, actually, actions speak louder than words. You know, we do need to start moving, in regards to some changes in this space, and I think the select committee process, which was very robust—I want to acknowledge Eugenie Sage, who was the chair of the Environment Committee, and I know that she did a very thorough and respectful process. I wasn’t part of that select committee, but I do acknowledge our members, deputy leader Nicola Willis and the Hon Scott Simpson, on our side, that contributed to the select committee process.

I also want to acknowledge—and I think it is important, because it was a condensed process—all of those officials, particularly from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, the Parliamentary Counsel Office, who made a significant contribution in terms of that passing through of that bill. I think, while the select committee spent many, many hours in terms of their deliberations and consideration around that, those officials in the background did significantly more as well, and sometimes we don’t acknowledge them. But because it’s Christmas and because we’re getting at that time of the year, I think it is important that we do so.

The bill as introduced at first reading had a significant number of amendments as a result of that select committee process, and the select committee process is such an important aspect of our democracy. It is a process—

💬 Simon Court: It was throwing mud at the wall.

—in order to make sure that we listen to the feedback that we get from people, and we got a lot of feedback—I can hear a bit of feedback somewhere in here; maybe it’s just me. But plenty of feedback across that select committee, and particularly for those members of my electorate. I know there was a number of people from Devonport, etc., that made submissions. Auckland Council, iwi, and commercial entities made a number of submissions into that. And I think some of the submissions and some of the feedback has been taken into account as part of the amendments that have been proposed under the new aspects of the bill.

There’s four elements that relate to the changes that were made as part of that process. One is around the design standards. We heard a lot of feedback, particularly, as I said, from Auckland Council, in terms of the ideas and considerations in that space, and I’m pleased to see that the bill was—

💬 Simon Court: Because urban design should be done by Parliament.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! Apologies to the member. Couple of things: first of all, don’t be the Grinch tonight that stole Christmas. Objections should be rare and reasonable, and the member will not interject while his mask is off his face. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. So as I was saying, there were some key changes, and I was referring there around the design standard changes, which were significant. They referred to changes in regards to the outdoor-space elements of the bill, and also in regards to landscaping and other components. An issue that was raised a lot in my electorate was around the exclusions around particularly heritage zoning. If any of you have been to the beautiful Devonport Peninsula on the North Shore, it is a stunning location. I’m slightly biased, but it is a lovely part of our city, and I’m glad to see that a number of the considerations around special character zones—that the council will be able to ensure that those protections remain. And that’s really important, not only for heritage but also for environmental aspects and other risk considerations.

Another aspect of feedback and critique that was given was particularly around the height-to-boundary ratio, and I’m glad to see that—as a result of feedback in the select committee process—that is being reduced from six metres down to four. I think that, by all accounts, in terms of the feedback that we’ve had subsequently, is sensible.

And lastly, there were some changes in regards to the district planning changes—and I think, again, just reflecting some of the feedback provided through that select committee process.

There were 966 submissions presented to that select committee, and I do acknowledge all the members of the select committee across the House here who were part of it. We got regular updates around that process, but it was definitely—having sat in on the Health Committee, which has a number of comprehensive and complex bills, this one definitely sounded like it was one that definitely put the team through their challenges. I think 183 of those submissions were oral submissions, as well, and that reflects the importance of our democracy in terms of being able to provide that feedback. I’m confident that all members of that select committee, across the House, participated and contributed as part of that process. I definitely know from those that I have spoken to that that was the case, and, again, that was really very much important.

In terms of the other aspects, I guess, of what, for those that are watching—and I’m sure there will be a large number as they come into Christmas. This will be a prime time, no doubt. If I wasn’t here, I’d definitely be watching, just for the record. The aspects of the bill—

💬 Simon Court: Well, particularly if their property rights are being extinguished. They’ll want to see who’s got their name on that.

There’s plenty of entertainment, as well. You can imagine it’ll be high ratings, no doubt. But some of the aspects of the bill that weren’t covered that, I think, it is important to recognise is around that affordability aspect that I referred to earlier. Infrastructure is another area that National has noted in regards to infrastructure enablement being a key element in terms of housing development in this country. National absolutely acknowledge and note that that is an area that needs to be progressed. In addition to that, also the challenges around labour supply as well, because it’s all good to talk a big game, but, again, in order to execute and deliver, you’re going to need the labour supply in order to do that. So we’re looking forward to seeing additional measures. Obviously, National has proposed around the $50k per house infrastructure funding package, which we announced earlier on this year.

💬 Simon Court: Except that bill’s been pulled from the members’ ballot.

I think the member’s saying how sensible that policy is, and he’s right, it is. It’s a sensible policy, and it’s good to have that support across the House.

But the other aspect that we’ve also, in terms of this bill, is—really, it’s cutting red tape. And I think that’s—

💬 Simon Court: Oh, no, it sets up a parallel consenting regime! It adds red tape.

—a good example around the bill, that when we’re cutting regulation—and, again, it’s good to see that the majority of those parties in this House are wanting to cut red tape and cut regulation. There are a couple that are not, but that’s OK. But I think, in terms of the importance of this bill and the value that we provide, reducing that regulation is an important aspect.

I just want to conclude, in the short amount of time that I have—and if only I had twice as much time, but we haven’t, of course—

💬 Simon Court: Well, if only I had a second call; it would set the record straight.

Thank you very much, member from Selwyn, much appreciated. This bill isn’t going to result in a free-for-all in regards to how housing is built in this country; restrictions will remain, and I think that is important. What, in effect, it will do is allow for sensible and pragmatic development. On this side of the House, we’re supportive of more housing in this country, we’re supportive of young people being able to buy their own home, and we’re supportive of action, not words. I commend this bill to the House.

Real pleasure to stand and take a short call on this bill. Homelessness, difficulties with housing—we all know it exists. It’s great to have all parties across the House—most of us—joining in to support something that will make a real difference, a real change, for our communities. I just want to really thank the entire support crew that got in there and did a whole pile of work which really, really brought this bill together. We made some significant changes. I love the transitional provisions. I commend this bill to the House.