Special Debates — Debate on Long-term Issues—Long-term Insights Briefings

Members, we now come to the debate on long-term issues, informed by select committee reports on long-term insights briefings. And just before I call on the chairperson of the Governance and Administration Committee to move that the House take note of long-term trends, risks, and opportunities affecting New Zealand, I just want to say that the purpose of this debate is to be future focused and provide an opportunity for members to reflect on the long-term challenges and opportunities that face New Zealand. As such, it would be desirable for select committee chairs in setting the scene for the debate to be non-political in their contributions.

I move, That the House take note of long-term trends, risks, and opportunities affecting New Zealand.

It is a pleasure to take the first call on today’s special debate on long-term insight briefings, as chair of the Governance and Administration Committee, in order to introduce the briefings and the associated debate to the House.

The long-term insights briefings were introduced during the 53rd Parliament following the passing of the Public Service Act 2020. The Act requires a chief executive of a department to give a long-term insights briefing to the appropriate Minister at least once every three years. A critical component laid out in the Act is the requirement for these long-term insights briefings to be established and delivered independently of Ministers. These briefings are designed to be truly independent of the executive and the Parliament and to enable Public Service departments to provide their own lens across the big issues affecting their department that are relevant for the long term of New Zealand.

The Governance and Administration Committee is tasked with, essentially, being a clearing house for all of the briefings that are presented to the committee and we are required to refer them to the appropriate subject matter committee, who must consider the briefing and report to the House.

The Governance and Administration Committee also engages regularly and receives briefings from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, which is the agency that is tasked with oversight of the briefings. Throughout the term of the 53rd Parliament, when I was a member of the Governance and Administration Committee, we engaged regularly with the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet on updates around the briefings, how they were tracking, and the process that had been undertaken in order to deliver the briefings. During that time, we produced two interim reports outlining the committee’s observations of the briefings and advice from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet about how we could make improvements to the briefings, going forward.

Today, we will hear from committee chairs and members regarding three of the briefings that were prepared by Treasury, the Ministry for the Environment, and the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development. In total, there were 19 briefings that were prepared during the 53rd Parliament, and departments are now tasked with preparing briefings for the 54th Parliament, that I hope will shortly come to the Governance and Administration Committee so that we may refer these on to committees for further insight.

I want to focus on some commentary that the Governance and Administration Committee made during our report. I just note that, in the last month, we have also had a report from Victoria University, authored by Malcolm Menzies, Andrew Jackson, and Jonathan Boston, called An Experiment in Governmental Futures Thinking: long-term insights briefings. I want to particularly thank the academics from Victoria University who have engaged with the committee early on, prior to us receiving the briefings, to put their lens across what they were looking to see. So I would encourage members across the House and I would encourage agencies to read this report, because it sets out some analysis, as well as some concerns that our committee noted in our interim report. I’m just going to touch on those in the short time I have remaining.

One of the concerns raised was that some of the reports didn’t necessarily focus on the big issues. Another issue was that there was, at times, an inconsistent approach to consultation. I want to note that for one of the reports that our committee touched on, by the Public Service Commission, we thought there wasn’t enough depth of consultation with migrant, rural, and Māori communities.

One of the big issues was the need for more cross-agency briefings and for there to be a systematic approach for agencies to work together using an approach where they actually go through some criteria to look at where they might be able to add value to briefings together. We note that there have been around four briefings where there was cross-agency work, where you could see that there was scope for two agencies or departments to actually work together to bring together a briefing. That is one of the biggest pieces of advice that our committee and these authors have suggested going forward.

Finally, the most important thing is that these briefings need to be for the long-term strategic issues rather than the day-to-day work of the department. So I’m looking forward to the debate today; I encourage members to engage with it. I commend the debate to the House. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s really timely to have this debate, particularly today, since the Finance and Expenditure Committee had the Governor of the Reserve Bank in on the Monetary Policy Statement from yesterday, which ties in quite well to this report.

The long-term fiscal position and the long-term insights reports have been prepared. Treasury prepare those documents and they report to the Minister of Finance, and it’s quite interesting, actually, that the Auditor-General has recommended that Treasury consider whether those two reports should be put together as they are, or not. It also made some recommendations about how they could more effectively incorporate public feedback in the preparation of those documents.

They also wanted to test the sensitivity and reliability of their models and the assumptions used in the models to inform those reports, and also wanted to better reflect the impact of the Superannuation Fund assets in the calculation of debt. I think that’s a really important point. One thing that we know with accounting is the way you represent numbers can influence how people think about the comfort they feel with debt or not, and I think that was really a sound recommendation from the Auditor-General.

It was interesting in regard to the COVID-19 pandemic, and I think one of the things we have to remember when we’re thinking about the pandemic is that it’s not so much the virus itself but how we reacted to it that caused the fiscal issues for New Zealand that we’re now living with still today—and, taking your advice about not getting overly political, I’ll leave it at that point. But I just want to point out that the way that the lockdowns affected retail trade and accommodation sectors was quite disproportionate to other sectors. Farming, for example, was able to continue on. They were able to work and go about their business. Supermarkets were able to remain open and trade, whilst their competitors—butchers, and fruit and vegetable shops—weren’t able to stay open. So there were quite disproportionate effects on that group in society.

As well as that, there was a disproportionate effect on young people. We’re seeing that now in the outcome in education and attendance at school—Māori, Pacific peoples, and women. So that is borne out in all the statistics.

Also, debt is a problem, and that’s because of the large-scale asset purchase programme that the Reserve Bank undertook in that period. They vastly expanded their balance sheet and, in fact, the Crown underwrote any losses that they would incur from that purchase. All of those things are not related to the virus but how we reacted to them, and I think they will have long-term financial implications for New Zealand. What’s happening today will impact on New Zealand—not all the way out to 40 years, perhaps, but certainly a long time into the future.

There was a lot of talk in the report about debt which actually nicely ties into our discussion today with the Reserve Bank. The papers suggest that New Zealand’s debt should be around 50 to 60 percent of GDP, with a buffer of 20 percent at least. So we’re looking at 30 to 40 percent, and, in fact, what the Minister of Finance has said is that she’s aiming for a debt range to GDP of 20 to 40 percent. That gives us a huge buffer—not a huge buffer, but an adequate buffer for the shocks that we experience such as the likes of COVID-19, although I hope that we have learnt a lot of lessons from the way we reacted to that and don’t go for lockdowns that have far-reaching impacts. So I think these debates are very worthy, and I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, and it is a pleasure to rise in the House to speak in this special debate. It is rare as a Parliament that we do get to have conversations and debates where we take the political tension down around what the long-term future and opportunities and challenges for our country are in order to get beyond the petty politics of the day and think about the future—to think about that long-term, intergenerational future and what it means for us. I think one of the things that really encapsulates that is the title of Treasury’s document, which brings together its combined statement on the long-term fiscal position but also the long-term insights briefing: He Tirohanga Mokopuna. That is the need to take an intergenerational view, and that is exactly what this work was about.

When the Public Service Act introduced the need for us as a Parliament to produce these long-term, strategic views as a country—that was introduced in 2020 and was to be produced every three years—it was to think about those big issues that are going to survive many Governments. Governments from all parties in this House—they’re all hoping they will get to make up or need to grapple with these issues, and I think that what we choose to focus on is vitally important. What we have seen is that this was the first run at some of these, and I think some of the feedback that we have got around these and around how it is that we can get the public more engaged in this process is an important consideration that, as parliamentarians, we should all be giving some thought to.

Parliaments all around the world, and Governments all around the world, indeed, are giving thought to how it is they encapsulate this intergenerational thinking into policy making. We’ve seen in some jurisdictions such as Ireland a commission for the future where they are looking very much down the road and trying to have long-term strategic discussions in a world that is becoming increasingly polarised. I think that these reports and this long-term strategic focus come at a point in our history where we do need to take the heat out of some of these conversations and realise that we do need to find some of the areas where we can find common ground and find what we can do that is in the interests of our of our globe and of our nation as we go through. But I think it is vital that we consider how it is that we can involve the public in these discussions.

I also think that one of the pieces of feedback from the Auditor-General on Treasury’s report is that we do need to think about whether or not we continue to combine the combined statement on the long-term fiscal position with the long-term insights briefing, or whether these need to be separated out. I certainly think that whether or not we keep them as one document or have them as two, we need to intertwine those two ideas in our heads as we go through and we debate these, because that long-term fiscal position is going to be vital for how we tackle the issues that are outlined in this report.

In terms of the focus that came in this first one, there was that immediate challenge. I think if we think about the fact that this was a piece of legislation in 2020 that required these reports to be produced, it is unsurprising that the very immediate issue of the immediate challenges of COVID-19 was such a focus point for how it was that we needed to think about it. I think that parliamentarians, legislators, and people in Government around the world are going to need to think about how it is that we would prepare for a future event: what did we learn, what did we do well, and what can we do differently for the future? That is something that we have to take the opportunity on.

But just in the time I have, one of the areas that was focused on was climate change, and that came across in terms of both Treasury’s analysis but also the Ministry for the Environment. I think one of the things that we know is that we have to do more and more work to quantify both the cost of action and inaction, and what the fiscal position for the Crown will be and what the strategic long-term challenges and opportunities are for us as a country. Our continuing to take an intergenerational view is something that is our responsibility as people who happen to sit in this House at this moment, because we need to govern for the future. Thank you.

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. I am really pleased to be able to make a contribution in this debate, and I definitely recommend the report to anyone watching it at home, because it’s full of useful information, even though it is possibly a bit wonky.

But there’s a couple of big insights and takeaways, and I absolutely agree with the previous speaker, the Hon Dr Megan Woods, about the importance of this House having a long-term approach, where we talk about long-term issues that are facing New Zealand, because I’m sure that the people who have elected us to represent them in this House of Representatives really do want us to deal with more than just the current day-to-day issues. But the long-term issues are going to affect us all, and it’s very easy to get caught up in an electoral cycle where it’s easy to kick the can down the road when it comes to dealing with long-term challenges.

My big takeaways from this report are very much about how both the COVID response and other policy settings have led to more wealth and income inequality, that certain people have suffered more as a result of some of the policy choices, and we can make different choices as a House of Representatives to ensure that we do have a fair and equal society. Page 8, for example, talks about how some of the people who were most impacted by the pandemic-related labour market disruption are young people, Māori, Pasifika peoples, and women, and that has exacerbated pre-existing inequities in the labour market—outcomes which we need to actively address if we want to have true equality of opportunity.

There’s a growing body of evidence—and this is here on page 9—that recessions are exacerbated by inequality that already exists in society. So having a more equal society by ensuring that our policy settings are fair is actually better for us in the long term, economically, and I know that hasn’t been the economic dogma of the last few decades that has dominated the political discourse—particularly coming from the right—but it is becoming increasingly clear that if you don’t have a mechanism for making things fair, wealth becomes concentrated. Labour markets are not pure and perfect transparency, and there is existing inequality that they can exacerbate if we don’t actively work to change that and remove the barriers. So I think that’s really useful.

There’s a very interesting graph that talks about how most of the housing wealth and the age kind of concentration of housing wealth has radically changed over the last few decades. Of course, that is somewhat down to policies—public policy that could change—which means that now a certain egroup of people are much more likely to hold a lot of wealth because they bought houses at a certain time and we’ve had house prices increase significantly, and that’s locked younger people out of the housing market, which puts them at a disadvantage. Of course, I would argue that that disadvantage will be exacerbated by this Government’s current policies, which are really oriented towards those who already own property and are transferring wealth back to those who already own the most, rather than helping others have access to—whether that is just secure, more dry, affordable rentals or whether it is buying their own home. So that is really useful information. I’m trying to find the page that graph is on, but I think I’ve lost it, But, hopefully, I’ll find it.

Before I get to climate, I just wanted to mention one other really important graph in here which I think is really useful for understanding Aotearoa New Zealand in the context of the OECD. That is about the discussion about tax revenue and tax as a share of GDP in OECD countries. This is on page 69—[Holds up graph]—nice!—and here it is: “Figure 34: Tax as a share of GDP in OECD countries”, and New Zealand is really low on that list. So while there’s a kind of mythology and kind of easy lines that we sometimes hear from some people that you can’t tax your way to prosperity, most of the countries that have higher incomes per capita than New Zealand also have higher tax shares of GDP. So maybe we can learn from that.

Just before I call Cameron Luxton, there’s a lot of chatter in the House and I’d like to be able to hear the people that are speaking.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to know that people are paying attention to what sometimes may seem like an issue that can put people to sleep, but, actually, this is one of the most important things that we can think about in our society. And Government’s role is to think about the future.

Now, I think we can all agree that the people of New Zealand have decided that the path that we were heading down was not a good one, and that is why in October they decided to elect a new Government. Now, it cannot be a surprise when one reads through He Tirohanga and sees some of the outrageous things that are being said. Governments should keep debt levels prudent. Well, blow me down! Governments should keep debt levels prudent, because not doing so could lead to an increase in taxes. Now, the previous speaker, the Hon Julie Anne Genter, might think that increasing taxes is a good thing, but if you’re printing a heck of a lot of money and you believe in modern monetary theory, I guess that is what you would think is a good thing.

On this side of the House, we believe that New Zealanders should be able to keep their money to be able to spend on themselves and on productive activities to provide for their family and their community, because, as another member of this House so often says, the economy isn’t just an amorphous blob; it is made up of all of us, and when we are taxed to the absolute brink of what a citizen should stand, no wonder the economy suffers.

Hon Julie Anne Genter: But we’re not.

CAMERON LUXTON: Well, exactly—we’re not, because we are taking prudent measures on this side of the House to lower taxes and make sure that the fiscal position of this country is improved. As I was going through the long-term insights briefing, I came across a startling number. It has got here that in 2061, the net worth of this country is forecast to be—good Lord!—negative 137 percent of GDP. Now, we cannot continue along such a horrendous path that will lead us to a place where we cannot make the decisions for our country and for our families that we have enjoyed in the past.

Another part of the long-term insights is looking at housing. Now, it can be said that New Zealand faces a housing crisis. Well, I’m a builder and I know what that looks like. It looks like building supply stores taking prices off the shelf because they don’t want to show how much the building materials are going up every week. That is what we lived through during COVID. It is not a surprise that the cost of building skyrocketed when we were printing so much money that it had no alternative because, as the great Milton Friedman said, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon”. What we had was a Reserve Bank printing money and inflation flowing through, and where does it go? It goes to discretionary spending, allegedly.

But I would say it goes to housing and the insane cost of housing in New Zealand. Well, this Government has got a long-term vision to reduce the cost of housing, by opening up the laws from which we plan, finance, and fund infrastructure, and taking steps like the Hon Chris Penk has done in making it easier to import materials into this country to provide some competition so that we don’t have an artificially raised cost of building because of a supply constraint made out of laws that have gone well past their use-by date.

There is another part in the long-term fiscal position that I think needs attention, and it’s demographics. New Zealanders work very hard to save and provide for their families, and they want to know that when they are working hard, that is going to their benefit so that they can invest in their home and in their business, and spend that money and freedom in a way that provides housing to people who need housing, provides jobs to people who need jobs, and provides a future for their family. That was taken away when that side of the House was frivolous with their laws around restricting building, a Resource Management Act reform process that was not future-focused, and Building Act reform that was long overdue.

We have been left with a horrendous position, but I am glad to say that this long-term insights briefing is a piece of the tool kit that this Government will use to make this country a better country. Thank you.

Can I just remind members—and this is not directed at the previous speaker, who actually had interjections to deal with—that we are looking at long-term insights, rather than at a political debate that is going on here. I understand the member was responding to some of the things that were said, but we’ve heard from our previous speakers how important it is to keep this at a high level, and it would be great if we could do that. Thank you.

Madam Speaker, thank you for the chance to speak on behalf of New Zealand First on this long-term risks and opportunities debate. I do agree with the previous speakers; I think this is a worthwhile exercise. We can be a bit tactical at times in this place. Things happen very fast, but we do need to be able to step back and look at the long-term drivers, the risks, the opportunities, things like the demographics, things like what our long-term fiscal position will be, so that we can make sound decisions as we go. Certainly, as we go into the Budget process next week, you will see us taking very much that responsibility, very likely.

We had the Reserve Bank Governor in at the Finance and Expenditure Committee this morning. He could not have been more strong in the sense that productivity, and the lack of productivity, in this economy is costing us majorly. But it’s not all about what the Government does. The Government sets the framework, but it is also about what the private sector does—what we are doing in this place that enables the private sector and particularly, in my experience, the primary sector. We’ve got 80 percent of our merchandise exports coming from the primary sector. It’s an extraordinary, extraordinary number. Madam Speaker, you would have been around in the days when David Lange called us a “sunset industry” back in the 1980s. But here we are today, at 80 percent of our total merchandise exports. As I said in question time today, it has been my pleasure, in the regional development space, to look at the gaming industry; looking at a billion-dollar industry—things like gaming—that we wouldn’t have even thought of back then. That’s fantastic.

But one thing I would like to bring the House’s attention to is probably the most significant corporate announcement in recent New Zealand history, made earlier this week: Fonterra is looking at divesting their brands business. This will be a multibillion-dollar asset going on the block. It will be up to Fonterra’s 10,000 dairy farming shareholders who hold the voting rights. They hold this decision—this impactful, long-term decision—in their hands. Do they take the money now, or do they look to the long term and maybe some of the risks and threats that are out there and decide to hang on to that brands business? It sits with them; it should sit with them, as it sits.

But why should this Parliament care? Obviously, the outcome of that will be pivotal for us, one way or the other. But the reason it matters is because Fonterra is a creature of statute. It was created by this House in 2001. We gave them extraordinary powers to amalgamate what was then two major cooperatives, New Zealand Dairy Group and Kiwi Dairies, and merge them with the Dairy Board, which was the exporter—the single exporter—at the time as that was being disestablished. That was a major long-term decision that that Parliament made, but it granted the single company extraordinary powers. The consequences of this could be vital.

We’ve got a situation, we’ve got a technology coming along called precision fermentation—which is, essentially, artificially creating the ingredients—that Fonterra have decided is their future. Now, this technology exists—Fonterra are trying to crack this code themselves; that’s how seriously they take it. But overseas, everyone is out there trying to do this. Do not believe that the Nestlés of the world would not drop us like a stone if they thought they could get the equivalent protein for cheaper. Because this is an ingredient. It’s not like meat, where you’re having the raw product; this is easier to replicate. Who knows what’s in your chocolate bar?

So this is a major decision, and I am going to be writing to the Finance and Expenditure Committee and asking Fonterra to attend and explain to this Parliament why they are using these extraordinary powers—are they making a wise decision on behalf of not just those 10,000 shareholders but the people of New Zealand? Thank you.

Just to remind members, you need to call so I know that you’re—

Oh, kia ora, kia ora. Aroha mai.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Thank you.

TĀKUTA FERRIS: Tēnā tātou e te Whare, tēnā rā koe e te māreikura, e te Pīka. Ka nui nei te mihi ki a tātou i roto i tēnei rā i a tātou e whakaaro ana mō te tirohanga whānui o ngā mokopuna i roto o Aotearoa. Ka hāngai pū taku titiro ki ngā whakatipuranga o te iwi Māori, otirā ki ngā āheinga i roto i te iwi Māori hei painga mō te katoa. Tērā ētahi kua kōrerotia i roto i tēnei Whare i roto i ngā rangi tata nei. Ko tāku he whakawherawhera i ērā āhuatanga hei whakarongo mā tātou i tēnei rā. Nō reira ka huri au ki te reo tuarua e mārama pū ai aku kōrero ki a tātou e noho nei i roto i tō tātou Whare i tēnei rangi.

[Thank you, thank you. Apologies. Greetings to all of us of this House. Thank you, Madam Speaker. Many greetings to us today as we consider the broad perspective of the grandchildren within New Zealand. My perspective will focus on the generations of the Māori people, indeed the capabilities within the Māori people for the benefit of everyone. Some of them have been spoken about in this House in recent days. What I will do is expand on those things for all of us to listen to today. So I will turn to the second language so that my comments are absolutely clear to us who sit here in our House today.]

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker, and thank you for the call. I stand on behalf of Te Pāti Māori to give some consideration to He Tirohanga Mokopuna 2021. “He tirohanga mokopuna” is a phrase from the Māori language, and it, basically, invites us to think forward as far as we can for the benefit of our grandchildren and our grandchildren’s grandchildren. Te iwi Māori has been on a long curve of rediscovery, of reclamation, of redevelopment, of growing things from a time in this country’s history where our people struggled to maintain their position not only in society but in many aspects of life in Aotearoa. Today, the Māori population is pushing on a million people, so “he tirohanga mokopuna Māori” is a very, very poignant statement and title when we’re considering what the future looks like. Māori babies, Māori mokopuna are an unequivocally important piece of the future of our country. They will comprise, along with their Moana nui a Kiwa cousins, one-third of the country’s labour workforce as we advance over the next two decades.

One of the key things that must happen is that we must begin to create systems, laws, processes, places of work, and places of education in our country that support those mokopuna to develop and become productive in an economy that we all rely on. The need to do this is ever-pressing, because the young population of Māori and Pacific Island peoples, and other people who come from cultured backgrounds, is already alive and kicking today. As they come through the developmental phases of life and enter into a workforce, they need to arrive as skilled people so that they can contribute to the same degree as the people who have gone before them. We should all be aware that, at the same time, the baby-boomer generation is exiting that labour workforce and taking with them a lot of the intellectual capital that has underpinned it. So it is vitally important that we strike the right settings that see he tirohanga mokopuna develop into the productive and leadership models that we need to maintain our country into the future.

The Māori economy is the second piece of that; the Māori economy. Every time the Māori economy is measured—and it’s currently ticking over $70 to $80 billion—it’s generally $10 billion behind. So before too long, definitely before 2030, the Māori economy will be worth more than $100 billion to this country. And all of that activity is driven on the basis of he tirohanga mokopuna, by the people in control of that economy, those resources. However they have come back to te iwi Māori, they are being used and managed in a way that will support everybody going forward. Me pēhea rā tātou? Me pēhea rā tātou te whai whakaaro nui ki ngā ara e ora ai te mokopuna? [What should we do? How are we to consider the big picture regarding the approaches for the wellbeing of the grandchildren?] How do we approach creating the pathways, doing the things that seize long-term prosperity and development for mokopuna—not only mokopuna Māori but all mokopuna of this country? That is indeed the intention of the report and its findings.

Nō reira ko tāku ki a tātou he akiaki. [So what I’d like to do is encourage us all.] So my words to us all, e hika mā, you know, friends, colleagues in this House, ko tāku he akiaki—mine is to encourage us all to consider: what are the pathways? What are the pathways that actually bring to life he tirohanga mokopuna, that bring to life he oranga tāngata, that bring to life he oranga whenua? He oranga tāngata, he oranga whenua—when the land is healthy, the people will be healthy with it. Nō reira, tēnā tātou.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. As the newly minted committee chair, it’s a pleasure to be participating in this, the first parliamentary debate on the long-term insights briefings that were part of the last Parliament’s work programme.

Now, the whole point of these long-term insights briefings was that they were supposed to have the ministries, and the various Government departments and agencies that were required under statute to produce them, provide information to select committees and, ultimately, this House about the medium- and long-term trends, risks, and opportunities facing New Zealand. Now, that’s a very laudable, a very plausible, and a very worthy objective. So the Ministry for the Environment duly invested a lot of time—many, many hours of work by staff from the Ministry for the Environment, an agency that in the last six years of the last Government had quadrupled its number of employees—and they presented a very big, fulsome report to the select committee.

It was typical of Ministry for the Environment reports: it had lots of very nice warm words, lots of aspirational goals, lots of pretty pictures, and it sought to actually ensure—and I’ve got the select committee’s report here; it only runs to about four or five pages. It’s actually quite a short report in balance. But the Ministry for the Environment presented their long-term insights briefing. The briefing topic was Where to from here? How we ensure the future wellbeing of land and people. Well, that was good work. The briefing, it says in this committee report, looks towards 2050, which, it says, “represents an important timescale for both climate change and native ecosystems”. Well, that’s very true. I don’t know that that took too long to figure out.

In Chapter 2, they said that the briefing describes how New Zealand’s land is under pressure. Well, again, kind of obvious. Chapter 3 of the briefing referred to the need to set out a vision for the future of land. Again, very good, laudable. And then the report from the Ministry for the Environment went on to list some transformational change that was needed to meet the aspirations that they contained in their report. Chapter 4, for instance, discussed pathways to a more resilient future for the land and every generation. And they talked about achieving incremental change. They talked about increasing effectiveness of policy and legislation, empowering communities, investing in sustainable infrastructure and technology, investing in science, promoting environmental education, embracing collaborative governance. And it sounded all to me like a Bluegreens policy manifesto. I thought that they had been reading some of the stuff that the very good Bluegreens had put together! The briefing notes, as well—that there would be a need for transformational change that would require choices about priorities. Well, again, go figure. I think we all know what that is.

So I want to record in this debate, because this is the first of these debates that the House has had, and we’ll have more of them in years to come and in months to come, and that’s probably a good thing—but I want to read and quote from the select committee of the previous Government, where there was a then Labour Government majority on that select committee. I quote: “While the Long-term Insights Briefing articulates an integrated worldview, the committee considers the report did not significantly contribute to an increased understanding of the issues the committee regularly deals with and the issues that are important to New Zealand.” Further quote: “If these Long-term Insights Briefings are to be useful, they need to go beyond stating the obvious and bring new insights and potential solutions to inform policy thinking.”

I think that for a committee in the last Parliament that was dominated then by Labour caucus members to have given that approval, which was unanimously agreed by the committee at the time, speaks volumes about the quality of what was a really long, really glossy, beautifully presented, worthy piece of work but did not actually, as the report says, go beyond stating the obvious. I hope that future long-term insights briefings will be far more beneficial to the insightful work that this House has to do.

Ko au te whenua, ko te whenua, ko au. Now, if you haven’t read this document—I’m not sure if the previous speaker, Scott Simpson, has actually read the document—that is a summary of what it is about: “I am the land, and the land is me”.

In this document—which, to me, wasn’t full of beautiful, glossy graphs; it was full of challenges that our land is under pressure. I read this and was concerned—and I’ll speak about that shortly—

Hon Scott Simpson: Tāmati Coffey didn’t think so.

GLEN BENNETT: —because in this document, it talks about the challenges of our ecosystem, the challenges of our soil—

Hon Scott Simpson: Stuart Nash didn’t think so.

GLEN BENNETT: —the challenges of climate change in terms of things like invasive pests and diseases.

Hon Scott Simpson: Aupito William Sio didn’t think so.

GLEN BENNETT: This document talks about the challenges of our future—

Hon Scott Simpson: Phil Twyford didn’t think so.

GLEN BENNETT: —and our species that are at risk.

Hon Scott Simpson: Angie Warren-Clark didn’t think so.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Enough—enough!

GLEN BENNETT: So I’m not sure if the previous speaker has actually read this, because, to me, it wasn’t blissful, night-time reading; it was actually a challenge to myself, to this House, and to future generations.

For me, it both challenges me and it scares me—this document. It’s about the environment’s health; how do we look after the land to ensure it’s ready and fit for the next generation? How does it provide for our needs, for our food? It’s for our jobs, it’s for our rest and recreation, and it’s for our play. Our environment is our taonga and I believe that this document challenges us about that and whether we are actually taking that seriously. So it challenges me because I can see aspiration, yes; I can see possibility, yes; but it also scares me.

When I look at the number on one of the pages in this document, it talks about the at-risk land species: 3,283 threatened, at-risk land species. That’s just land, not to mention the others that are airborne in that 4,000 that we’re talking about, that are native, that our biodiversity hosts here in this place; we’re a hotbed for the beauty of what nature and the environment provide. But also I am scared because we could be the generation that wipes out species that will never ever come back again. It’s also estimated that 192 million tonnes of soil are lost to erosion every year, and 44 percent of that comes from our pastures. This is crucial to our own existence and crucial to our economy and crucial to our life.

As I said earlier, climate change, of course, featured in this, talking about the challenges of our rising temperatures, the challenges of our rising rainfalls, and how climate change is impacting and will continue to impact the future of agrifood in our communities. But it talks about the existing pressures that are going to get worse, about the increased invasive species, and about the increased diseases that come. So I find hope in this document. I find the possibility if we actually read it and understand it and work with it. But it also is sombre reading in terms of our generation and our responsibility if we don’t do the right thing and pay attention.

I want to finish on the section that engages our rangatahi, because they are our current and our present but they’re also our future. They were part of the engagement in this, and that’s why this does give me hope through the challenges. Through being scared in what I read, it also gives me hope when they talk about how they want action and they want us to be bold and collectively work across the House together to make change, when it talks about connections and bringing people from all over our communities together and across our country to make it better, when it talks about deep environmental responsibility that we need to take seriously as adults, but also as young people and children, and when they acknowledge the practice of Te Tiriti o Waitangi as something that is a gift to this nation—that is a gift—if we understand and honour it, then our nation will thrive and grow even more.

This is challenging. This is hopeful. This is scary. But I believe that all of us, on all sides of the House, need to make sure we read this, we understand it, but then of course we put this into practice.

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. Some really cool things happened in 1986 with the origin of this report. Not only was 1986 the year that my twin sister and I were born but it was also the year of the birth of the Environment Act. From what I’ve heard, apparently people didn’t get everything right in the 1980s, but they got something right in this Act when they mandated the Government and its agencies to ensure a full and balanced consideration of the things that really matter—things like the needs of future generations, the intrinsic value of ecosystems, and for Te Tiriti principles to be upheld in managing our natural and physical resources or, as we understand, te taiao, or the fundamental basis of life on which we all rely.

The directives in the Act, captured in this report, invite us in this House today not only to address our immediate responses to our climate and ecological crisis but to think more broadly about our actions or, rather, probably, our lack of actions, and, most importantly, to look ahead. And that is just what this report does. It looks forward to 2050 which, according to where current Government commitments head us, is the point in time when Aotearoa will have reached carbon neutrality. We will have achieved all those breathtakingly wonderous nature goals in te mana o te taiao, or our biodiversity strategy, and Predator Free 2050 will be our blissful current-day reality. And this will only have been possible by us working together under our foundation of Te Tiriti.

But, unfortunately, with this Government at the reins, it looks increasingly unlikely that this beautiful 2050 future is possible. Our current reality is rather painfully set out in this report. It includes the pressures of land-use change, invasive species, pollution, extraction, and a dangerously warming climate. Land intensification, as outlined, has drastically altered our landscapes, leaving us with deforestation, soil erosion, and a decline in our freshwater and marine ecosystems and our biodiversity. We’ve got urban pollution from our vehicles, our industries, and our waste-water treatment plants, and it’s degraded our air, our land, and our water. That impacts our health and our ability to connect with nature, and, therefore, we must take action to actually care for it and protect it. Our isolated island, as we’ve heard, is a biodiversity hotspot and it’s something to be celebrated, but we know that so many species—4,000—are threatened and at risk of extinction.

Everything laid out in this report leads to one question: sure, we’ve really screwed things up in the past, but why keep deciding to screw things up so badly? Next week, this Government will make critical decisions that majorly impact our environment and our existence within it. It’s astounding that these decisions look set to favour corporations and lobbyists at the expense of the awesome sustainable future—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Can I pull the member up. You’re talking about the Budget and none of us knows what’s in it. I think we should be focusing on the long-term briefing. At the outset, we said this was not to be a political debate but a long-term vision debate.

LAN PHAM: Thank you, Madam Speaker. What this report does make clear is that for our rangatahi, youth, the state of our environment is not a distant concern; it’s real to them now. They so clearly know what good decision-making looks like to get us out of this mess, and what it doesn’t look like.

If this Government took their fundamental role of a duty of care for our environment seriously, as envisaged back in 1986—and the challenges are so clearly set out in this report—we could ensure that the need, or worse, the greed of today doesn’t compromise the life and the wellbeing of those tomorrow. Put simply, there is no planet B. It makes it really clear in this report, and we need to voice and acknowledge and act on the critical need to care for ourselves and our environment.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m glad to rise again to speak on a long-term insights briefing. Now, this one is the Ministry for the Environment’s Long-Term Insights Briefing 2023 with a report-back from the Environment Committee. Now, as a Kiwi that has spent his life enjoying New Zealand’s environment, I often wonder: what is the environment? We can have—it’s actually quite a nice name—the “natural and built environment”. I mean, it gives us a bit of sense that there’s more than one environment. You know, I’ve built environments; I’ve been a builder. I’ve farmed environments; I’ve been a farmer. I’ve contributed to my part of cleaning up New Zealand’s pests by having stoat lines and other lines in the—well, two now in my life, and it’s always a bit of a pleasure when you find a stoat hanging from a tree and know that you’ve done your bit to protect the feel of your favourite valley. Now—

Hon Andrew Bayly: That’s success.

CAMERON LUXTON: It is success. So what all New Zealanders growing up in this country feel an affinity for is the environment, and some of us go out and strap our boots on and take the set of plans that have gone through that rigmarole at the council and go and contribute to our built environment.

We’ve heard from the Labour member that people should go out and read this report back from the Environment Committee. Well, I have to say, I’ve gone through it and it’s just a word salad. I mean, how is anyone who gets up in the morning to go out, put their boots on, grab a hammer, a shovel, a piece of machinery, a bulldozer, and goes out and tries to deal with flooding, replant a hill that should never have been cleared—how are they going to get anything out of “Futures thinking is critical to … Ministry for the Environment’s role as … environmental steward and system[s] leader.”? I mean, what on earth? Look, I may not be a smart man, but I know what love is, and I have no idea what a systems leader is. I mean, how are we supposed to get anything out of something like this?

Anyone who goes out to put in a piece of infrastructure, to build a house, someone who’s gone to get water to put through the pipe system to get into town or to spray on some crops to diversify the agricultural basket that is New Zealand—and, I might say, I found myself in the Wairarapa last week and saw what could be done with a bit of security around water to helping New Zealand’s long-term environmental standards improve while also diversifying our crops and making sure that New Zealand can battle with whatever challenge the rest of the world throws at us. We need to be able to get to minerals and use these to fuel our economy and the future life of New Zealanders. But I say again: how is anybody going to make sense out of what was written in this report? I, unfortunately, cannot.

Farmers, townies, Kiwis are doing more for the environment than the Ministry for the Environment. I’ve met with conservation groups throughout the Bay of Plenty who are picking up the mantle for themselves and going out and getting it done, and I think we should be supporting them in securing a better environment for the next generations. There is a lot to be said for New Zealanders going out and doing what needs to be done, for improving their farm sustainability, improving the value of the town in which they live, and enjoying the benefits that come from that.

What we need to do—and what ACT and this coalition Government with National and New Zealand First are doing—is focus on replacing the Resource Management Act with a system based on property rights, because it’s only with true property rights that you can create wealth in a society, and it is only with wealth in a society that you can secure a healthy, prosperous, and sustainable environment. I look forward to New Zealand’s environment improving for new generations. My kids, my grandchildren will enjoy it, and I look forward to all New Zealanders enjoying it too.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to take this call on our land and our people and this briefing that has been put into this beautiful document in front of me, titled Where to from here? How we ensure the future wellbeing of land and people. So far, we’ve heard a lot in this debate around land, but we’re probably missing that one of the key factors in that title is “people”. It is the long-term future that we need to be looking at, and this document does say some important things. It was quite obvious, reading through it, that sometimes you can’t reinvent the wheel—it has already been done; it’s already been said. We know that issues around land, and that’s been very well-documented here—we know land is under pressure, and we know some of those pressures are coming from housing, housing intensification, trying to protect food production. As land is being taken up for housing, that high-quality food production land is being taken away.

This report outlines that we are losing things like our native plants, our native animals, our ecosystems, and they are under threat and there is no doubt about that. The amount of highly productive land is shrinking, and it’s shrinking dramatically in areas where we used to grow a lot of our high-quality crops. The way land is being used—we know that soils are being degraded and the water, and the environments in urban areas are being polluted. Another role that I’ve had was to do with the Resource Management Act, around being a hearings commissioner. It’s always those key elements around land, air, and water, and how those things link into each other. Through this report, some of the drivers that have been discussed are around those future land changes, around the intensification and what that will look like, around climate change and what that will look like for land, population change, the economics and the consumer demands that affect the land use, and invasive species. And we haven’t heard a lot about that in this debate—things in my district around wilding pines and stuff, and how that affects the use of land and farmland.

This report does set out having a vision. What I thought was really important in this report was that it talks about an enhanced role for all New Zealanders, and it’s all New Zealanders putting in their part and playing their part. It was good to hear, through this, that already that enhanced role is being implemented. But first, we’ve got to get the policy and the legislation effectiveness, and we’ve got to get the right legislation, the right policies, and we’ve got to get the buy-in, and we’ve got to get people empowering our communities. If we can empower communities, that is a really, really important thing. Investing in science—and that’s something that New Zealand First is really keen on: investing in science and how that enhances land use. Also, promoting environmental education—education is a really, really important thing for our young and for going forward.

In this report, we talk about transformational changes, and it talks about nine different pathways. One of those pathways is around the environmental responsibility. But we’ve got to find sustainability and balance. It’s all about choices, about priorities going forward, about housing, about food production, and about conservation. It’s the way in which we use the land, and that is the important thing.

The one thing I want to touch on in my last minute is the role of community-led incentives around catchment groups. That is the way forward in this country. We’ve got over 290 catchment groups. I did hear from the other side of the House around Jobs for Nature. That’s something New Zealand First is proud of and was proud of in 2017-2020. Those Jobs for Nature catchment groups are something we’ve got to encourage and keep supporting.

What I did want to talk about too was the effects of waste on land. We talk about forestry blocks, and there’s a lot of things with waste going on to land. We’ve got to find, through innovation, better ways for getting rid of forestry slash, like biochar and looking at those type of opportunities.

So this report, as much as it’s stating the obvious, is about that long-term thinking, and it’s not just about the next 50 years but the next 100 years. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Otirā, tēnā tātou. Kia ora, kia ora. Otirā tēnā tātou. Tēnā tātou i te āhuatanga o ā tātou kōrero.

[Good health and wellbeing to us all. Greetings to us all in accordance with what’s been said.]

I want to use this opportunity to talk about something that’s not just one of the most important long-term issues facing Aotearoa but one of the most important issues facing humanity, and that is climate change. Climate change is probably the most prevalent theme across all of these reports. The Finance and Expenditure Committee report He Tirohanga Mokopuna discusses the uncertainty of the economic and fiscal impacts of climate change, especially in an economy like ours that is dependent on land use, our natural ecosystems, and the environment. The national security long-term insights briefing also noted climate change will create competition for scarce resources and result in more migration to Aotearoa. The increase in severe weather events—as we all know, a consistent occurrence around the world—will inevitably place more pressure on our ability to recover. We experienced these ourselves first hand, particularly on the East Coast with Cyclone Gabrielle.

Poor planning and management of land use, of flood protection, housing and infrastructure means the impacts of Cyclone Gabrielle will be felt for many years to come. Tens of thousands of people were displaced in the middle of a cost of living crisis. People lost their loved ones, their homes, their livelihoods. The impacts will be intergenerational. We saw marae completely flooded, without insurance. We saw urupā desecrated and whānau having to dig up tūpāpaku so that they could be moved to safety.

As Māori, climate change poses a direct threat to our whakapapa, our culture, our livelihood, and also, as Māori, we have always adapted with the changing nature of Papatūānuku. Aotearoa cannot continue to treat climate change as a distant threat, because it is a very real part of our present day reality. We cannot sustain an economy that is based on the exploitation of whenua, the exploitation of our moana, and the exploitation of te taiao. Now that climate change is with us, we cannot continue to drag our feet on adaptation. Māori and poorer communities will be hit the hardest by the Government’s inaction in this space if we fail to move. Climate change isn’t just an environmental or economic issue, it is a human issue.

Anā kē ko te kīanga o te ao Māori. He aha kē te mea nui? Arā, he tangata he tangata he tangata.

[There is that proverb within the Māori culture. What is the most important thing? It is people, it is people, it is people.] 

We cannot take care of our environment without taking care of our people, and we cannot take care of our people without also taking care of the environment. The only way to deal with climate change is with system change. None of this will be achieved to its ultimate extent without indigenous leadership and knowledge. It’s a leadership and knowledge base that has been developed in this very environment over more than 1,000 years, and the realisation of these rights and the place and value of mātauranga Māori that is inherent in tangata whenua, in the tangata whenua experience—experience of our lands, ō tātou whenua, ō tātou moana, me ngā rawa o te taiao, [our lands, our seas, and the resources of the environment] all of our resources. Only we have this knowledge, and only we can create the solutions that will bring us back to a more balanced place in terms of where we sit as he tangata ki te ao ka puta ki te whaiao ki te ao mārama. [people in this world to find the pathway to enlightenment.]

Tangata whenua have always been at the forefront of climate action, and we are always the first to step up for our communities in times of crisis. Our marae are safe havens in times of crisis, providing warm showers, food, and shelter for hundreds of people each and every day all around the country as natural disasters strike in their regions—places, like Takahanga Marae in Kaikōura, who stood up and looked after a community supported by Ngāi Tahu whānui at the time of the Kaikōura earthquakes; marae, like Whakatū Marae in the Nelson district, who came to the fore as the Nelson fires ravaged the area and looked after the people who were displaced.

The solution to climate change is through sustainable, resilient indigenous thinking, action, and modelling. Before I close off, I’d like to just expand on a couple of key ideas that are always talked about throughout discussion with te taiao and the environment—the sustainability of our environment—but are rooted in te ao Māori, and they are whakapapa. Whakapapa is not just about people; whakapapa is about everything—it’s the interconnectedness of everything and everything is connected to you.

Te mana o te taiao. [The rights of the environment.] We are not separate from te taiao. We are not separate from the environment; we are a part of it. So we must think more about not only the rights of the individual but the rights of the collective and the sustainability of the collective, te mana o te iwi, te mana o te taiao [the rights of the nation, the rights of the environment]. Nō reira e te Pīka, tēnā rā koe, tēnā rā tātou. [So then, Mr Speaker, thank you. Thank you all.]

We come to the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development long-term insights briefing.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I rise to speak on the debate on long-term issues, informed by select committee reports on long-term insight briefings for the Social Services and Community Committee.

Now, the context around this is that the long-term insight briefings are about the Public Service Act 2020 mandating Government departments to develop and publish long-term insight briefings every three years. Briefings aim to inform the public about medium and long-term trends, risks, and opportunities in New Zealand, providing impartial analysis and potential policy responses. And from the Social Services and Community Committee, there are three particular long-term insights briefings from the previous term: the first being the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development’s long-term insights briefing, the next being the Ministry for Pacific Peoples’ long-term insights briefing, and the final one being the Ministry for Culture and Heritage’s long-term insights briefing.

Now, if I look at the first one, which was around the long-term implications of our ageing population for our housing and urban futures, it had a few points which are quite stark and bring together a number of issues that we as a country are going to be facing in the coming years. The briefing explores how population ageing will affect housing and urban development in New Zealand. It projects an increase from 17 percent of the population being over the age of 65 in 2023 to 24 percent of the population by 2053. The ministry highlighted that each community needs different things and cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach.

Now, having looked at that and diving a little bit deeper into it, they identified four shifts that the housing and urban development sector will need to make to adapt to these population changes and support the needs of the ageing population. They included providing more affordable housing; secondly, supporting more opportunities for alternative tenure options such as cooperatives, cohousing arrangements, or papakāinga. They also recommended increasing the diversity, functionality, and accessibility of housing stock. Finally, designing neighbourhoods, towns, and cities so that it is easy for people to access amenities and essential services.

The Ministry of Housing and Urban Development emphasised that there cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach to housing and urban development. Instead, each community needs different things. So how neighbourhoods are designed and the housing dwelling types within them will differ depending on factors, including the age of population.

And then looking at the next, they had the Ministry for Pacific Peoples’ long-term insights briefing, and this was around improving Pacific data equity—opportunities to enhance the future of Pacific wellbeing. The select committee heard from the Ministry for Pacific Peoples, and that looked into Pacific data inequity in New Zealand. It looks at how to improve the data systems and processes so that data more accurately represents Pacific perspectives and values. The long-term insights briefing stated that Pacific data equity is about ensuring that the definition of Pacific data in its design, collection, analysis, interpretation, and use, including the presentation of information and narratives about Pacific peoples, represents Pacific voices and is free from bias. The ministry has found that Pacific worldviews are not consistently taken into account across Government data systems. This risks misrepresenting the issues that affect Pacific people, leading decision makers to misidentify potential solutions.

Finally, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage’s long-term insights briefing, and this was looking at ensuring we’ve got a thriving arts and culture sector across New Zealand, moving into the future. It also noted that the sector currently generates around $13 billion each year and employs just under 100,000 people as at the end of March 2022. The Social Services and Community Committee, from their long-term insights briefings, has looked into a number of issues and challenges facing our country moving forward, and I commend this debate topic to the House.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. This report was really interesting reading, and I believe that it did touch on many of the challenges facing housing in this country, and, of course, no report of this size would touch on absolutely everything, but there were aspects here which, I think, will inform those that take the time to read it. I do hope that it informs those that make policy decisions in Government and in Government departments.

There were a couple of things that I thought it might be useful highlighting, and that was touching on the trends that they have identified, one of which, of course, is that there are people that earn an income that would, on current numbers, prevent them from accessing social housing but also isn’t big enough for them to realistically expect to save for a deposit. And, of course, this is a topic that has been canvassed over the last couple of days. In addition to that, it touches on a trend here that, essentially, means across the board, be they Pākehā, be they Māori or Pacific, the projected rate of homeownership is to go down. Now, there have been successive Governments that have promised to increase the housing supply. There have been recent Governments that have declined that there was a housing crisis. But, if we are to draw anything from this, at least it has to be said that there appears now to be a consensus in Parliament, on both sides, that the solution to this is in increasing supply. Where the disagreement in that debate appears to be is what role the State has to play in that.

Is it the State’s role to fund houses? We say yes. This Government believes that there is benefit in changing rules and requiring councils and all those sorts of things, and I’d note the nature of this debate isn’t to comment on that specifically, but to comment on this report and the trends that it identifies. But I mentioned that because I think that is the crux of the problem. In order to fix the housing crisis that we face, that this report refers to over four different areas, there actually does need to be some consensus moving forward. And that worries me a bit. I’m sure we’ve all heard it—and not that we agree with it, but we would have heard it from time to time—that for those who perhaps don’t take too much notice of politics, there’s not much difference between the National and Labour parties. Well, of course, we would disagree. There are areas where there are fundamental differences—like workplace relations, for example—and one of those, I think, is housing. But I don’t think we’re far off, because in here it touches on the need to identify the trends moving forward. So we’re going to have to address Māori and Pacific housing. That is going to require a change in attitude to programmes that are effective, directed, directly targeting and run by those particular groups that are going to benefit. There were programmes; there aren’t now. Perhaps that could be reconsidered.

Very similarly, this identifies that older people are particularly prone at the moment, and are projected to be even more so, to homelessness or the inability to be able to own their own home—86 percent, not that long ago, of those over 65 owned their own home. That’s projected to be lower than 50 very shortly, and that’s a worry. So the question needs to be: are those provisions that are currently in place catering for the older person? Now, I’m sure we can all think of an example where perhaps an older person or a couple are living in their family home, their children have moved out, it’s now too big, and they’re looking around to downsize because they want another family to move into their home and have the life that they had. There’s nowhere to go. There are no single rooms. There are no double-room units. There is somewhere to go if they can afford it, if they can afford to go into a very corporate aged-care, retirement-type village. Not everyone can. But the provision of houses, despite the fact that there has been tremendous progress over the last six years, I don’t think is yet catering for that particular group, and the need will only continue to grow.

So I’m hopeful that, if the last speech is anything to go by, they will take this seriously, but they will, I think, need to reflect on a couple of things in order to get there. Thank you, sir.

Thank you. Just for those speakers to come, we’ve had a pure non-political speech and one that was probably getting close to the edge, so we’ll be looking for people to be in the middle of those two. Thank you.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. I will try my best to keep it mellow because we have had a very big week on housing this week. So we will keep it mellow.

I’m taking this call to speak on the past and the future of housing in Aotearoa, in regards to the long-term briefings. I want to begin with this quote by New Zealand author Rebecca Macfie, who said, “In a single generation New Zealand has transformed itself from a home-owning democracy into a society fractured by property wealth—between those who have it, and those who do not.” In Treasury’s He Tirohanga Mokopuna 2021 report, they said that sharp increases in house prices have exacerbated the challenges of housing affordability, especially for those seeking to purchase their first home. This reflects the reality for many young people in Aotearoa who are choosing to move overseas, where they can earn incomes that allow them to save up for a deposit and to service those regular mortgage payments.

The reality in New Zealand is that if you don’t have intergenerational wealth, if you don’t come from a rich family, then it’s going to be extremely hard to be able to scrape together the money for a deposit. I think this contributes even more to an ageing population, which is heavily touched on in this report. People aren’t having babies. That’s why our ageing population is increasing—because it’s too expensive and too unstable to raise a family under these conditions, and that’s the sort of country that we live in, where there is very little class mobility, where a huge chunk of our country’s wealth is concentrated in housing, and where our system is built around favouring those who are lucky enough to own their own homes. You used to be able to work really hard and save up enough for a home in Aotearoa, and now all of your wages are taken by supermarkets and the steep cost of living. It’s a massive shame to see our country’s brightest and best moving overseas.

But it’s not just those at the beginning of their lives who are struggling; it’s our kaumātua, our seniors in our communities who bear the brunt. This is a key theme throughout this long-term briefing around how our kaumātua are living in this day and age. Imagine spending your whole life contributing to the country that you live in, hoping to retire and be able to chill out, but your pension is calculated on the assumption that you own your home, so you’re living in poverty because your pension doesn’t even cover your rent and it doesn’t keep up with the rising cost of living.

I had a message from a family supporting their grandfather that really encapsulates the reality behind this briefing. It says, “My elderly grandfather lived under other people’s homes, or in tiny beds, on the North Shore of Tāmaki. He was in his 80s. He paid way too much for these dark, little places. He was kicked out each year for three years in a row from three places. It was such an ordeal moving him. He wasn’t eligible for funding for a place in a rest home and didn’t have the money to pay for one despite being a successful businessman for many years. It was so sad seeing him shuffled along every year.” This is why we continue to advocate, especially for multigenerational housing—I think that’s something we don’t have in our housing stock, is that diversity.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O’Connor): It’s more about what the report said than what you’re advocating, actually, Ms Paul.

TAMATHA PAUL: Yeah, so one of the key themes in this report is about increasing the diversity, functionality, and accessibility of our housing stock, and allowing for planning rules that allow for larger houses that are accessible and that are universally designed so that babies and kaumātua can live in the same house as an essential part of that.

The other point that I want to touch on is: housing trends for Māori and Pacific populations—another one of the four key points in this briefing. In particular, there is a really great resource called Homeless and landless in two generations - Averting the Māori housing disaster. That report by academics completely backs up what this briefing says about declining homeownership rates and increasing renting within Māori populations.

I want to use the last bit of my time to talk about the accessibility of our housing stock. Considering the amount of people who live with a disability in our society, our housing stock does not reflect the needs of our community. We can improve that by having higher standards for our public housing, our council housing, to meet universal design standards. That is going to go a long way to addressing stable homes for seniors and people with disabilities. Kia ora.

Thank you. I’m quite privileged and happy to take a call on the previous Social Services and Community Committee’s work that they did in putting together the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development’s long-term insights briefing.

So speaking to the report, there are a couple of key points that I want to talk about. The demographics and the ageing population, like the previous speaker, Tamatha Paul, actually alluded to is a really important thing. When houses are really expensive, we do see, in fact, the birth rate going down, which is quite evident at the moment.

If we look back and we think about the boomers, who are our ageing population, we think about why there was a baby boom in the first place. What were the conditions back then that allowed people to feel like they were safe and secure and to have a family and how was it easier to build homes? I mean, I have to think about regulation in that space, but because we’re talking about this report, I will keep it nice and on point.

Supporting more opportunities for alternative tenure options such as cooperatives, co-housing arrangements, or papa kāinga was one of the points that they made in this report—increasing the diversity, functionality, and accessibility of housing stock. They emphasise that there cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach to housing and urban development and, instead, each community needs different things.

So let’s just think about that for a moment. What are we hearing and what are we seeing? We’re seeing that each individual community’s needs are different and that our housing needs to reflect this. We need more of those partnerships with CHPs, as they call them—or the community housing partners. Some of this work is actually beginning, and I think that this report really leads to how we need a lot more of this happening.

One thing I thought that I might actually talk about briefly, because it’s a really good example of what they talk about within this report, is actually Autism New Zealand. So Autism New Zealand, they have indicated that 2 percent of people in New Zealand suffer from autism, which is around 93,000 individuals. They are partnered with Equity House to bring together some of their own community housing that is solution-focused for people with autism. This is a great example of what we can see when you bind a community together to solve the issues that they have.

The likes of Community Housing Aotearoa and Emerge Aotearoa are actually amazing. I think that this report really does indicate that we need more of this—that central government, Kāinga Ora doesn’t always know what the community’s needs are, so I think that this report really highlights that for us.

Some other little bits that I’d like to point out: when they’re talking about having our cities more accessible and making sure that we have that urban planning correct, we have that urban development increasing, and we need to obviously increase our housing stock, we really need to think about that Resource Management Act reform, because if we’re looking for our future and our future development, this is going to be the key to that. I feel like it’s something that has held us back and you can tell that through some of the report here.

So, just in summary and talking through a couple of other things that we could mention within this report, I feel that while this is a great starting point, the writing’s already been on the wall. How am I standing here and we have a boomer generation that is completely ageing and we’re completely unaware of it? I mean, we call them the boomers; that in itself should actually be an indicator. We need to make sure that we have affordable accommodation to be able to care for people, and especially care for our elderly, and it is something that I’m gravely concerned about. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s great to be able to speak on this long-term insights briefing on housing. I think this is an excellent initiative of the 53rd Parliament. What’s really good is that we get the opportunity to be able to think about long-term issues: not about what’s happening in the next three years, or even the next news cycle, but think about things which are genuinely long term: 30-, 50-, 100-year issues.

What we’re discussing at the moment is the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development’s long-term insights on housing. They could have covered a whole range of different issues, but what they did is they focused on, I think, four major issues. First of all, the ageing population, which we’ve heard quite a bit about; secondly, the declining level of homeownership—in other words, more of us who are renting; thirdly, the place of Government housing; and, fourthly, the response to climate change. So I’m going to try and flick through some of those issues.

First of all, on the ageing population, the graphs in the report are really, really stark. In fact, you look at the number of nought to four-year-olds as a proportion of the population, it’s half what it was in 1961—half what it was. The ageing population—well, the good news is that our life expectancy is going up. Back in 1948, the average age expectancy for men was 66.7; for women it was 68.5. Now, for men, it’s 80 or over 80; and for women it’s about 83 or 84. So, actually, the good news is we’re living longer, we’re living healthier, and we’re living better. But the nature of our population structure has dramatically changed. As we’ve heard already, 17 percent of us today are over 65. By 2053, it’s going to be 24 percent of us.

So there’s a question which this report raises: is our housing stock appropriate for that ageing population? Clearly, the answer is no, at this stage it’s not. So is it accessible enough? Is it close enough to facilities? The ability to be able to drive, for many people as they get older, is simply not going to be there; that proximity is important. The placement of retirement housing is also very, very important. Is the housing size appropriate? Look, for many years we were building bigger and bigger and bigger houses, and now we’re starting to see the emergence of smaller houses. That, I think, is a response both to affordability but also to a changing population. Then, we’ve also heard about alternative 10-year plans.

There’s also a lot which is said about affordability, and the number of people who are renting is rising dramatically. That is particularly, as we’ve heard, a real problem for our older population. I mean, the superannuation system we’ve got at the moment is not designed on the basis of people having to rent as well—it’s simply not going to be able to afford it. The numbers actually are pretty challenging. In 1986, as the report says, 79 percent of Europeans and Asians owned their own home; it’s now 51 percent. For Māori, 54 percent; it’s now 40 percent. For Pasifika, 51 percent; it’s now 31 percent. So, right across our population, the number of people who can afford to buy a house has declined. That is a real problem for an ageing population.

So we’ve got to do something about these things. There are some people who would like to see the house prices fall. The problem is that we saw that post-COVID. We’ve got a housing crisis and we want to build more houses, but, of course, what people did is say, “Well, actually, there is no money in building houses because the house prices are falling, the cost of building is going up.”, and people stopped building houses. So that didn’t solve the problem at all. What we do need to do is to make sure that the cost of building a house—[Member is passed a note] Can I finish?

Jamie Arbuckle: Yeah.

ANDY FOSTER: The cost of building a house needs to come down, relatively. Minister Penk is doing some great work in that area to pull down the cost of building a house. Secondly, we need to make sure that we can actually raise incomes so that people can afford to buy those houses.

I’m being encouraged to move the speech on, so I think what I’ll do is just to commend the great work that’s been done here. There’s a lot more that can be said about housing—housing is a major issue for this country. We’ve got a huge amount of work to do to tackle those issues. The report raises a number of those issues, but I’m going to finish now because I know that there is an anxiousness to move on to the next issues.

Takutai Tarsh Kemp. Unfortunately, we’ve only got two minutes left for this speech for a timed debate, so New Zealand First gave up a little of theirs, so thank you.

Tēnā koe e te Pīka, tēnā tātou e te Whare. Amohia ake te ora o te iwi ka puta ki te whai ao—the health and wellbeing of our people is paramount, and housing is paramount to the health and wellbeing of our people. So I’m going to kōrero all about what happens when a Government treats housing as a business instead of a social good.

Housing was identified as a key long-term issue in several reports. Treasury’s He Tirohanga Mokopuna 2021 talked about the ways in which housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable for first-home buyers, with the median house price in my electorate, Tāmaki Makaurau, now being over $1 million, way out of the price range of our whānau. Te Puni Kōkiri’s Thriving Whānau in 2040 talked about the barriers Māori face when accessing finance to buy a home. The Ministry of Housing and Urban Development’s briefing talked about a stark decrease in homeownership for Māori and Pasifika and the increase of kaumātua living in rental properties. But I want to talk about what this means for our people, who are doing it tough day in, day out; pay cheque to pay cheque; benefit to benefit. They live on “Pōhara St”.

It means that tonight 100,000 people in Aotearoa will be sleeping rough on streets, in tents, in cars, in garages, or in unlivable houses that are making them sick. It means that 30,000 tamariki will be hospitalised this year because of substandard housing. This housing crisis is literally killing our tamariki and mokopuna. There are currently 94,000 unoccupied houses in this country doing nothing but collecting dust. That is enough empty houses to put roofs over the heads of every single person who’s experiencing homelessness in Aotearoa right now, yet in Aotearoa, we’re happy to allow tamariki to sleep in cars. This is what happens when you treat housing as a commodity and a business instead of as a human right. Māori make up 60 percent of homelessness in Aotearoa. Nothing paints a clearer picture of colonisation for indigenous people being homeless in their homeland.

While this Government is cutting minimum increases and sanctioning beneficiaries, rent and food prices are higher than ever. Our people are being forced to pay over half their income to feed their landlord’s whānau when they can barely afford to feed their own, and, just yesterday, this Government confirmed it will be scrapping first-home grants, further locking Māori, Pasifika, and rangatahi out of homeownership. This would save the Crown $245 million over four years, which is about 8 percent of the $3 billion handout they’re giving to landlords. This Government is making homeownership—

Thank you to the member. I’m really sorry, but we have run out of time for this debate.

Motion agreed to.