Urgent Debates — Kāinga Ora—Government Response to Review

I call on the Hon Kieran McAnulty to move that the House take note of a matter of urgent public importance.

I move, That the House take note of a matter of urgent public importance. Mr Speaker—

💬 SPEAKER: Wait a minute—wait on. Members, there’s a time on this. Do not have conversations as you’re leaving the House. Leave quietly and respectfully.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. When it comes to social housing, the National Party are all talk. They’ve always been all talk and they always will be all talk, and there’s no better example than the response to the review into Kāinga Ora that occurred yesterday, as the Prime Minister and the housing Minister stood there in front of the media and looked for every possible excuse they could to undermine Kāinga Ora and the provision of State houses in this country. There is a reason why I didn’t refer to its full name—this so-called independent report—because I do not accept that placing Sir Bill English, the man who oversaw the wholesale of our State houses while he was finance Minister, is anywhere near independent. The record of the previous National Government speaks for itself. In the nine years that they governed, the number of State houses went backwards by 1,500, and the bloke that oversaw that was the bloke that oversaw the review that the Prime Minister and the housing Minister used to justify their agenda.

Let’s have a look at what they said in their response. On numerous occasions, the Prime Minister mentioned that debt had gone up from $3 billion to $12 billion. At no point did the Prime Minister mention the asset value that had been accumulated in that time, that had gone from roughly $20 billion to roughly $45 billion in six years. Why? Because they are trying to paint a picture. They are trying desperately to undermine an organisation that had to start from scratch.

Actually, that’s inaccurate: they had to start beyond and behind the starting line, because when we came in in 2017, and when Kāinga Ora was established in 2018, Housing New Zealand was a shell of an organisation. It existed for one reason and one reason only, and that was to sell State houses. It was a shame, it was a disgrace, and we had to build that up from nothing, change the outlook. That is what, supposedly, was in review yesterday. It was what, supposedly, is under financial strain. What amazed me was it seemed like the Prime Minister and the housing Minister only realised that it costs money to build houses, and a lot of houses—14,000 is the number that public houses increased by in the last six years. That is an astronomical number in the context of what Housing New Zealand was and what Kāinga Ora has become. By all means, we should always look for efficiencies, but the attitude—it was astounding. They’ve given up—they have given up. They have not even committed to continuing at the same level.

I find the actions of those two Ministers yesterday to be disingenuous—disingenuous because throughout the campaign, both of them made a promise to New Zealanders. They promised that their Government would build more houses than the Labour Government. So to achieve that, that’s 14,001-plus, and what have we seen in the last seven months? Absolutely nothing. We’ve seen blaming and we’ve seen dodging around the issues, and we’ve seen claims that I believe to be disingenuous.

In the Prime Minister’s state of the nation speech, he claimed, as we have heard in the House today and was referred to again yesterday, that when they came into Government there was advice sitting on their desk that Kāinga Ora was about to sell 10,200 houses, and they claimed that we knew. We heard it today—it’s not true. That advice was commissioned by the Minister of Finance as a result of a conversation she had with the Secretary to the Treasury. That’s confirmed in another written question.

I’ll tell you what also was confirmed: in the annual review hearing at the Social Services and Community Committee, both the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development and Kāinga Ora confirmed very clearly that that advice was on the preface that this Government will not fund social houses, public houses, or State houses beyond 2025. They were working on their advice. This is the outcome of this Government’s policies, and they have the gall to turn around and blame us. If they want to blame us, they can blame us for housing people, because that’s what we did—we housed people. We housed families; we housed disabled people, who, incidentally, make up 70 percent of Kāinga Ora’s tenants.

What have they done—apart from looking for excuses and looking for distractions? They have reintroduced interest deductibility for landlords, a $2.9 billion tax cut. Why was that brought in? It was brought in to incentivise new builds, because for years speculators and investors were competing amongst themselves on existing stock, driving up house prices. And what did we see once that was changed? Investment went to new builds. New homeowners came into existing stock. That is the result of that policy.

So the reverse is true: by them bringing it back, there won’t be new builds; there will be competition on existing stock, house prices will go up, new homebuyers will be locked out, and rents will go up. And guess what! That doesn’t help build houses. We saw them put restrictions and make it harder to get into emergency housing—that doesn’t build houses. We saw them announce that it’s easier to evict Kāinga Ora tenants without the promise that they would then go back on to the list—that doesn’t build houses. And later today, we are going to debate a bill at its first reading that makes it easier for landlords to kick tenants out—that doesn’t build houses.

What does build houses is funding, and the glaring omission from yesterday’s announcement was another missed opportunity, another refusal to confirm funding. Right around the country, community housing providers are pausing and cancelling housing developments for one reason: because they won’t confirm the funding. And we’ll hear it—Chris Bishop’s writing down notes now. We’ll hear the nonsense that he’s been saying for a while; fiscal cliffs and all that sort of stuff. Anything short of this Government announcing funding perpetuity for the rest of time, they’re going to go into their same trap that they’ve created; they’re going to do what is a total fiscal cliff.

It’s a disgrace. It’s like they think New Zealanders are thick, but they’re not thick and they know what to expect from this Government, when they see their Prime Minister unable this morning on Breakfast to answer a simple question: “How many State houses will you sell?” He refused to answer. “Define mass State housing sell-offs.”, as was referred to by the housing Minister yesterday. He refused to answer. Why, is my question—why is that? They could’ve cleared that up yesterday; they didn’t. Instead, they took us down a road that wasn’t true by claiming that they’ve got advice on sales of houses that wasn’t true. Their own advice, their own officials, their own answers to written parliamentary questions say it wasn’t true.

It’s actually quite clear and quite evident: they are shaping up Kāinga Ora to perform what happened in the last National Government: a mass transfer of State-owned houses to other organisations, be they community housing providers or be they these new associations modelled on what’s happening in the UK. Of all the European examples to follow on housing policy, the UK is the last one. The number of social houses has gone down; the number of homeless has gone up. It is the very thing we shouldn’t be doing. It is the very thing they will do, because it’s the very thing they did last time. If they don’t fund public houses, the numbers will go down. The evidence is there for all to see. They can yell, they can holler, but here’s a challenge for them: what’s larger, 14,000 or minus 1,500? It’s a pretty simple question, because if this Government continues on its path and follows to make excuses like they did yesterday in the response to the review and refuses to fund additional funding for State houses and for income-related rent subsidy, that’s exactly where we’re going to go. If the previous National Government funded houses like we did, we would be nowhere near the mess that we’re in.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. There are a few things that the member Kieran McAnulty—who I realise is new to the housing portfolio—needs to realise about Kāinga Ora and the financial situation that this Government has inherited. The first is that it is true to say that in December last year, when the Government came to office, a report landed on our desk that was pursuant to the funding—

💬 Hon Dr Megan Woods: It was commissioned by the Minister of Finance.

No, no, no—no, no, no.

💬 Hon Dr Megan Woods: Yes, yes, yes.

The member who is interjecting, herself, alongside the Minister of Finance at the time, started the Kāinga Ora funding and financing review in the first place. The previous Government was donkey-deep in the situation that this Government has inherited, because even the profligate previous Government realised that what was going on at Kāinga Ora was not acceptable. That’s why they started the funding and financing review by Treasury and the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development in the first place.

One of the outcomes of that review was a report that landed on the new Government’s desk in December 2023 that said, on the budget approved by the board in December 2023, that Kāinga Ora was forecast to sell, over the next four years, 10,200 houses—that is fact. So that is the situation that the Government has inherited. Now, as I said yesterday in the post-Cabinet press conference, that will not be happening under this Government’s watch, and one of the ways it will not be happening is that we have commissioned this review and have started the turn-around job of Kāinga Ora.

Kāinga Ora is an extremely important organisation. It’s a $45 billion company. It spends over $2.5 billion per year. Over the last few years, its financial situation has been deteriorating. In 2022-23, it ran at a loss of $520 million, which is forecast, on the current track, to increase to $700 million by 2026-27. It has added 2,000 staff since 2017-18.

One of the consequences of the previous Government’s enormous remit that it gave to Kāinga Ora is that it has taken its eye off the ball on doing its job of being fundamentally a public housing landlord. It’s an extremely important organisation that houses over 185,000 people, owns over 70,000 houses, alongside many other things that it does. One of the things that the Government will be considering is to reduce the remit of the things that it does so that it can focus on its core responsibilities. So it’s very important fiscally for the Government, but it’s also very important for the people who actually live in those houses.

The review that we are responding to in this urgent debate finds that the cash cost over the next four years is $21 billion for Kāinga Ora. That is money that comes from taxpayers, that comes from the rest of the Crown. Now, as I say, it is very important that Kāinga Ora is an efficient and effective organisation. That is why we commissioned the review and the review was thorough and it was engaged comprehensively with Kāinga Ora and the communities that are part of the Kāinga Ora family, or at least the sector around the country.

One of the things that’s interesting is that Kāinga Ora’s social licence has really been put at risk, and this is the issue that the current Government has had to grapple with, in that I think public housing and State housing and social housing has in some communities had a bad name that is undeserved, partly because of Kāinga Ora. I want to restore the social licence for State, public, and social housing in our communities because it is extremely important that we look after people in need, and Kāinga Ora plays a very important role in that.

We will, under this Government, build more social houses. We will build more Kāinga Ora houses. We will also facilitate the building of more social houses, and never is there more of a bigger divide between the parties than when it comes to the role of the State and social housing, because the previous Government’s obsession was with building State houses through Kāinga Ora, and that was their sole focus. To give you a sense of it, they funded 6,000 more social houses in Budget 2023 over the next two years. Eighty percent of them were allocated to Kāinga Ora, 80 percent of them—4,800 houses were allocated only to Kāinga Ora. The community housing sector got the crumbs—about 1,200 social houses.

On this side of the House, we are far more interested in growing the community and social housing sector than we are in focusing resolutely on the gross number of new State houses. So, we will fund and build more social houses on this side of the House, but we are far more interested in powering up organisations like the Salvation Army, like Emerge, like the Community of Refuge Trust. We are far more interested in innovative funding and financing formulas that allow those houses to be built. For example, we are interested in developments that let ACC, and other forms of capital, fund—

💬 Hon Dr Megan Woods: They’ve already done it.

Yeah, I know—yes, that’s true. They’ve already done it, but we want to see what more we can do in that regard. So we will fund and support more social housing places.

The member who led off this debate, the leader of the—well, maybe the leader in the future of the Labour Party, but the leader when it comes to housing talked a lot about the 2025 social housing places and how the Government hasn’t confirmed funding beyond that. As I said in question time, that could equally be true of the previous Government, because in 2023, the outgoing Labour Government at the time funded more social housing places to 2025 and stopped it there, and we know why they did that. It’s because they pretended that after that time there’d be no more additional social housing funding so that the 2025-26 books could look better, so that they could pretend that around that time, and the year after that, they would deliver a surplus. This is one of these fiscal cliffs, and the fiction, created by the Labour Party, that they were on track to surplus.

When we got into Government we had to open the books and turn over the rocks and we discovered all of these situations throughout. Pharmac is another one, which David Seymour, my colleague, had to confront as well. School lunches was another one where they just pretended that the money would not continue to be spent—utterly fictional—so that Mr Robertson could go into the election campaign and say “Oh, don’t worry, we’re on track to surplus.”, even though the truth was the opposite.

So Mr McAnulty sort of cries crocodile tears and says, “Oh well, you’ve got to continue the social housing track funding.” Well, why didn’t the last Government do it? We are confronting that situation. He rages against transfers to other organisations. It’s utterly hilarious—the idea that the Government might transfer State houses to social housing organisations. The last Government hated the fact that the Government before that—the National Government—transferred social houses from Kāinga Ora, or Housing New Zealand, as it then was, to accessible properties in Tauranga, and—

💬 Shanan Halbert: Sold them off.

See, this is classic—it’s classic. This is what they say all the time. They spent much of their time in Government pretending that the last National Government engaged in a State house sell-off.

Well, here’s the facts. Here’s the facts: the last National Government transferred, at market rates, houses owned by Housing New Zealand to accessible properties. Guess what? They were transferred on the basis that they were social houses and remain social houses. Guess what? The people who live in those houses are largely the same now as they were when they were owned by the Government. Here’s the difference: unlike the socialists opposite, who care about who owns things, on this side of the House, we are agnostic as to ownership; we care about the tenants and the services that they are receiving. The Labour Opposition can cry crocodile tears about State and social housing and pretend that the private sector is the enemy of community housing; we know, on this side of the House, the truth is the opposite.

The final thing I’ll say in rebuttal to Mr McAnulty is he says, “We house people.”—“We house people.”, he says. Well, here are the facts: social housing wait-lists quadrupled to 25,000 families. The New Zealand Government, as of today, spends a million dollars a day housing people in emergency housing motels. There are 3,000 families living there now. The number of people living in cars quadrupled.

So, quite to the contrary of what Mr McAnulty says, the last Government’s record on social housing, as it was on housing more generally, is utterly shameful. We are sorting this dreadful situation out, and the Kāinga Ora report is just the start of that process.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. Well, it’s Groundhog Day today and history is repeating itself, because before us we have another National-led Government trying to create the social licence to sell off tens of thousands of public houses that are owned by the people—a move straight out of the playbook of John Key and Bill English’s National-led Government. In the past in Aotearoa, in the face of housing insecurity, when our people returned from war, when our cities were controlled by urban slumlords who had people living in their own filth in our cities, the Government made a conscious decision to build public housing at scale because they knew that public housing is a way that we can ensure people have secure housing, affordable housing, and relative protections from market forces. We’ve made that decision before, and we can make that decision again.

In fact, I learnt recently that if we had the same amount of State housing that we had in 1991, we would have enough public housing to clear the public housing wait-list and have an additional 10,000 houses in our country. That is to highlight the fact that these are political decisions that our leaders are making to keep people in a state of housing insecurity. Public housing is as essential as public education, public schooling, public transport, public healthcare. Aotearoa is in the midst of a housing crisis, and what we need is a Government that backs Kāinga Ora to tackle the housing crisis, not a Government attempting to micromanage every single thing that Kāinga Ora does.

Public housing has become a safe haven for young families, seniors, disabled people, and those living with complex needs, because when housing is treated as a public good, it can provide a stable home for those people to live without fear of discrimination, without fear of unfair evictions, without fear of unforeseen rent increases. We should be building thousands of new public homes now and confirming ongoing funding for those community housing providers that the Minister was just talking about so that they can continue to build with certainty around sustainability of funding. How can you expect community housing providers, if anybody, to build more housing when their funding doesn’t even extend between 2025? That is why thousands of build projects are being cancelled and delayed across the country. Desperately needed homes in urban centres and in the regions are being cancelled because this Government does not have the courage to actually face the housing crisis.

I want to repeat that public housing is important. We need to stop trying to micromanage Kāinga Ora and get out of their way and actually allow them to build the housing that our people desperately need. We need to see and treat public housing as the public good that it is and actually look beyond financial viability. I hate to break it to the other side of the House, but some things are more important than turning a profit, such as making sure that people have a stable roof over their head, being able to pay the rent, being able to continue to send your kids to school in the same neighbourhood that they’ve grown up in—not displacing and gentrifying our communities by only building houses that rich people and property investors can afford.

Well, thank you very much, Madam Speaker. I’ve got to say, I was curious when I saw that this debate had been asked for by the Labour Party. I couldn’t work it out. And then I watched Kieran McAnulty’s demeanour and his attempt at faux crescendos rising up and down in his body position, and I thought: that guy wants to be leader. That’s why he did it. Unfortunately, there are some more important issues at play.

There is, at base, the fundamental fact that we have a country which is one of the most sparsely populated on the planet. We have more room, more places for people to live, a better climate, a better place for people to live than perhaps any other place on Earth. We are so lucky. And yet somehow, through decades of policy neglect, we have made it too hard to build a house—too hard to get the resource consent, too hard to fund and finance the infrastructure, too hard to get the building materials, and too hard to get the building consent. As a result, there’s a shortage—there’s a shortage of homes. I think that is in large part why the Government changed in 2017 and why Labour were elected. And here’s the thing: they made an enormous mistake in that they truly believed that if they could reach back to their heritage—pictures of Peter Fraser, the then Labour Prime Minister, carrying the table through the first State house—if only they could go back to that. And we actually just heard it from the Greens, “If only we could go back to that.”

💬 Glen Bennett: Wrong Prime Minister.

Then, all of a sudden they believed—and he said it’s the wrong Prime Minister. He’s right, it was Michael Joseph Savage. But none the less—Labour very focused on their history but not focused on the results today. None the less, the Labour Government believed that if only the Government built the houses then the problem would be solved. The issue was they didn’t solve the problem with infrastructure funding and financing. They didn’t solve the problem with resource management law and make it faster to get a consent. They didn’t solve the problem with building materials or building consents or the shortage of builders. Amazingly, they managed to make it worse.

They put all the money into Kāinga Ora (KO). They gave them billions of dollars. But were they faster? No. It took them 58 months from go to woe to build a house, on average. Now, you put that in perspective. Noah took an estimated 55 years to build the ark. So I’ll grant that Kāinga Ora were faster than Noah, but Kāinga Ora, unfortunately, were not saving humanity. Far from it. Not only were they terrible as a builder, so inefficient that they are losing half a billion dollars a year—you know, every day, today, Kāinga Ora will lose $1.5 million dollars. And, you know, I heard the Labour Party accusing this Government of running the country like a business. My thought was: how would they know? You know, they ran Kāinga Ora into the ground. They say they care about community housing, but they can’t make the numbers add up. Not only that, Kāinga Ora were horrific as a neighbour to all those people who were too scared to call the police because the Kāinga Ora neighbours next door might do something to them and they weren’t going to get kicked out by KO, whose policy was sustaining tenancies. They weren’t that good as a landlord either.

Altogether, we had a Labour Government that put everything into Kāinga Ora—terrible as a landlord, terrible as a neighbour, terrible as a builder, so inefficient that they lost half a billion a year. And even when they tried to build affordable housing, they were so inefficient they actually pushed the price of housing up. The great shame of it is not that we’ve lost all that money, not all the mismanagement; the great shame of it is that after six years of that Labour Government, New Zealanders are more short of housing than at any given time.

So what are we going to do about it? We’re going to stop obsessing about State houses. People just need houses; people need a warm, dry roof over their head. We’re going to make it easier to build them, whether you’re the State or not. We’re going to fix the resource management law. We’re going to do city and regional deals to coordinate infrastructure funding with city planning. We’re going to do infrastructure funding and financing so the pipes and the roads and the bus stops show up when you build new homes. And we’re going to make it easier to bring in the building materials that the rest of the world uses at lower costs, so we can build homes more efficiently. Then, and only then, will New Zealanders finally be able to realise the dream of New Zealand. This beautiful, open space with a mild climate really will have a place for everybody. That’s the dream, not Labour’s ideological obsession over failed State delivery.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Like the previous speaker, I was staggered to see this request for this debate, and also staggered by what I thought was the presentation of an alternative reality there, because, actually, you don’t have to look too hard to undermine Kāinga Ora (KO), which is what we on this side of the House were being accused of doing. Actually, you don’t have to look very hard. You look at the financial track record, and that doesn’t look particularly spectacular. You look at the cost of building houses that they were doing, and that doesn’t look particularly spectacular. If you look at their record as a neighbour, that doesn’t look very good either. So, it’s not particularly hard to undermine KO, which we were being accused of, because they simply are not performing.

This really is what that report by Sir Bill English and others was all about. I thought that Kieran McAnulty, in starting this debate, also started on the approach that they’re saying, “Let’s shoot the messenger”—let’s shoot the messenger. You look through the report, and I think, actually, it’s a pretty good report. Actually, it’s pretty generous in some places, in saying, “Look, the last Government did try very hard to try and build more houses”, and it acknowledges that. It also says that it was well intentioned in doing that as well. So, I think, actually, it’s a pretty balanced approach. So shooting the messenger, to me, was quite the wrong thing and an unfair thing to do.

Look, well, there are a number of messages which I see in this report. The first of them is the lack of financial discipline. You have to ask the question—I mean, KO, basically, were operating on the basis of saying, “If it costs more for us to deliver houses, we can just go to the Government, we can go to the Government for more money, and they’ll help to bail us out”. Well, I wonder how many other places within the previous Government administration that was being done, not just KO but right across the board. Of course, that has come home to roost.

What that does is that has increased our cost of debt, so our cost of debt now is, what, close to—servicing debt is close to $9 billion. Gosh, we could spend $9 billion and do something else much more useful than paying for debt that’s been run up, and has been grown at such a great rate. Secondly, it’s pushed interest rates up much higher than they were, so everybody that is paying a mortgage, everybody that is paying a debt on a business, they are paying for that profligacy as well. Then, of course, there is the impact that that has on employment and the economy. So these choices, this lack of discipline, is not cost-free, and we are bearing that cost as a nation at the moment.

The report talks about saying that the average KO house costs $35 million—sorry, $35,000. It’s not $35 million—that would be getting a bit excessive. But it costs $35,000 more than the equivalent average that was built by somebody else. So they’re costing more, and we’ve all heard the stories of KO going and outbidding other bidders for land or for buildings. That is profligacy. That is them just saying, “Look, we know we can have more money. All we want to do is we want to build more houses”. That’s a good thing. That’s a good thing to do, but not at any price, not with a blank cheque book, and that’s the approach that they were taking. So they did build more houses, but they were deliberately going out and outbidding other people for doing that.

What we see in the report too is that the expectation is that they will be spending $23 billion more over the next four years—$23 billion more. We heard over the last 24 hours or so that that equates—because most people will look at $23 billion and say, “Well, that sounds like a lot of money, but I can’t quite envisage that”. That is $4,000 for every man, woman, and child in this country. That is the cost of the way that KO was doing business, and that is why something needed to change.

The second thing is that KO became a landlord to be feared, and that was because of their “no consequences” approach to their own tenants. Look, we all heard those stories, and they were appalling. Look, we have in the report here a great quote in the foreword from a social housing tenant: “Having a permanent place to call home changes everything about life.”—absolutely—“It gives stability and helps with your health. You can plan for the future. For me it means I can have my grandkids whenever I want to”.

But I want to talk to you about security, because how can you have security when you have the neighbours from hell and their landlord won’t do something about it, and they didn’t do something about it on the instructions—the explicit instructions—of the previous Government?

I spoke to a KO manager when I was out and about, in fact, in your area, Grant, and what he said—

💬 Grant McCallum: Mighty Northland—mighty Northland.

What he said in the mighty Northland was simply that the change of approach that this Government has taken to that has changed some of those bad tenant behaviours, and that is a great thing. So not only have we got to deal with bad tenant behaviour but we’ve also got to make sure we deal with bad commercial practices.

In the last couple of seconds—we’ve got there—the last thing I want to say is that KO was also a submitter from hell to deal with when it came to district planning, because they brought all their lawyers. It was a horrendous process for the poor communities, and they need to do a much better job than that, too.

Tēnā rā koe, otirā, tēnā rā tātou e te whare. E tū ana au ki te waha i ngā kōrero mō tēnei take, ā, e tū ana mō Te Pāti Māori i tēnei wā.

[Greetings to you and to everyone present in the House. I stand to speak to this matter, and stand to represent Te Pāti Māori right now.]

In this country, our Māori children—our Māori mokopuna—suffer. They have suffered under every Government, and today the suffering continues. All whānau have a right to warm, leak-free, secure homes, yet 30,000 tamariki are hospitalised every year in this country because of substandard housing. Further, over 100,000 people are homeless in Aotearoa and 60 percent of them are Māori.

Tangata whenua should never be homeless in their own land. Regardless, it seems it is this Government’s objective to do exactly that. The detail, the truth, of our people with whom we are displaced and dispossessed, is in the history of this country. We need only reflect on land loss; the Native Schools Act, which displaced tamariki Māori from their whānau and their whenua; and urbanisation which forced Māori into cities, into social housing, and into a cycle that continues today.

I can say that as it is, Māori make up of half of the social housing wait list. It is Māori that make up one-third of those living in damp, overcrowded, and unsafe housing. When we create an environment, a way of life, for people and that continues through legislation, through law, and through Budget to keep them in the same cycles whilst judging and ridiculing them in this House, what message are we sending? Can the people—can our people—really trust this Government?

We know as Te Pāti Māori that we understand our people. We listen to what they ask and we can respond to these calls. Our solution to the historical oppression of our people through housing—or, rather, lack thereof—would be to build papa kāinga [original homes], a cost estimated to be $600 million. I actually live on a papa kāinga housing with my own whenua growing māra [garden] kai and through my whakapapa, which clearly speaks to the privilege that I’m allowed to have.

We would introduce rent controls with higher incomes, end property speculation, and allocate 50 percent of new social housing to Māori—given we make up the majority of those who utilise these services. We want better for our people, for our mokopuna, and this Government threatens our very existence unless we assimilate, conform, and keep ourselves from sharing what they consider our unhelpful comments. No reira, tēnā rā tātou.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m very pleased to have the opportunity to speak in this urgent debate, because I think there are some very serious matters before this House that do require a conversation that goes beyond soundbites and headlines and actually look at some of the facts.

So I would like to start by thanking the people who put their lives into making Kāinga Ora a fantastic organisation that has delivered more State houses in New Zealand’s history than any Government since the 1950s. I’d like to thank those people, from the people who governed to the people that work each and every day to deliver those houses, who in the last 24 hours have been demonised—and, in fact, over the last years by the National Party have been demonised, as have the tenants within our State houses.

There are some things in this review of Kāinga Ora - Homes and Communities that I agree with. Indeed, they recommend the continuation of some of the policies of the previous Government, and in many ways pick up on the 2023 spending, funding, and financing review that our Government instituted back in 2023 to look at the financial sustainability. But there is one thing that you cannot get away from in this report, and that is the elephant in the report: this is nothing more than priming the public up for the fact that (a) next week there will be no new income-related rent subsidy for housing in the Budget, and (2) it is a softening up for once again the sell-off of State houses in New Zealand. These are the two things.

Now, to have a State house or a public house, if you will, or social housing, you require two things: you require someone to build it and the necessary capital. But where the Government and where choices that Governments make come in is what funding is put in in the form of income-related rent subsidy funding; that’s what turns a building into a public house, a State house, or a social house. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s Kāinga Ora or a CHP—community housing provider—that is providing that service. But the fact of the matter is this Government is gearing up New Zealand for the fact they are walking away from the kind of commitment that the Labour-led Government made around housing.

Now, we have Chris Bishop saying that he was presented with a fiscal cliff that they didn’t know about because the bad Labour Government did not fund what he knew he wouldn’t be able to get through a National Party Cabinet. But I absolutely remember putting out a press release during the election saying there is funding for income-related rent subsidy to 2025. The Labour Party, in a costed manifesto commitment that went into the books that we stacked up—our budget that we would have implemented—was committing to an extra 6,000 State houses. This present Government—the National Party—have to own up to the fact that they once again are reverting to type and they are walking away from a commitment to State housing.

This so-called need to sell off 10,000 houses was the result of advice commissioned in December in 2023 by the Minister of Finance after a discussion with her Treasury officials, no doubt about the fact there would be no further funding for income-related rent subsidy, and there are written questions to Kieran McAnulty with the Minister herself telling him this, that she commissioned that advice. And what did we hear from Kāinga Ora when they came to the select committee? That if there was more Government funding to add new State houses, new income-related rent subsidy, they wouldn’t have to sell any off. This was advice prepared for a Government that was gearing up to do what it always does and back away from its commitments.

So the real test of the mettle of this Government is next Thursday and how much new funding there will be into income-related rent subsidy. I will compare that to our record in Government, when each and every year we committed to funding new and additional—and additional is the key word—public houses. And this nonsense that we privileged Kāinga Ora over the CHPs and somehow we only went there—CHPs more than doubled under our Government. The fact of the matter is when you put money in to expand your public housing, both CHPs and Kāinga Ora do it. We do not think it is one or the other. And the evidence is that under our Government, CHPs added 7,255 new places; Kāinga Ora built 7,777. So there is a lot of nonsense, a lot of rhetoric—

The member’s time has expired.

I rise to scaffold the articulate and agile kōrero of my learned colleague and sentinel the Minister of Housing, Christopher Bishop, and to respond, respectfully, to the king of hyperbole from Wairarapa and the Nostradamus of housing from Christchurch, who have demonstrated—demonstrated—some of the sheepish guilt that they must feel—sheepish because some of the lowlights of the last six years by a Government that’s been misguided, and devoting energy and wasteful spending on housing support for needy New Zealanders.

Roll call coming, people: an increase of emergency housing support from under $90,000 a day to over $1 million a day; the moral and social catastrophe of nearly 3,000 kids in emergency housing; an increase of the social housing register from around 5,000 to, now, 25,000 households; an operating deficit at Kāinga Ora (KO) of over a half a billion per annum, estimated to be $720 million by 2026 and 2027—could have built a medical school in Hamilton for that sort of money—decreasing homeownership, particularly among Māori and Pasifika; an extra $170 per week rent increase for New Zealand households—

💬 Carl Bates: Shameful.

Shameful. Revenue at Kāinga Ora getting a lot less than expenses. And debt expected to go to $23 billion. And work in progress growing from $472 million in 2018 to nearly $3 billion in 2028. Rental debt in Kāinga Ora going from $1 million in 2017 to $21 million in 2023. And over 450 people living in Kāinga Ora homes who owe more than $10,000 at the end of 2023. Our previous Government’s track record and track of spending will have Kāinga Ora spend $21.4 billion over the next four years. Every Kiwi—every single Kiwi—would pay $4,000 for that privilege. And, now, even for a real blow, especially for my whanaunga in the Opposition—hopefully the permanent Opposition, if you listen to Matua Shane Jones—over 10,000 extra Māori households on the social housing register in the last six years, and over 1,000 more Māori households living in hotels and motels and places like Ulster Street, Hamilton; Fenton Street, Rotorua; and up and down the motu. If that is not a roll call worth fighting against, what is?

Kāinga Ora houses thousands—tens of thousands, nay—of people in very hard situations—over 70,000 homes in our country. It’s responsible for public assets worth billions, and relevant repairs and maintenance costs. And it’s incumbent upon this Government to ensure that that job is done prudently, that job is done effectively, and that job is done a whole lot better than the previous Government’s attempt to provide social housing for the masses.

And after yesterday’s announcements by the independent review, what have we found out? We have found that KO has a poor understanding of tenant outcomes, with decision making remote from those affected. We have made investments in KO and interventions separate from evidence. Kāinga Ora incentivises higher cost support and creates poverty traps for tenant whānau. KO’s performance has deteriorated, and their ability to maintain and renew assets is at risk. KO’s financial viability is at risk, compounded by limited attention to value for money and apportionment of costs and revenue, making it difficult to have financial sense. Asset procurement is not done transparently nor delivering value for money.

This is absolutely shameful, and we are here to get housing back on track. We need to change the housing system—yes, we do—to be fit for purpose, and we will continue to both support State houses and support other people to provide social housing. There is not one single money tree that’s going to solve all the housing challenges that we face as communities. There’s not one. The recommendations of the independent review are even more pressing—for example, consolidating the Government funding for housing outcomes under the Minister of Housing, my learned sentinel Christopher Bishop, supported by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development; the Ministry of Housing directing Housing and Urban Development to take a social investment approach to social housing; and responsible Ministers to set an expectation that the Kāinga Ora board will have a credible plan to improve financial performance. That’s quite a novel idea for some people in this room, but not for us in this party or this Government.

And, finally, can I add this: the Opposition can deride Sir Bill English. They can put him down. But I attest to his honesty, his integrity, and his absolute genuine empathy for those people who are less well off, and I appreciate his commitment to the ongoing success of all New Zealanders and the provision of this independent review. Tēnā tātou katoa.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. First and foremost, I want to say how proud I am of the work that Kāinga Ora has done across Aotearoa New Zealand: the number of houses that they have built, the people and whānau who they have supported.

When I look at my own backyard, Northcote housing development is one of the best examples of infrastructure development that this country has ever, ever seen. That particular development has a long whakapapa. It started under Helen Clark, it continued under Key, the houses were bult under the Ardern-Hipkins Governments, and here we are today.

When I think about next Thursday, when we hear the Budget, what will we see? But, more importantly, what won’t we see? We won’t see more additional funding for public and State housing.

Last Friday, I went and looked at the 85 new State houses that were opened in the Northcote housing development, part of 1,700 overall. What’s important there is not just that I showed up and showed interest in public housing in our area but, actually, those houses, those apartments that are there were designed and developed and opened for our seniors, our over-65s. Now, that’s important in that development because it works across communities. People have different needs. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to housing.

Let me be clear that in that history of the Northcote housing development, there were no houses built under the last National Government. Zero. In fact, across New Zealand, they ended up with fewer overall State houses than what they started with.

So when this review was conducted and the report put up yesterday, it paves a way for this National Government, once again, to sell off—to sell off—State houses in this country. I’m concerned because we’re still building in Northcote, and I heard a Minister across the way talk about “After the Budget, we’re building houses, we’re building infrastructure, we’re building roads.”, and so on and so forth. Well, not with the Budget that they’re putting up next Thursday. But, most of all, we were already doing that. The Northcote housing development, 1,700 houses, a third of which are public houses; they’ve got new transport connections.

We built a new primary school for the lowest decile on the North Shore of Auckland. We’ve got 150 hospital beds waiting to open because this Government hasn’t funded it. In addition to that, the infrastructure that we built to address the flooding issues in our area, we invested under the Housing Acceleration Fund, and what we saw in the floods last year in Auckland is that that took in the water that Auckland saw, it then drained away the next day. The next suburb along the way was where the person died in Waihou Valley.

Now, anyone in this House can criticise the previous Government on housing—go for gold. But you tell me: where are your examples of success? Where did you build houses? Or are we going back to the 1990s of leaky homes, substandard houses, and one-size-fits-all for every family in this country?

When I look at this report, you know, the context is important. They’ve forgotten the facts in the debate that they’ve put up today, and so it’s important that they actually acknowledge the whole report that’s there; not just the narrative and rhetoric that this Government wants to roll out. All they have wanted to do, pre-election and post-election, is put the boot in to Kāinga Ora.

I finish this speech in the way that I started. I’m proud of the work that Kāinga Ora has done. I’m proud of the houses that they’ve built. When I saw the community engagement team bringing new communities together in Northcote, I’m proud of them—

The time for this debate has expired.

The debate having concluded, the motion lapsed.