Source: New Zealand Parliament
RACHEL BOYACK (Labour—Nelson): Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s the first opportunity I’ve had to take a call on this bill and I want to talk to some of the impacts it’s going to have on my community.
The first comment I want to make is that this bill is a mean-spirited little bill that’s been snuck through the House under the cover of darkness during urgency. It hasn’t had the opportunity to go to select committee, which means that people who are actually affected by this bill haven’t had an opportunity to come to the Parliament to put their views to MPs to ensure that a bill like this actually is fair. Because it’s not fair—it’s not a fair bill.
When I was doing my reading of the bill prior to putting my notes together, I did take a look at the explanatory note. I think it’s worth noting to the members over the other side of the House that this policy was actually introduced in 1992. Who was in Government in 1992? The National Party. And here in the bill, it even reads—I’m just going to read it out—”It was intended to encourage better utilisation of State housing (ie, occupation of empty rooms) and encourage beneficiary [houses], particularly sole parent beneficiaries living in larger State houses, to take on a boarder, or boarders, to offset some of their costs.”
In the context of the nation’s housing crisis, it’s important that we actually look at what will be the unintended consequences of a bill like this. What it will lead to is higher costs for those who have a boarder or people not taking a boarder on in the first place.
Dr Hamish Campbell: Unintended consequences—cumulative effect of 25 percent inflation under your Government.
RACHEL BOYACK: At the moment, the situation we’re facing—I mean, I just want to note, Mr Campbell, you did have an opportunity to take a 10-minute call. It was less than a minute.
Dr Hamish Campbell: No I didn’t.
RACHEL BOYACK: Yes, you did. You had an opportunity to speak for 10 minutes. [Interruption] You’ve obviously got something to say—
ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Order! We don’t want conversation across the House.
RACHEL BOYACK: I know, but he’s heckling me so I’m just responding. But he’s obviously got something to say. It is within the rules to respond to a heckler. He took about a minute; he had nine minutes where he could have said all this, that he’s, you know—so—
Dr Hamish Campbell: It was a split call.
RACHEL BOYACK: Oh, it was a five-minute call. OK, it was a split call. So you took one minute of your five minutes—
Joseph Mooney: Point of order.
RACHEL BOYACK: I withdraw and apologise for getting my timings wrong.
ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Point of order, Joseph Mooney.
Joseph Mooney: No, she just addressed it. She got her timings wrong. It was five minutes, not 10.
RACHEL BOYACK: Basically what I was saying was that he had four minutes that he didn’t use, but instead he’s decided he’s just going to shout at me. If that’s just how you want to behave in the House, it’s up to you.
Hon Member: Tell us about the Nelson Hospital.
RACHEL BOYACK: Just coming back to the bill—oh, I will tell you about Nelson Hospital.
Hon Member: Oh, great announcement!
RACHEL BOYACK: Fewer beds. Fewer beds. Fewer beds. We’ll run out of beds in about five or six years and we’re going to have to come back and build the last building. You cancelled the last building that Nelson needs. It’s a disgrace. So don’t believe the spin that your Ministers have given you because they’re wrong. It’s a disgrace.
Hon Matt Doocey: Whoever the mayor is, he’s happy.
RACHEL BOYACK: Oh look, the mayor had 30 years to get their hospital built and he didn’t.
So anyway, Madam Speaker, I’ll come back to this bill, which is really important for Nelson because we have a policy in Nelson set up by the wonderful people at Nelson Women’s Centre called HomeShare for Her, which runs across the Nelson-Tasman region.
HomeShare for Her. What it does is it matches a woman—normally an older woman who is living in their own home or renting a home and often it’s a larger property—and to take on a boarder. One of the things that we find in Nelson is we do have a growing and ageing population, which is why we need more beds than what National have promised. One of the things is that women are often living in their own homes that might have an extra two or three bedrooms. They want to stay living in their own homes for safety, to help reduce costs, for companionship. So what HomeShare for her has done is it allows a matching process between those women, and then women who are single, who might be working, studying, or not able to afford their own home. So it allows—you know, coming back to the purpose of the original policy—greater utilisation of that home. It’s a great scheme and it’s allowed matching between these women.
What this policy will do for any of those women who are receiving the accommodation supplement because they might still be paying their mortgage and be on superannuation or be living in a rental, that’s going to increase the cost for those women. So it actually has an unintended consequence and has a poor impact—
Steve Abel: I think it’s intended.
RACHEL BOYACK: —on those. What was that, sorry?
Steve Abel: I think it’s intended.
RACHEL BOYACK: Yeah, I think it’s intentional too. And—
ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): I’ll just remind the member again not to engage across the House.
RACHEL BOYACK: Madam Speaker, I understood under the Standing Orders that you can respond to heckles. I think that was all right.
But one of the issues in Nelson as well as we have seen an increase in our homelessness and we’ve seen through the ending of some of our emergency accommodation provision, a growing number of people living on the streets. We’ve also seen, as part of that, unfortunately, a growing number of women living on the streets. One of the things around how women present through homelessness is it’s often a bit different to how men present. Often women will end up sleeping rough on someone’s couch, in a garage, potentially with children. They’re not necessarily sleeping on the street, but the homelessness is still there and present.
That’s one of the things I love about this HomeShare for Her policy that was set up by this group of women was: that it both served the older women who were wanting to get greater utilisation of their home, and then it also supported those women who were on a low income, unable to find a home. What this bill is going to do is add costs to those people. It’s going to add costs to those women and it’s potentially going to disincentivise the number of people living in in those homes.
The other thing that we face in Nelson which is really specific to this bill is we do have a lot of State houses that do have three to four bedrooms, where we have a really high need for one- and two-bedroom properties in Nelson—and that’s shown on the Housing Register. We had begun building those one- and two-bedroom properties. We had got quite a few built, including the one recently finished on Waimea Road which has 29 one-bedroom units in it, which is fantastic
But some of those future properties have been cancelled—those builds. There was one in the inner city that was going to build another 30 or so one-bedroom homes that would have served particularly our older population, our disabled population, very, very well. That build has been cancelled under this Government and so we’re seeing the latest release of information from the Nelson Tasman Housing Trust saw the highest ever housing need from people who are in that space where they might not qualify to go onto the Housing Register, but they do have a housing need in terms of being on a low income. So they’ve seen a real spike in numbers, unfortunately.
When you have a place like Nelson, which is one of the most unaffordable regions in the country after Queenstown, when you compare income against rent and a real squeeze on housing—because we do have a growing number of people choosing to retire into Nelson—what we see is a real lack of access to housing. It is a real issue in Nelson, it has been for some time. The option to have people boarding is a really, really good solution, and it happens a lot in my community. So my biggest concern here is that we’re going to be penalising people on low incomes who have looked to say, “I’m going to take on a boarder.”
The other area where it can impact is those who are taking on like students—they may have a student come to study at Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology, for example—take on a boarder because they might be an elderly person who’s looking to supplement the income on their rental property. Making those kinds of decisions is going to become less attractive to those people, and so it’s going to limit the amount of housing supply we have. Because in a place like Nelson, we need to look at every single opportunity.
There is going to be, if you look at social housing, around 6,200 households across the country have boarders. Those people will have to find around $132 more each week towards their income-related rent. That’s a significant amount of money for people at a time when, alongside the housing crisis, you actually have a cost of living crisis. The 8,200 households who receive the accommodation supplement are going to be affected and 7,000 of those people will have a reduction in support from the Ministry of Social Development.
So this bill should have gone to select committee. To pass it like this when it had actually been put in place during the Budget in 2024 just shows the Government can’t actually line its ducks up properly to actually get a bill into the House at some point last year, put it through to select committee so that those people who are affected, so that the Government members who have been shouting at everyone but not taking lengthy calls—so choosing to shout instead of listen—actually hear the real impact of this bill. And I do not commend it to the House.
