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