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Ian Hassall, the first commissioner for children, said that the first policy change needed for the well-being of children is that of affordable housing.

Similarly, Susan St John stated that unaffordable housing is the single biggest issue affecting children living in poverty. We have just heard that 30% of children are living below the poverty line, and that many parents have to decide whether to pay the rent or buy the groceries each week.

This year we have seen two major research projects completed in Palmerston North; one on Serious Housing Need and another on Homelessness. It has been a shock to discover that so many people are living in appalling conditions.

The Homelessness Report speaks of people living in shop doorways, under the eaves of the Globe Theatre, behind the City Council building, and in clothing bins. One church reports allowing people to shelter in a garage overnight, another of advising homeless people of safe places to sleep rough.

Children who are no longer able to live with their parents are dossing with friends and others, often people who have neither the room nor the resourcs to give these children the stability and material help they need.

People who have come out of mental health and justice facilities find themselves without a roof over their heads nor the means to get one.

Those people on low incomes who have managed to get a place to rent often find themselves sharing it with several desperate relatives and friends.

People sleep in garages and sheds, several to a room, in vans and anywhere there is a space not used by someone else.

At the Housing Advice Centre we talk to people every day who struggle meet their accommodation costs. People are paying well over half their incomes in rent; sometimes more than three quarters of their resources. Although they receive the Accommodation Supplement, they still have to make decisions about which bills they will pay, about how much food they can afford. The A.S. appears to supplement their income, but in reality it is a direct subsidy to landlords' income. It has allowed landlords to rent out often substandard accommodation at exhorbitant rents, and receive taxpayers' money without any checks or questions. This gift to the rich is costing us a billion dollars.

Another concern is the fact that every Housing NZ house is up for sale; and not just to their tenants, they are available on the open market. Investors are buying these houses at a price, on average, $22,000 cheaper than a comparable one privately owned. Landlords then charge full market rentals for these homes, once again gaining a subsidy from the taxpayers while doing so. Eleven thousand of the most attractive state houses have been sold in recent years. This means that there are fewer desirable stand-alone state houses left; just units in ghetto-like areas.

Since 1990 home ownership has dropped from 84% to 70% of people who have this advantage. Owning your own home has become an impossible dream for people on low incomes. Where their parents had options such as capitalising on the family benefit to raise the deposit, and affordable mortgage rates, people now see the prospect as hopeless, as they watch their money disappear into landlords' pockets.

The need to change government policy on housing is urgent. The return to the streets of people with special needs, the minimal rates of benefit payments, the absence of jobs and the dislocation of people as they desperately look for a better lifestyle, all mean that people are poorly housed or not at all. We need affordable, income based rents, a reversal of the running down of Housing NZ stock, financial encouragement for people to own their own homes and an enforceable standard in the quality of rental housing.