Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2)

I move, That the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2) be now read a second time. This is, as members on this side of the House will know, a very important bill. It is, at the very least, symbolic about the very important challenges that New Zealand faces today. On this bill, the Government Administration Committee received 85 submissions, but there have been expressions of support from a large number of people from a number of other quarters as well.

The submissions that the select committee received came from organisations and private individuals from the length and breadth of the country. I would like to thank all those who made submissions on the bill and those who made oral submissions, in particular, and brought their very compelling reasons for support for the bill.

There were many private individuals who took the time to support it, to express their support for it, and to make their valuable comments. The district health boards, the New Zealand Medical Association, and other medical associations have provided expert support for the bill. And I especially want to mention the Paediatric Society of New Zealand for the invaluable data that it included in its exhaustive The Health Status of Children and Young People in New Zealand. Strong support has been provided by local government, social agencies, church groups, and iwi trusts, and then, of course, those very determined campaigners for social justice and the ending of poverty: the Child Poverty Action Group, Community Housing Aotearoa, Housing Call to Action, and the Tenants Protection Association.

Yesterday, the Medical Students for Global Awareness, along with other medical professionals who are strong supporters of the bill, presented me with their expression of support. It was a petition from medical professionals with no fewer than a thousand signatures on it. A public petition supporting the bill, which I tabled today, attracted more than 30,000 signatures.

This is a bill whose time has come, and for which the issues in it need to be seriously addressed. This bill has wide support because the reality is that we have a housing crisis in New Zealand today. And we all know the dimensions of it. We have the worst homelessness rate in the OECD. The Government is today spending $50 million a year shunting homeless families from one motel to another. That budget has blown out by 1,500 percent. The Government is spending 25 times more than it budgeted, and the situation is spiralling out of control.

This bill will help thousands of people. It will change lives and it will save lives. There is a very simple principle behind this bill: no New Zealander should have to live in a house that makes them or their children sick. Every Kiwi child deserves to grow up in a house that is warm, safe, and dry. As a parent, I would not accept anything less for my son; I do not think there is a New Zealand parent who would accept anything less for their children, and this Parliament should not accept anything less for any citizen of New Zealand.

The Children’s Commissioner tells us that 42,000 children a year are turning up to the emergency departments in our hospitals with preventable respiratory conditions. This is what we are trying to fix. That number is intolerable, it is wrong, it can be fixed, and this bill can fix it.

Every rental property should be insulated, should be weathertight, and should have adequate heating. It is not too much to ask. You see, it is not just a problem for the poor. It is any tenant—anybody in a rental property. And here is the thing: there are thousands of landlords who are doing the right thing already and who know that it is the right thing to do as a landlord. We have got a housing crisis that is locking middle New Zealand and families out of homeownership, and that is why what this bill says is so important. It is about getting it right for those who have to rent. This bill is about standing up for those New Zealanders who have to rent.

And so the challenge for the Government is this—and we will see what way it votes tonight. The simple question for the Government is this: whose side is it on? Is it on the side of the slum landlords who do not care about their tenants—push them in, pull them out, put a new one in, and collect the rent—or is it on the side of New Zealanders who have a reasonable expectation that the place they end up renting is going to be safe and healthy for them to do so?

💬 Carmel Sepuloni: Whose side are they on?

And that will be the challenge tonight. Whose side is the Government on?

You see, responsible landlords are telling us that this is a good bill. It will not impose big costs. When you look at the asset that this is about—a house, a private dwelling, a residential dwelling—and the life of that asset, the costs that this bill will impose on those who have not got their properties up to standard yet will be negligible. But they will be costs that will make a difference—make a difference for children, make a difference for adult tenants, and help to save lives.

Andrew King, from the New Zealand Property Investors Federation, called the bill sensible and pragmatic. And, as I said, most landlords are already doing this, because the cost is not high. So the question remains for National: whose side is it on? You see, Nick Smith hides behind the excuse that we cannot insulate homes fast enough. He says this will impose extra cost, but the landlords are telling us this is a reasonable cost to bear if you have not already done the work. You see, the Children’s Commissioner is calling National’s response to the situation shameful and a broken promise. So whose side is it going to be on tonight? Making rentals warm and dry is doable, affordable, and it is the right thing to do.

The select committee considered a number of amendments to this bill, and they are all worthy amendments: making the bill consistent with the Government’s smoke alarm requirements; increasing the transition time for landlords to comply—so compliance within 90 days of the new regulations coming into effect—giving landlords the right to enter a property on at least 24 hours’ notice to make sure things are in order; requiring the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment to create an inspection regime to audit rental properties; specifying more detail on indoor temperatures, moisture, and humidity standards; and increasing the penalty for failure to meet the standards, from $3,000 to $4,000.

As I said before, this bill can make a real difference for thousands of Kiwis. I am very grateful for the support that I have had on this bill, from the many thousands of New Zealanders who have expressed their support and from the many members of this House. I want to particularly thank Peter Dunne from United Future, who has tonight expressed his continuing support for this bill because he knows that this is the right thing to do.

No Government should side with slum landlords in this country. No Government should put the interests of slum landlords over the interests of Kiwi kids. This is a bill that can help Kiwi kids who, at the moment, are in vulnerable, unsafe, unhealthy homes and stop them having to turn up to hospital with their preventable respiratory conditions.

We are in this Parliament to make a difference. We are all in this Parliament to act in the best interests of all New Zealanders, and this is a small, modest, reasonable step that can be taken that ought to make every member of Parliament supporting the bill proud to do so. I urge all MPs—and I urge my colleagues opposite—to do the right thing. Back those New Zealand families who have to rent and back their kids and stop them getting sick any more. It is with great pleasure that I commend the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2) to the House.

There is absolutely no disagreement on this side of the House of the importance of our homes being insulated, of our homes being warm, of our homes being drained, of our homes being of a proper standard. But what the member introducing this bill, Andrew Little, has illustrated is that spin and waffle is no substitute for good law. This bill represents everything that is wrong about the Labour Party and its leadership. This bill is slow and late to the cause, and will actually slow down the legal requirements for insulating homes across New Zealand. It is a sloppy piece of legislation that is poorly drafted and impractical. If passed, it will not result in any—not a single healthier home than we have now. Like so much of Labour Party policy, when you look past the spin, when you look past the mush, they are hollow promises. Let me deal with a number of those issues.

Last year, this Parliament passed amendments to the Residential Tenancies Act. It specifically requires that every one of our 450,000 rental properties be insulated by 1 July 2019. What is the date in this bill? If the member bothered to look at the actual bill, it says that the insulation requirement will come into effect 5 years after it is enacted. That means that Labour is saying it is going to give landlords until the year 2022—3 years longer than what the current law requires in terms of insulation. I say to members opposite: how does that in any way make for healthier homes?

Then I come to the issues that the member claims—and let me say, there are six issues that are listed in respect of regulations that would be required. The regulations under this bill supposedly require methods of heating, ventilation, draught stopping, drainage, and for other standards in respect of ensuring that homes are warm and dry. But here is the problem: here are the existing housing regulations, which are the law of the land right now. Out of those six things, Mr Little, five of them are in the current law. Let me read them to the House from the Housing Improvement Regulations. If you look at clause 14: every home shall have “efficient drainage for the removal of storm water, surface water, and ground water. … Every house will be provided with gutters, downpipes, and drains for the removal of water … every house [will have] adequate space and vents to ensure proper ventilation,” to ensure that every house is free of dampness.” So five out of the six requirements that Mr Little’s bill wants to put in the law are already the law.

But then there is one that is not. There is one, I accept, that is not—that is that the member suggests that Parliament should regulate a minimum indoor temperature for landlords. Think about it. Is it really practical for the Parliament to say to the landlord: “You have got to ensure that your house is at a minimum temperature of 19 degrees.”? Any member of this House with even a tiny fraction of intelligence would know that, actually, whether you close the drapes, whether you turn the heater on, whether you close the windows and doors will affect the temperature. It is impractical and unworkable for the Parliament to say to the landlord: “You’ve got to maintain a minimum temperature.” Members on this side of the House do say that a landlord has got a responsibility to provide heating in a home, and that, again, is already in the regulations.

I am proud of this Government’s record on improving the standards of our rental properties. Do we know that they are improving? I think that most members of this House would expect that the Building Research Association of New Zealand is an independent organisation. For the last 30 years, it has done a survey every 5 years of the standard of our accommodation, and the latest survey shows that over the last 5 years there has been a marked improvement in the quality of our rental accommodation. In fact, it shows—and it sets out in this comprehensive report, which I would be happy to table—that over the period of the last 5 years, we have seen the number of properties that are rented and improved actually improved by a marked 10 percent. This Government is not saying it is good enough. We are wanting to do more, but it is headed in the right direction.

I want to deal specifically with the issue of insulation. Let us compare the record. During the last Labour Government’s 9 years it insulated 35,000 homes—35,000. The first thing we did when we came to Government is we said “The Government needs to get its own house in order, so every one of those 30,000 State houses that we own we are going to get on and insulate straight away.”, and we did so within a period of 2 years. We then brought in the subsidy scheme to rental homes, and do you know how many we have insulated? Over 300,000 homes—300,000 homes—have been insulated under that initiative. Then last year we passed that legislation that requires every home to be insulated by 1 July 2019, and that will insulate a further 180,000. I am happy to go to the electorate on 23 September and say: “Ignore the rhetoric. Compare the record.” There were 35,000 homes insulated under the last Labour Government in 9 years, and 380,000 insulated under this Government and a programme to get that number to 500,000.

The last point I want to make is this: let us be honest about the issues of the standards of our rental accommodation. The issue is not the law; the issue is the enforcement of the law—that is, every one of those slum properties that members opposite and on our side of the House find unacceptable in terms of leaking or moisture or drainage.

💬 Peeni Henare: What are you doing about it?

The members opposite interject and say “What should you do?”. What you should do is enforce the law, and that is why this Government proudly introduced the compliance and investigation unit. Last year we provided it with a budget. There are over 400 cases of prosecutions before the Tenancy Tribunal as a consequence of that law change that our Government made, because it is our view that it is actually the enforcement of the standards that are already in the law that is the key to ensuring that we improve the standards of rental accommodation.

I say again: the issue here is not whether you care. The question here is not whether you understand the connection between healthy homes and our society doing better around all those issues that are being debated. The real issue is whether this bill makes any material difference, and the answer is that it takes us backwards. Why on earth would any member of this House want to not get homes insulated by 1 July 2019 and stretch it out to 2022? The reality is that Andrew Little is a johnny-come-lately. He has not been at the forefront, like on so many issues. On so many issues, this Government has the programmes in place to address the issues even before Mr Little is out of the starting blocks.

He is too busy having a breather to address the issues that New Zealand needs addressed. The right policy around improving the standards of our residential property is in the bill this Parliament passed over 1 year ago; in the enforcement that is now taking place with the new unit within the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment; and also with the further amendments that are proposed in the residential tenancy bill that is now before a select committee. Again, I say that this bill represents everything that is so shallow about the Labour Party and its leader.

If only we could connect that Minister, the Minister for Building and Construction, to every rental property in New Zealand, because in the last 10 minutes he has expelled enough hot air to keep every single family in New Zealand in a rental property warm—every single family. It is a shame that we could not then add additional connections to the people who are sleeping in garages and who are sleeping in cars, because this winter, the Hon Nick Smith, they are cold as a result of your inaction to address housing issues for New Zealanders.

When I was a child, I knew that if we worked hard and saved hard, as adults we would be able to afford to buy a house. It would not be a flash house. It might be a house you had to do up, but it would be a house that you would turn into a home, and you would put a foot and a stake in your community. We had security as we got older and we were able to raise children as part of that community as well. This is the first Government that I have known in my lifetime that is leaving the next generation worse off than we were left. Which member of Parliament comes to this House to make the lives of their children and their grandchildren worse? That is the one legacy that John Key and Bill English will have when they are turfed out of this place—the memory of John Key and the reality of Bill English—in just over 60 days. I cannot wait till 23 September, when the vision and the passion and common sense of Andrew Little, as demonstrated in this bill, will be able to be put into reality with legislation across many portfolios.

It is 2017 and the National Government still says it is acceptable for children in our country to live in cold, damp homes—cold, damp homes that their parents can hardly afford to rent. Well, on this side of the House,—and thank you, also, to the support of Peter Dunne from United Future—we say it is unacceptable. Children are dying in our country from diseases that could be prevented. How can that be right, Mr Doocey? How can that be right, Barbara Kuriger? How can it be right that we have children going into hospital and dying from conditions that are preventable—preventable by actions that are delivered by this bill? It is not acceptable, and your names will be alongside opposing this bill for ever. You will put your name alongside opposition to this bill because of some petty party politics, instead of thinking about how important our children and our elderly, particularly, are—people who are vulnerable when they are living in cold, damp houses.

At the Government Administration Committee we heard a lot of submissions. They were all supportive. I want to say to Kris Faafoi that some secondary students who came from his electorate of Mana in support of this bill were some of the most impressive that I have ever seen at a select committee. They were actually from a high-income area—they told us that. Then they said: “We’re here to support this bill—not for ourselves. We live in warm, dry houses, but we know people who live 10 minutes down the road who are in a low-income area and who are in cold, damp houses, and we want them to live in warm, dry houses like we do.”

That is the spirit of New Zealanders that I love so much—that if we are doing all right we want other people to do all right as well. We do not want to see people who are doing poorly. Children who get sick, children who end up having medical treatment or being in hospital, kids who miss school because they are sick—all these things affect their outcomes as adults, and here is a chance to really make a difference. Here is a chance to make a positive contribution not just to the literal lives today of those children but to their future. We can make it better for them.

So we heard the submissions, and a lot of people gave us very constructive amendments to this bill. The select committee originally agreed that we would change the bill; we would put in those amendments. We agreed unanimously that we would change those amendments, and then on the very last day the National members said: “No, we’re not going to do that.” Mr Doocey will recall my surprise at the changed position. I usually take a member at her or his word when they give a commitment; I am learning not to do that so often now with National Party MPs. It is disappointing, because even if you disagree you should be able to take people at their word, in my view. So we ended up writing the amendments and putting them separately. We have got returned to this House a bill with amendments prepared that improve the bill and that could make a difference.

Nick Smith said this will take us back in time. When Nick Smith introduced the “new” insulation standards, he lowered the standard of insulation required in New Zealand homes to 1970s standards. He has got a bit of a pattern in this regard. It is like when he changed the water quality standards to say that we are now going to have swimmable water, but the new standard is wadeable, and it applies only to 15 percent of the waterways in our country. So 15 percent of 100 percent is going to be of lower quality than we have ever had in water in New Zealand before, in the same way as the insulation standards currently required are lower than we have ever had in New Zealand before.

This bill is not the answer to all our housing problems, nor was it ever intended to be. Andrew Little made that very clear when he introduced this legislation. This goes alongside other measures to fix the housing issue—for example, stopping overseas residents buying New Zealand homes. Let us house New Zealanders first.

💬 Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Stick to the bill.

Instead of making money out of houses—

💬 Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Come back to the bill.

—we should be making homes out of houses. It goes alongside the winter energy payment, so that we would give people on superannuation and on benefits additional cash to help them pay for their higher power bill in winter. Thirty thousand people signed an open letter in support of Andrew Little’s bill, which we are debating now—30,000 people. That is in addition to the 85 submissions overwhelmingly in support that we had at the select committee. New Zealanders want this change—not only New Zealanders who live in cold, damp houses but New Zealanders like the secondary school students I mentioned earlier who came to our select committee so strongly supportive of this bill, not for themselves but for other secondary school students who live down the road.

I just want to ask the National Party members: what is wrong with trying to give all New Zealanders an opportunity to live in a warm, dry home? We know the health outcomes are improved dramatically if that is the situation they live in. We know, as a result of that, that our health bill is lower. We know, as a result of that, that their overall health outcomes will be better. If you get rheumatic fever as a child you are likely to end up with a heart murmur, you are likely to have atrial fibrillation as a young adult, and that could affect you negatively for your entire life. Why would we want to do that? Why would we not want to do every single thing we can to make healthier homes for people so that the children and the elderly, particularly, who live in those homes have healthier outcomes? I do not understand how the National Party members and ACT can say “We will reject this.”, having heard from the select committee that we have made all these amendments after listening to the submitters. We made the bill better. The vision in it was good, the passion behind it was good, the common-sense approach to saying “If you’ve got a cold, damp house, how do we make it warmer and drier?”—the common-sense approach was excellent. We have made a very good bill even better.

But the National Party members’ petty political point-scoring means that children in New Zealand will die because they are living in cold, damp houses. I do not understand why any member would come to Parliament to make the lives of children worse than our lives were. That is what the opposition to this bill is doing. We have a chance to give people better health outcomes, better education outcomes, better employment outcomes. This is the time to do it. Make a stand against the petty political point-scoring of your party, Mr Doocey. Make a stand for young children in New Zealand. Say that you want them to all live in a warm, dry home in the same way as our families do. This is the opportunity. We can improve it further in the Committee stage, but we have to pass it at this stage.

That speech was from Ruth Dyson, a member of Parliament and a Minister in the last Labour Government, which oversaw fewer than 50,000 houses insulated. Yet we get the lecture, when we have insulated 300,000 to date, and will go on to insulate another 200,000 in the coming couple of years. There is an old saying in rugby, “Look at the scoreboard”, and the scoreboard never lies.

I want to do something very unique tonight: I actually want to talk about the bill. We are in the second reading, so what I want to talk about is this bill going to the Government Administration Committee—some of the submissions that we heard, some of the debates that we had, and some of the issues that we identified and discussed that have led to this bill coming back to this House with the National Party not supporting it.

Can I first just talk about the submission process. We had 85 substantive submissions on the bill. Interestingly enough, we had 7,200 standard form submissions. What a standard form submission is is an auto-fill submission, where the submissions were filled automatically. These were sent to Labour Party offices from the Labour website. So what the committee looked at was identifying any of those that were unique and distinct. We identified that they were unique and distinct because the submission had additional text to it. We were able to identify 890 submitters. Out of those 890 submitters we heard 31 oral submissions. There was a fair range of submissions, as we have heard tonight, from local authorities, NGOs, church groups, unions, and student groups. I would just like to acknowledge the Hon Ruth Dyson for her chairpersonship through the select committee process, as well as the very able deputy chair, Paul Foster-Bell, for his leadership as deputy chair in steering this bill through the select committee process.

What I want to start with in my call tonight is talking about the initial briefing that we had from the advisers once this bill was passed from the first reading and went to the select committee. One of the key issues that came out as we digested this bill and got to the detail of it, one of the debates, was how much is already in existing Acts or existing amended Acts. When you look at the Residential Tenancies Act of 1986, currently the Act places a general obligation on landlords to maintain a reasonable state of cleanliness and repair. The Residential Tenancies Amendment Act 2016 requires landlords to ensure adequate insulation, as well as smoke alarms. This date has been identified for income-related rents as last year, actually—July 2016. So thanks to an Act passed by this National Government, renters in income-related rental properties have that standard already. For other, non-income related rental properties the standard will come into force on 1 July 2019.

But let us look at some of the other Acts that place requirements on landlords. Down here it says they have to comply with all requirements in respect of buildings, health and safety, and others under the enactment. So let us look at the Housing Improvement Regulations. Every living room should have an approved form of heating. Every bathroom should have one external window that can open and a means of ventilation. Every room must have an openable external window, natural light, and ventilation. I think we can already tick heating off, and ventilation. Every house must have efficient drainage. Every house should be provided with gutters and downpipes. Under every part of every house where the floor is timber there should be adequate space for vents for the protection from damp and decay. Every house must be free from dampness. So I suppose we can tick off, there, dampness—this is under the Housing Improvement Regulations. The materials of which each house is to be constructed must be sound, durable, and weatherproof where subject to the effects of the weather—so that is the one we can tick off under draughts. So when you look at this bill, the six clear standards it outlines—heating, insulation, ventilation, draughts, and drainage—are already covered by existing Acts, amended Acts, and regulations.

But there is one—there is one that has not been touched here, which talks about indoor temperatures. I think that was an interesting policy debate we got into on the select committee. We heard from the advisers about what would be an adequate indoor temperature. We looked at World Health Organization standards—18 degrees for fit adults; vulnerable and children at 21 degrees, as well. But what we landed on was that this is ultimately determined by tenant behaviour, yet this bill legislates or regulates the landlord, and not for tenant behaviour. The bill has a requirement for the landlord to comply with this bill, and not a corresponding requirement for tenants. What we also know is that tenants have a right to the quiet enjoyment of their property. Yet are we saying under this legislation that compliance will open up their property for people to come in at any time to test the indoor temperature? I do not think this has been thought through. What was also interesting is that this bill sets a fine of $3,000, and, interestingly enough, currently the fine for not meeting these is $4,000. So under this proposed bill the fine actually is reduced. So, as clearly outlined by the Hon Nick Smith, this bill is regressive.

But let us not just think of the advisers. Let us take the word of some of the submitters. They also talked about the standards for indoor temperature. They submitted that “Attempting to regulate the indoor temperature of a given property for a given tenant will be nearly impossible regardless of how standards are designed.” Many submitters also identified in the bill, about the outcome, that there was potential for wide disagreement around the standards, and an inability to land on agreement to the standards. What was clear from the submission process is there actually appears to be a lack of education about what currently is in the law and what currently is under regulation. I think we can use that as a platform on how we educate and how we understand why we have got to this position, and I think the Hon Nick Smith clearly outlined the Government’s response to compliance.

Before I finish, I just want to talk quickly about one issue that came up, as well, around the cost. We know the compliance could be costed at about $100 million, and there is always a fear that that cost will then be translated and transferred to the renter. I was at a Christchurch candidates’ evening last week for Christchurch East—the member of Parliament Poto Williams; the candidate for Wigram, David Hiatt; and I myself was there for National. That was in a room with 60 young people. It was an event organised for Pacific young people. A majority of them were trainee medical staff. That was their biggest concern. We did not raise that as a panel. The young people raised that as a panel—that they were not convinced that an unintended consequence of this bill would not then be the removal of some rental properties or the increase in price to renters.

Ultimately, this bill is already in law. There are some policy issues that clearly no one could answer, and there are clearly some unintended consequences, which is why this bill should not be passed.

Oh, Good Lord! I am so glad that is over.

💬 Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: No. It is just the dear old Deputy Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. So it really is a bit rich listening to that member, Matt Doocey, lecture this House on the regulations on housing standards. I mean, this Government, of which he is a part, has had 9 years to enforce exactly those regulations, 9 years to put standards around those regulations so people know what it is that they have to do in order to meet them, and 9 years to enforce those regulations, so we do not have—what—600,000 homes in this country still uninsulated, still damp, and still causing their families sickness.

And it is “Poto Williams”, Mr Doocey—it is “Poto Williams”. It is not that hard to say.

We have had this debate in this House about housing standards for years and years. Last year we had that ridiculous bill from Nick Smith, who also decided to stand up here and lecture us all about it. It was a bill that put in place fire alarms—that is fine—and a 1978 standard of home insulation for—

💬 Peeni Henare: When?

1978. I was 8 years old in 1978—yes, I am that old.

💬 Peeni Henare: 1978—Seymour wasn’t born.

Ha, ha! It was a 1978 standard of home insulation for homes that families are having to live in in 2017. I mean, it was an utter, utter disgrace. At the time that Nick Smith’s bill was going through the Social Services Committee, we had submission after submission from those involved in health and those involved in child advocacy saying: “This is wrong. This bill is wrong, because it will not save these children’s lives.” The Children’s Commissioner came to that select committee, and he said that Nick Smith’s 1978 standard was a broken promise to New Zealand’s children—a broken promise to New Zealand’s children. The Government had said that it would set the standard not only so that children’s lives would be saved but so that all children would have a decent, healthy standard of living in these rental homes. The Government, National, broke that promise.

I am here to support Andrew Little’s bill because Andrew Little’s bill restores some faith in the promise that New Zealand homes can be and should be insulated to a standard that protects those children, stops them from getting so sick that there are 40,000 hospitalisations every year, and protects those up to 15 children who will die every year because the homes that they live in are cold and damp and make them sick one time too many. That is what the Children’s Commissioner told us at the time that Nick Smith’s bill was going through select committee—that up to 15 children a year die because of illnesses that are caused by cold, damp homes.

We know—and my colleague Ruth Dyson has clearly articulated this as well this evening—how critical it is to every single family in this country that they have a home that is warm and dry and safe. I am very pleased that we are supporting Andrew Little’s bill, because it goes a long way towards putting in those standards to make that possible.

I would also note from the speech of that member who just spoke before me, when he was talking about those regulations and why they were not so necessary, that one of the biggest issues that was raised at the Government Administration Committee on Andrew Little’s bill was the fact that tenants were unable to enforce the existing regulations. They could not enforce them because access to the Tenancy Tribunal was too difficult, because access to the information about what the standards were and whether or not they were met was too difficult, and for fear that raising any issue around the standard of their housing would lead to them being evicted. They have no legal protection. Remember, a tenant has zero legal protection if they complain to a landlord, because a landlord can make up a reason for kicking them out and kick them out. They may try to take a case at the tribunal, but that does not mean that they have got anywhere to live.

So these tenants are unable to enforce even the poor standards that have been put in place, and that is an issue that this Government has known about now for a decade, nearly, and has still refused to do anything about it. So do not stand here and lecture us about those standards. We actually need real law that makes it very clear to landlords as to what their obligations are, and that means the standards that are set are set at a 2017 standard and not a 1978 one, that the regulations are clear about how those standards can be tested to ensure that they are met, and that there are good enforcement and protected rights for tenants, so that they are able to enforce those rights, even in a market where renting is very expensive and demand is high.

It is absolutely critical that this bill proceeds, because families’ health and children’s lives are dependent on it. So while we have talked in political terms about housing in this House, and we do so nearly every day—and that is part of the political discourse and the argument we have here—there are times when we need to just focus on what is important. What is important is that kids are living in homes that make them sick and sometimes lead some to die. We can fix that. We can help fix that tonight by getting this bill through to the next stage. I would strongly urge members to think first about those families and their kids. Thank you.

Depending on where this bill goes, I will be interested to see the Supplementary Order Paper from that member, Metiria Turei, that allows landlords to exempt themselves from the law if they decide it, you know, sort of takes their fancy. I also notice around the whole talk of children and unhealthy homes that this is from a political party that supports the increase of smoke in homes through smoking cannabis—so I find, you know, contradictions, without even getting on to other sorts of moral issues, where children are just gotten rid of because it is inconvenient. But, you know, let us just not let that get in the way.

Can I acknowledge the member Andrew Little, who has put this bill forward. I think the intention is correct, and I think, listening to the various speeches in the House tonight, that there is no difference in the sense of the intention to try to do what is best to improve the housing quality. The problem is that good sentiments alone make bad law, and this is a very bad piece of proposed law—least of all is the fact that it actually takes up about a page and a half of paper. When you listen to everyone who has been standing up tonight, particularly those in support of it, you would think that this was some comprehensive approach to housing that would be reflected in the paperwork itself—and particularly when you listen to several members of the Opposition talking about standards.

I have flicked through these, I think, 900 words multiple times. There are no standards. This is a lazy member’s bill. I just want to point out that it is actually not so much an ad hominem on Andrew Little, but we are having a bit of a habit coming into this House of members’ bills, regardless of political sides, actually, that sort of expect that a little cursory bit of work should then be flicked on to a select committee to try to make substantive changes. That is lazy law-making, and this is a perfect example of it. So the standards are but sentiments—but sentiments.

It has been asked that officials go away and come up with a whole array of standards to do with heating, installation, indoor temperature, ventilation, draft stopping, and drainage. It was noted by my colleague Nick Smith, earlier on, that a number of those are already addressed in law and in regulations. One standard that is not addressed is around, of course, the indoor temperature. Maybe it is the geography background that I have. Temperatures in Invercargill are slightly different from what they are in Inglewood and slightly different from what they are in Rotorua and, perhaps, in Whangarei or, where some of my family are initially from, in Tangiterōria. How are we going to create regulations that are manageable for something like this?

I think about where I live in Auckland—effectively, in a dell. Drainage is a nightmare. I know that the council itself has spent millions and millions of dollars trying to fix the drainage. Regardless of that spend there are still major drainage problems. In fact, I and most of my neighbours almost got flooded the other day. How is that going to be written up into standards in a way that is feasible and applicable? And I think that for responsible lawmakers—and I would like to think of myself as one—I would like some greater sense of direction from the member of how these standards might look before I and others are asked to vote on it. That is not to take away from officials. We trust them in a whole range of areas to go away and write up regulations and to write up standards, but, by and large, good legal process provides some indication of where this is going to go. And I have just given two examples—again, around indoor temperature and around drainage—that I think begin to indicate some of complexities that are at work here.

Then we step into what is, effectively, a heavy-handed approach, and I just want to use indoor temperatures. We just have to step back for a second and imagine how this is going to look. Basically, we are saying there is going to be an inspectorate—well, I assume there is going to be an inspectorate—of people walking around into homes measuring temperatures. How on earth is that going to practically work if you forget to close the window and you all of a sudden drop under whatever the temperature is? What is going to happen, and are there appeal rights? You will come back again? Who is going to pay for that? So it is incredibly impracticable, right from the start.

It also is one of those occasions where—we heard it, unfortunately, from Andrew Little when he started—this sort of gets mired, ultimately, in sort of a rhetoric, a moralising, if you will. He started by saying: “Which side will you choose?”. Which side will you choose? Well, that fits very much into, I would argue, a progressive left-wing mentality because, actually, I choose both sides. I choose both sides in this, because actually this is not the simple, classic progressive stuff. It is so tiresome really, but it is the sense of every landlord is evil and every tenant is good, or on the reciprocal, in corollary, every tenant is bad and every landlord is good. That is simplistic nonsense. In fact, most tenants are fantastic. OK, I have been a tenant most of my life. I hope, with my landlord speaking, they will say the same to me.

Most landlords are good people, but listening to the rhetoric here tonight, you would think every person who is a landlord is a slum landlord, and that they could not give a tinker’s cuss about their landlords, because that is the argument that is required for people who want us to choose sides. But I choose both. I choose a Government that has actually worked to ensure that tenants are able to work with landlords to have homes that do have insulation. No one on the Opposition tonight has spoken about the agreement between National and the Greens, when we came to power in 2008, to insulate all of the State homes. I have heard nothing from the Opposition tonight about the Warm Up New Zealand: Healthy Homes programme through the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority, to enable landlords to take responsibility, along with Crown funds, to actually insulate their homes. There is none of that “both sides” cooperation. No, we have fallen back to the usual boring, jejune, even germane, rhetoric.

💬 Kris Faafoi: Oh my God; we’ve got 3 minutes of more of this drivel to go.

I know. I will give you a dictionary afterwards so you can understand some of those basic words.

💬 Dr Megan Woods: Oh my God, how patronising.

So, basically—oh yes, patronising. That is right. Once again, it is all about sides—good and bad.

💬 Dr Megan Woods: Come on, you can do 10 minutes. Come on!

I could actually. I could probably switch into Latin for you.

So the ultimate element we have got here is simple sides: bad landlords and good tenants, and, actually, most are working and cooperating together. We also have heard very clearly that all the standards the Government has put into place, and actually—

💬 Kris Faafoi: 2 minutes 40 to go.

Thank you very much. Are you sure you do not want to give me another minute?

💬 Dr Megan Woods: Yep! Positive!

💬 Kris Faafoi: Sit down!

No, not at all. So there is already a number of great initiatives that the Government has put in. We have already touched on a couple of those. There is also the whole changes that are coming through in a bill that the Government has at the moment, which is addressing this step by step—enabling, particularly, the landlords to come on board. What is proposed here, other than being incredibly light and without substance, is a heavy-handed approach that is demanding of landlords, for no other reason—and of course, what is going to happen? It does not take a genius. I suggest even some on the other side—

💬 Kris Faafoi: No, you’re not one. That’s right. You’re no genius!

I have 2 minutes to go. No, I am definitely not a genius; usually geniuses are mad. There is a cost to this, and all costs come with consequences. I for one can see that, actually, we will see homes close. I have seen that in my own electorate. Look, rightly, those places closed, which is fantastic. Actually, they should be closed down, but the consequence of that, which the Opposition ignores, is that when they close, there is therefore a change in supply, and this piece of legislation is going to facilitate that further. And, of course, we would have had more moralising from the other side about what should be done, because, of course, coming back to the usual element, the Opposition feel that only it knows what is best. Everyone else is wrong; only it is right.

The irony of all of this, coming right back to the start, is a page and a half of supposed legislation that is then couched in moralising terms, and we are hearing some of it here. We actually have not had a debate tonight from the other side. We have had ad hominems, we have had the usual rhetoric, we have had moralising, shallow attempts, and we have had the playing the “child” card. As I said at the start, if we want to start talking about children, why is it that Opposition parties in this House want to support the likes of cannabis smoking and other drugs in homes, and they moralise about children?

💬 Marama Davidson: Oh my goodness! Really?

Really.

💬 Marama Davidson: Really?

Yeah, really. Because that is a contradiction.

💬 Marama Davidson: Seriously? Those are the children? Really?

Those are the children, yes. Those are the children, because, when you work in the community and voluntary sector, that is where the harm is done. And I think we can be very proud in this Government for actually holding a consistent line, including in my own electorate, when you look at the likes of Glen Innes, where, actually, someone mentioned State houses earlier—2,500 old damp State homes are being transformed, as we speak, into 8,000 new homes; some in the private sector, some in the social sector. What an amazing situation there, and I would just like to point out that this was opposed by the other side.

💬 Kris Faafoi: Sit down. You’ve wasted 10 minutes of my life.

You will get it back.

If the last member who spoke, Simon O’Connor, was ever to become a Minister, I think he should be allocated the “Ministry of Awful Attitudes”, because that is all we heard from him throughout the entirety of his speech. It is those awful attitudes that have resulted in one of the most disappointing approaches to any subject that this Government has pursued. And it is especially disappointing that the Government and the ACT member as well, David Seymour, have blocked this bill from making any real progress through the select committee process. That is in the face of hundreds of submissions, and, yes, we should include the standard form submissions, because they are from real people. And the fact that they have the same—

💬 Simon O’Connor: Really?

Yes. Really, Mr O’Connor, really—real people with good attitudes, as distinct from your awful attitudes. And those people had a right, whether they use a standard form or not, to express their views, and those views are diametrically opposed to National’s attitudes and policies in this area. They have been ignored by National, they have been ignored by Mr O’Connor, and National should be ashamed of itself.

Those people made submissions because, like most people in New Zealand society, whether they rent properties or not, they do want to see an improvement in the quality of rental properties so that they are warm and dry and healthy, by being required to be adequately heated and well ventilated and insulated up to modern-day standards. That is really all this bill is about—nothing fancier than that. Tenants, and the Government itself through the accommodation supplement payments, deserve a product in terms of a liveable tenancy that is fit for purpose. Far, far too many of them these days are not. And the stories about that have been on TV. They have been in the news media many, many times. It proves that it is just the tip of the iceberg, and that this is a huge problem that this Government has not even begun to address. I do not believe for one moment the speeches I heard from Matt Doocey and from the other members opposite, as though the current regulations actually achieve anything in this area. Demonstrably, clearly, and unmistakably they do not. But it does not need to be that way—it does not need to be that way.

We in New Zealand First agree with this bill because it fairly requires landlords to upgrade properties, over a reasonable period of time, to acceptable standards. These are not sentiments, as Mr O’Connor said of them. They are simply good and proper standards that should actually already be required, and we now need regulation to do that, and that is what this bill does.

The bill requires the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment to objectively set minimum standards for both heating and insulation, and there is nothing wrong with a bill requiring that to be done in the future, in an objective way, by a Government department. All of that work can be properly done and brought forward as a result of this bill. I think it is a good way of going about it, rather than us, as MPs, trying to do so comprehensively in a member’s bill. I think it is a very good way of going about it.

All of that is, of course, what is missing in current legislation. It is precisely what the Government failed to do in its residential tenancies legislation. It had the opportunity then to do it. When you look at the arguments that were then put forward by Government members as to why they were not done, they were rather pathetic arguments. They did not amount to any genuine reason why landlords should not, within a reasonable period of time, be required to come up to properly established standards. That is actually all the bill does. In fact, it effectively gives 5 years for that to happen.

I think that would be a very effective way of achieving the objective. It provides landlords with a reasonable period of time to comply. Good landlords would have no difficulty in doing so. Good landlords would be happy to do so. They want to provide a good product, and those who do not should either get out of the market or come up to the standards that are required.

It cannot be overstated how important the need for those standards is, because of the need to drastically improve health outcomes and provide for much better use of energy. By the way, if Mr O’Connor was still here I would point out that those are costs—

💬 Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: No, the member is not allowed to make reference to a person’s presence or otherwise in the House.

I understand—I understand that. I would say to Mr O’Connor that he should look at this as an opportunity for savings, in terms of energy, not as a cost, as he thought it exclusively was. In addition to all of that, of course, this is one of the ways in which a contribution can be made to our Paris climate change commitments.

I would like to also just add this, at this stage. There are already many community organisations and commercial companies that are working for the same objectives. I would like to mention a couple. I recently visited Community Energy Action in Christchurch. That organisation provides free advice for tenants, homeowners, and landlords on heating and insulation. It has a huge storage facility for good quality used drapes and curtains. It provides a repair and alterations service. It also tests properties for heat loss and gives advice on how to make a home warmer and drier.

I also recently visited the opening of Pro Clima, a factory in Auckland, which is going to be providing, in the New Zealand market, for new properties and much better high-tech insulation systems for new homes using advanced membranes and fittings to hermetically seal homes, together with an advanced system for heating. It also provides training for people to install those systems.

All of these new technologies are there. They are cost-effective, they save energy, and they are brilliant when it comes to heating homes and providing for insulation. That applies to both new and existing properties. All of these technologies are arriving—more and more every day. They are the sorts of technologies that landlords would be able to afford, and they would find that it is well worthwhile them doing so, because in doing so they are also improving the value of their properties. Any landlord would be interested in that.

What is actually missing here is genuine Government leadership. The Government could be doing things like, for example, providing some tax breaks for landlords who invest in those systems. It could, for example, allow landlords to write off, for tax, the full amount in any year—the amount incurred in insulating homes and bringing homes up to an adequate standard of heating. Landlords would then get a financial boost as well, and why not? If they are going to invest, why does the Government not encourage them in those sorts of ways?

But, most of all, there does need to be a firm regulatory regime to establish a level playing field and a workable set of effective standards so that all landlords know the level to which they need to provide good insulation and good, healthy, dry, warm homes.

If there was a message for the Government to come out of all this, it is that most people do not think that it is doing nearly enough. After all, for so many people these days, homeownership is out of the question and they are going to end up living for very long terms in rental properties. They need those to be good quality warm, dry properties. The vast majority of New Zealanders do want to see the Government do more, and I am flabbergasted that it is simply not willing to listen to them or to anybody else, and to do a lot more, when it is so easily done. This bill is a good start. The Government should be supporting it, instead of trying to knock it out.

The last speaker, Denis O’Rourke, talked about what the Government does not do. I am not going to talk about what we do do because we have done quite a bit in this field, interestingly. What I want to talk about is why we have some challenges in New Zealand around the types of homes we have here. If you look at the history of homes in New Zealand, we have built homes out of wood, with very little inside them. In other words, if you live in a house like mine, there is a bit of scrim stuck on a bit of wood inside the house, and it is a wooden house, with single pane windows. They give all sorts of trouble. The reason they give trouble is that we have got such a varied climate in New Zealand.

If you look at housing stocks around the rest of the world, not many places have used wood to build their houses. So we have some challenges in New Zealand around our housing stock, which many other countries do not have. When the houses get to an age—many of our wooden houses are in excess of 100 years old. Many of the rental houses we are talking about, in the course of this bill, are over 100 years old. When they get to that stage, it is extremely difficult—particularly if they are low to the ground, with a very small ceiling area—to change the structure of those houses and the nature of them.

We do have some significant challenges in New Zealand around the type of housing stock that we have historically had here. I think if you look at my own electorate, you get to a place like Taumarunui, where you have extremes of temperature. It is extremely cold in the winter and sometimes it is extraordinarily hot in the summer. There are a lot of very old wooden houses because Taumarunui is one of those very early settled places in New Zealand. It is extremely difficult to get those houses and bring them up to scratch today.

So one of the challenges we have—

💬 Denis O’Rourke: Look at the new technologies. Has the member done that?

Yes, Christchurch—the great technology they used in Christchurch was pretty simple. If we could do that in Taumarunui it would solve all our problems. The issue we have got with houses in a place like that is how we bring them up to the standard, and bring them up to the standard at a rate that both the landlords can afford to do it at, and that the tenants can then afford to rent them at, at the same time. I am not making excuses for it. That is just how we are in New Zealand, and it is different from the rest of the world. So there are some very big challenges in that area.

So what then tends to happen, as landlords do better, is that they sell those houses and upgrade their own stock. So rather than upgrading the house, they upgrade the stock. Sure, upgrading the stock achieves the same thing, but they sell those houses to first-home buyers, and so then the first-home buyers have got, effectively, the same problem that the landlord had initially. If you looked at the insulation programme that we have had for the last 6 years running in New Zealand, some of those houses have been the beneficiaries of that and it has done a great job for New Zealand. So this is a vexing challenge for us in New Zealand—much more difficult, I think, than almost any other country in the world faces, and that is for the reasons I have outlined.

If you think about the context of this bill, there is a proposal in this bill that there will be an inspectorate put in place to inspect those houses, and one of the problems that we have with all Government inspectorates is that they cost a whole lot of money. If you think about the proposal that may be in place for this—may be, because we do not know, and I will get on to that in a minute. The proposal that may be in place to administer this bill could cost as much as $225 a house a year. I do not know of any landlord who is going to carry that cost without passing it on, so straight away we have this large cost passed on to the tenants of those houses.

I think the other issue that we have got with these inspectorates—or with publicly owned, Government owned, or council-owned housing, for that matter—is that they are never as well run as the privately owned operation. So once you put a regime in place to inspect those houses, they will tend to be let go by the landlords, and that is, effectively, what will happen. I take my own case where the Manawatū District Council had a stock of 207 community houses, which it ran pretty badly, to be fair. It then put those houses into a trust. That trust was able to bring those houses up to speed, and they are very pleasant places to live now. So the community trust, which, effectively, is a community-owned organisation, has brought those houses up to speed, and by insulating them, by rebuilding them to some extent, and by using some money from outside of the system to upgrade those houses, it has done a great job of it.

So I think there are some challenges around the way we structure the ownership of some of these houses. Sure, this bill is designed to deal with tenanted houses, but it is also deals with community housing and deals with Government housing, and all other types of housing that we put together. So it does create some challenges, and I think that the moment that you put an inspectorate in place you have created a bureaucracy, which creates a whole lot of problems of its own.

I want to talk a little bit about the need to have homes be warm and dry, because clearly it is important that we do have warm, dry homes. But, again, as with many members’ bill that come to this House, this bill does not lay out clearly the conditions on which it is anticipated this will be implemented. So there is no real guide for us when we discuss this bill as to how it will be implemented in due course. So, for example, there is a proposal that a house should be set at a certain temperature. There is no way you are going to get a house to run at the same temperature in a place like Taumarunui as you are in a place like Hastings or somewhere else. It is almost impossible to do that. Of course those people who live in those places are going to live in a very different environment and will consequently operate at a very different temperature.

So I think one of the difficulties that we face as a Parliament with members’ bills is that there is no clear guidance as to how it is anticipated that those members’ bills will be implemented; nor is there any clear guidance, nor has there been any clear consultation other than the opportunity to submit to the Government Administration Committee as to what impact that might have on the total housing market, on the tenancy agreements, or on the rental property market throughout New Zealand. I think that is quite a challenge for this House as well.

We have seen a number of members’ bills coming into Parliament in recent times where the ability of the community to comment on the bill as it gets made up has a very big impact on what happens when the bill gets here, because suddenly they are panicked into thinking: “Well, this is going to be implemented and how’s it going to be implemented.” Of course no one really knows how it is going to be implemented when it comes to the House, and so I think these members’ bills often create some very interesting—or difficult, I guess—challenges for Parliament, but they also create some very difficult challenges for the Government departments, which have to then try to put together a set of regulations around how this might be implemented.

So whilst I congratulate the member, Andrew Little, on having his bill drawn—and this is the first time I have had a look at this bill because, clearly, I was not part of the select committee process that brought this bill to the House—it does create a whole lot of challenges, I think, which are interesting for us to try to resolve. It creates some pretty big challenges for the Government department that has got to implement the legislation and to get it in place.

As I said, I did not have the opportunity to listen to the submissions or take part in the select committee process, so it is a little difficult to comment on how we got to some of these conclusions that have come back to the Parliament. I think there is merit in a lot of the proposals that come to the House in members’ bills. There is merit in a lot of proposals in this bill. But, as has been said by earlier speakers on this side of the House, many of the issues that are touched on in this bill have already been touched on in the course of Government legislation and things like the Warm Up New Zealand: Healthy Homes initiative, which in my part of New Zealand has made quite a contribution to a large number of houses in a small town like Taumarunui, where there has been help with upgrading house insulation and things like that, so it does a pretty good job.

I can see why a bill like this would come to the House, but I can also see that the Government has done a lot of work on getting some of the issues raised in this bill to the point it has, and I can also see the difficulty in trying to implement a bill like this without having had a very clear pathway and a very good discussion amongst all those people who have gone down the path of implementing the bill. With all that, I am opting to oppose the bill, so thank you.

The Green Party will support the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2) from my colleague Andrew Little. This bill is to amend the Residential Tenancies Act 1986 because the standards are just not good enough. It is quite clear that this Government, which has been in power, which has had the tools available to it to fix the current situation, did not fix the current situation. The standards have not been good enough for far too long, and that is why so many of our rental properties today have been making children sick over and over again and have been responsible for causing annual winter deaths of our people. We need to do better and Andrew Little’s bill, the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2), proposes exactly that.

I want to enforce what my colleague Metiria Turei has said. She said: “How dare the Government lecture us? How dare the Government lecture us that they are doing a good job to fix things?”. It is 2017. You have been in power for 9 years and last year you finally decided to put a bill through Parliament, and it is a stink one. You finally decided to put some standards through, and the standards—

💬 Hon Member: A stink one—what?

Actually, it is a stink one because mould in rental properties is stinky and smelly, and more rental properties have mould than private properties—surprise, surprise. So it is a stink bill that you have put through because the standards that the Minister Nick Smith put through went back to the 1970s. I mean, we all like to go back to the 1970s but not when it comes to making sure our homes are healthy. The standards need to be 2017, not 1978.

I did come to Parliament on an understanding that we would do everything we can. The standard has to be that our people, our children, our elderly people, our citizens can live in rental properties and their health is not at all compromised, and we in Aotearoa New Zealand can afford that. We have enough. We have enough to make sure that our people are adequately housed. We cannot afford to continue with standards that keep making our children sick. We actually cannot afford that. So I do take some offence at the constant raising of the issue from the Government side of the House, where members keep saying: “How will we afford it?”. We cannot afford the current situation, not financially and not morally.

Oh gosh, there are just too many things. We know what is happening: the admission of 42,000 children to hospital with preventable diseases. What country is this? There have been 1,600 deaths caused by inadequate housing. What country is this? The Government has had 9 years to fix this—9 years—and last year it put through a shoddy bill.

Our standards need to be better, and this bill is a good start. Also, the standards need better enforcement. I want to go back to one of the submissions—and it does relate to this bill—on the Government’s bill, where the standards are not good enough. It was for the residential tenancies amendment stuff that the Government put through last year. One of the submissions that will stay with me was from the Sisters of Mercy Wiri, from Sister Anne Hurley, who was very, very clear that the families that she advocates for—when it comes to poor properties and poor rental housing—are afraid of making a noise. They are afraid of taking anything to the Tenancy Tribunal. They are afraid of raising an issue with the landlord. Now do we understand why? Do we here, in this privileged House, understand why? It is too much living on the edge, knowing that you could be kicked out just for raising the issue.

We will be supporting this bill. We need to have standards that save lives and stop sickness, and we need better enforcement of the standards. Standards are nothing if tenants feel afraid to say anything about the mould that is coming through the wall. Come on, Government; come on, this House of Representatives—let us represent. Thank you.

I rise in support of this bill. When the member who introduced this bill, Andrew Little, took the first call on this tonight, he asked a very simple question for members in this House, and it was: “Whose side are you on?”.

It is as simple as that. We have seen spinning on the head of a pin by Government members. First of all, the argument was: “We do not need this bill, because we are doing it anyway.” Then we had: “This is an unsophisticated one and a half pages, which we do not need.” And then, finally, we got to the crux of the matter when we heard from the previous National speaker, Ian McKelvie, and that was: “It is too expensive.”

Well, at what price? Every year, 42,000 children are admitted to hospital because they live in cold, damp, and mouldy houses. We have 15 children a year who die because their houses are not of an adequate standard. On this side of the House, we make no apology for asking people to choose which side they are on. To hear members saying that it would be too difficult to put in place an inspectorate to make sure we do not have homes that are a threat to our children’s lives is simply galling. It simply shows which side this Government is on, and it is not on the side of the children who are being admitted to hospital.

What we have at the moment is a piece of legislation—a Residential Tenancies Act—that says landlords have to insulate to a 1978 standard. I remember growing up in the 1970s. I remember seeing my breath in my bedroom. I remember ice on the inside of my windows. I remember a cold house. I think we can do better, and that is exactly what this bill of Andrew Little does.

We have heard—again, the dancing on the pin—“It doesn’t specify what the standard will be.” It is very simple, and I will reiterate it: we have made it clear, all the way through, that the standard would be set by regulation so that it could be adjusted as it was necessary without having to come back to this House to make those amendments. It is not unheard of to do that by regulation, and we have been very clear that it would be the 2008 standard. This would result in some huge benefits in terms of our houses and their healthiness and whether or not people get sick in them.

We have seen the evidence come in. We have seen, from the Children’s Commissioner, the number of people who get sick, but also we have seen evidence of the number of hospital days that would be saved by insulating to this higher standard. But not only is it insulating, because you do not keep warm in an insulated house—even the best-insulated house—if there is no efficient way to heat that house. If you are on a low income, you actually need an ability to heat that house. What this bill does is make a requirement to have efficient and clean sources of heating in those homes, so these can be homes that can be heated. To say that you cannot measure how warm that is is just nonsense. This is managed all around the world, and if we cannot manage it here, then there is something that is seriously deficient. It is something that we cannot contemplate or accept.

Then, for the Government to claim that it has done more than Labour did is simply nonsense. What we had was a National Government that came into power in 2008 and scrapped a scheme that, if it was still running today, would have seen more homes better insulated than we currently have. This is a Government that is content for our children to be admitted to hospital or to die, because it thinks it is too expensive for us to insulate and heat our homes adequately. That is not the side the Labour Party is on, and it is not a side that we are willing to accept. That is why Andrew Little’s bill should proceed.

Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker, and I apologise for jumping the gun 5 minutes ago. I do want to start this contribution by just clarifying a couple of things, because I have heard it said a lot of times this evening—and I heard it a year ago when we were passing the amendment to the Residential Tenancies Act—that, actually, the Government is only enforcing a 1978 insulation standard. The way that is described by Opposition members is that that is the only standard that someone actually has to comply with. That is fundamentally not true.

Yes, if a house was built after 1978 and if it is compliant with those 1978 standards, under the residential tenancies legislation passed last year it does not require further insulation. But if the house was built prior to 1978, then landlords will be required, by July of 2019, to actually insulate those properties up to the 2008 standard. It is not just a simple carte blanche 1978 as has been described by a number of speakers this evening—and I have heard it bandied around at other times as well. There actually is an aim and a goal, particularly for houses post 2008, of course, but those prior to 1978 need to comply with the 2008 standard.

I have got to say that when I picked up this bill I saw, for a start, the title, and I thought “Yes. Yes, I can commit to healthy homes. I can commit to us wanting to have young people in New Zealand growing up in houses that are warm and dry. Yes, we do want to have people growing up in places that are healthy.”

💬 Carmel Sepuloni: Cross the floor then, Jono—the only way you’re going to get it.

Do we accept that 42,000 being admitted to hospital each year is acceptable? No, it is not. So we have got to take measured steps to ensure that we do bring that down, and that is exactly what we did last year with the residential tenancies legislation.

What I have had, just at the moment, though, is some people from across the House calling out to me, saying: “So cross the floor and vote for this bill.” I could be tempted to do that, I have to say, if I thought this bill was actually going to do what those members say it is going to do. The difficulty is that when you draft a bill and it is 3 pages long, like this one, it is a little bit light on detail.

This is the third member’s bill this evening that I have spoken on. The first one was the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Interim Restriction Orders) Amendment Bill from Chris Bishop—a very good bill. It was very well drafted. It is very easy to comprehend exactly—

💬 Carmel Sepuloni: What’s that got to do with this?

Wait—just wait. I am getting to it. Be patient. With that bill, it was very clear what the expectations of people to comply with that bill would be. It was very clear what the law would be going forward and what would be the standard that was acceptable. With this bill it is very short on some of those details. We had the same with the Private International Law (Choice of Law in Tort) Bill. It had very clear guidelines.

So when I hear people saying “Well, they are members’ bills. We cannot expect them to necessarily have all the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed, and we can sort that out during the select committee process or otherwise.”, I do not think that is required. I could see from the members’ bills put forward by Government members tonight that it is indeed possible to have precise, well-drafted, and good law for us to be able to follow.

When we did the Residential Tenancies Amendment Act 2016 a year ago, it was very clear that the new type of smoke alarms would have to be installed in every rental property by July 2016. That date has come and gone, and those now need to be in place. There we go. Compliance—easy. We knew, as members of this House, what we were voting on when those standards were put in place. We knew that those standards of insulation would need to be in place by July 2019. We knew what the regime would be for enforcement. It was very clear.

However, in this bill, the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2), I am not even sure what standard I am voting for. New section 132A, in clause 6, is headed “Function of Ensuring Healthy Homes”, and what is being said here is: “(a) the standards must describe what constitutes adequate—(i) methods of heating;”. Well, I know there are very many ways to heat a house. I know of houses that have got heat pumps in them—that is a pretty effective one. I know of houses that have got fireplaces in them. Those can be effective. But what I do not know from this legislation is what is going to be deemed to be acceptable.

So what I am being asked to vote for tonight is some sort of blank cheque that says: “We’d like things to be better.” What Andrew Little has said in this bill is: “I’d like things to be better. Just don’t ask me how good they should be, because I don’t know, because I haven’t put it in my bill. I’d just like them to be better. Can you please vote for it to be better, and then we’ll find some people to run away and figure out what those standards may or may not be.” I do not think that is good ins—well, it is not insulation. It is not good legislation, and it is not good for us as a Parliament to be going round voting for things when we do not know what we are voting for.

There is no description of what the standard will be for methods of insulation, yet we had in the Residential Tenancies Amendment Act very clear guidelines on what those standards would be and what would need to be done to enforce them.

The idea of indoor temperatures has been well canvassed. On any given day you could walk into my house and it may or may not be at the appropriate temperature because someone forgot to turn the gas heater on or otherwise, or one of the kids has gone out and left the back door open, or whatever it is. It certainly happens a lot at our place—well, it used to happen when the kids were at home, to be fair. Now there is just me to blame.

But what can happen when you get to this bill is that you say: “What’s the minimum temperature? What’s the right temperature?”. Well, there are all sorts of world safety guidelines, and, actually, we would have a chance if there was a number in here. If the Government Administration Committee had received information telling it what the right temperature would be, or if someone had done some research prior to drafting the bill—there is a novel thought—and had actually proposed a number and given a rationale for it, I might have been tempted to vote for it. But at the moment I have got this one line that says: “(a) the standards must describe what constitutes adequate … indoor temperatures;”. Well, I do not see anything fixed on there that I can actually pin that to and say that I will vote for this or otherwise. Ventilation, draught stopping, drainage—I could go on and on and on. There are no minimum standards and nothing for us to point to and vote on.

There are a number of issues that lead to houses falling into a state of disrepair—into mould-growing or otherwise. I was talking to a landlord recently, who had a—

💬 Carmel Sepuloni: Try talking to a tenant.

Well, I talk to tenants, as well. Anyway, on this particular occasion I happened to be talking to the landlord—and I have spoken to plenty of tenants as well—who said that 5 years earlier, they had completely redone the bathroom in this property. It was all in good condition. They had installed a heat pump for the tenants, and it could be adequately warmed. For the first 3½ years, there were no issues with mould whatsoever in the bathroom, so clearly the design of the house was adequate. The landlord had done what was necessary to ensure that there would be no mould. Miraculously, in the last year and a half, mould had become an issue in the property. The house is probably—I do not know—a 1980s-built house. There was no evidence of mould beforehand, but in the last 18 months, yes there is. So what had probably been happening was that somebody had been using the bathroom and not opening the windows afterwards or not turning the fan on while it was occurring—

💬 Carmel Sepuloni: Oh, those silly tenants!

No, well, actually, on that particular occasion—

💬 Carmel Sepuloni: That’s what he’s saying—those silly tenants. It’s all their fault they’re getting mould.

I am saying that on this occasion, actually, the landlord had done everything they could to ensure that the house was in the right condition to be able to be lived in well.

So the problem I have with this bill is that it is actually looking to try to hold landlords accountable for some things that they cannot actually be held accountable for. Indoor temperature is one of them. Whether a house is being adequately ventilated is another. So as much as my heart says that there is a lot of good intention in this bill—and good on Andrew Little for having some good intention in bringing it forward—unfortunately, though, either he or the people who have been helping him out forgot to do the research before putting the bill together. They forgot to actually do some work. They left a bunch of generalities and left the setting of the standards to somebody else, to be done at a later date. Nice idea; poor execution. I cannot support it.

Thank you for this opportunity to speak on Andrew Little’s Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2). This bill is vitally important for thousands and thousands of New Zealanders. We are here to debate the principles of this bill. The basic approach of Andrew Little’s bill is simple and clear, Jono Naylor. It will bring into law a bottom line that we in this House should defend on behalf of the people who brought us here to Parliament. We are here to represent and be the voice of the people who elect us to be here. For those members on the opposite side of this House, I say that no New Zealand adult or child should have to live in a house that makes them sick or makes their children sick.

But can I just address the member Jono Naylor, because he said that this bill is unclear. Well, this Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2) will amend the Residential Tenancies Act 1986 and has the purpose of ensuring that every rental home in Aotearoa New Zealand meets minimum standards of heating and insulation. At the moment, landlords already have obligations under the Residential Tenancies Act—that is true—but there is no guidance about the specific standards that they must meet to ensure that every house is warm and dry. This bill—Andrew Little’s bill—will amend the Residential Tenancies Act to require the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment to ensure that there are minimum standards that are set for heating and insulation within 6 months. This bill also amends the Act to require that all landlords must meet those standards.

It is very clear that most New Zealanders do not think it is acceptable that our children continue to be sick and that in some instances some of our children die as a result of poor housing. Too many of our children are dying, and I want to just remind this House that one of those kids—a toddler who was just over 2 years old—was from Ōtara in my electorate of Manukau East in South Auckland. The mother of this child went to the landlord many, many times, asking and begging the landlord to maintain the house that they lived in. This was a house that was cold, freezing, and mouldy, and it was not healthy. It was not just this child who was a toddler who was sick many times and who was in hospital for various conditions. Her older brother, who was 6 years old, had previously been diagnosed with rheumatic fever. So you would think that if the system actually worked, those two combined—and in this instance, the landlord was the Government: Housing New Zealand—should have actually done something to ensure that this family lived in a healthy condition. But it was not until this child had passed away—and we know from the coroner that one of the main reasons why she died was the poor condition of the house that they lived in.

It is not good enough that this continues to happen. We know from doctors and the statistics they have quoted, that they have told us to date, that we have at least up to 15 children die from respiratory conditions, and it is mainly to do with the poor condition of the houses that they live in. We also know from statistics that the hospital admissions for children across Aotearoa New Zealand—over 40,000 people are admitted to hospital. We will not only save lives when we pass a bill like this that Andrew Little has put through to the House but we will also be saving taxpayers’ money, because as people are admitted to hospital many times over, especially during the winter, it is us—all of us as taxpayers—who actually pay for that.

There are many reasons, but one of them is that New Zealand is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Pursuant to article 27 of the UN convention, every child—every single child—has the right to an adequate standard of living. This includes housing. This National Government has an obligation to uphold its commitment to this convention. It should take this obligation seriously. When we see the effects of poor quality housing on our children, on our tamariki—and it includes our children dying—we should, for legislation like this, which could save lives, put aside our political differences and actually agree that it is important to save people’s lives.

According to the submission from the Office of the Children’s Commissioner on Andrew Little’s bill, more than half of all New Zealand children—especially those living in poverty—are living in private rental houses. We know that one of the reasons why the Children’s Commissioner supports this bill is that it actually goes further than the current standards for insulation. This bill—Andrew Little’s bill—includes rigorous standards for heating and ventilation.

The Government, as I said earlier on, is obligated under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and various other conventions. Meeting the health and safety obligations is actually considered a normal cost of doing business in most industries. Why is it that we are not providing a place that is healthy for tenants, for people to live in? Why is it that we are not ensuring that the normal cost of doing business, for property owners, is also something that we should consider, that we should pass into legislation?

New Zealand is currently facing a housing crisis, and this housing crisis is most acutely felt and experienced especially by those who are low income, and especially those who live in Auckland. We know that there are many families who are living in substandard conditions, and one of the things that the honourable Minister Nick Smith said earlier on is that currently the Government’s regulations are already dealing with some of these issues and that there is a compliance obligation and a department at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment that is already enforcing standards.

But why is it that there are so many boarding houses, why is it that there are so many rental houses in my electorate in South Auckland and Manukau East where these regulations are not actually enforced? Why is it that when we go visiting some of these boarding houses there are so many houses that do not even have glass in the windows and so many houses where it is actually more freezing inside the house than it is outside the house? So the question is this—it is not whether the current obligation is being adhered to. The question is whether this National Government actually cares enough to ensure that we are saving people’s lives, that we are making sure that the current regulations are being complied with?

Just yesterday, the Leader of the Opposition, Andrew Little, received a petition from medical students and from those who are working in the medical profession. These are people who are seeing, on the front line, our children and our families who are coming to seek assistance. One of the things they stated in their submission—over a thousand people signed this—is that “together we can make a difference in ensuring that New Zealand homes are warm and insulated—that they improve the health of our children and families.” As I said earlier on, this is one bill that will save lives.

Another submission was from a resident here in Wellington, Jenny Ritchie, “that New Zealand has had a proud history of caring for its children.”, but it is now “an embarrassment to find … the differential between rich and poor is so extreme, and that there are many families who are struggling to house and nourish their children.” We need to make a stand. We need to make a commitment to do everything that we can as a nation to ensure the well-being of our young children. We in this House, as members of Parliament, can make this stand, and I urge members of the opposite side of this House to agree with us, to pass this bill, and to make sure that we are saving as many lives as possible. Thank you.

It is my pleasure tonight to stand and support my colleagues on this side of the House in opposing the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2) in its second reading. This does not mean that I am opposed to healthy homes—no. In fact, what it means, from this side of the House, is that we support healthy homes but in a very practical sense that is achievable and does not impose added cost to the tenants of those homes.

I do note that this bill was referred to the Government Administration Committee on 4 May 2016. That may explain why it has fallen behind and has not kept up with where the Government actually is at the present point in time. But it is clear that things have moved substantially in the intervening period, thanks to this National-led Government. Under this progressive and responsible Government, substantially more is already being done than this bill seeks to deliver. We are already doing it.

We have already insulated 30,000 State homes. We are walking the talk with our own housing stock as responsible landlords—more than any Government in our country’s history. We have subsidised ceiling and underfloor insulation for 290,000 private sector homes through the Warm Up New Zealand programme. Further to that, changes to residential tenancies legislation will see the retrofitting of insulation for a further 180,000 homes by 1 July 2019—not 2023, as proposed by this bill. Altogether, it will be for 500,000 homes—10 times what the previous Labour Government achieved. That amounts to a total investment in insulation of $116 million for Housing New Zealand stock and $450 million for Warm Up New Zealand grants—a total of $566 million invested into insulation.

Another programme under way is the Healthy Homes Initiatives, led by the Minister of Health, the Hon Jonathan Coleman. We have seen 11 district health boards across New Zealand refer 2,838 people for insulated drapes, floor coverings, beds, ventilation, and heating, and this programme on its own is credited with the 45 percent drop in rheumatic fever since 2012. We know that investing in warm, dry, safe homes is absolutely essential and vital to the health of Kiwis, especially their children, and we will continue to ensure that they get our support.

The difference between the two programmes is that one funds insulation and the other funds a bit of insulation but a whole lot of bureaucracy and diverts funds into inspectors, who will then be able to go into people’s homes to take the temperatures, and that will most certainly increase the costs. I know one couple—and I have had this debate with them in the past, because one likes their room really warm and the other one likes their room very cool. How is an inspector going to equalise that problem for that couple? Whether they as tenants wish to pull the drapes, whether they turn on the heater or close the doors is entirely up to them, not a temperature inspector.

Mr Little, when he introduced his bill earlier tonight, called it “symbolic”, and it is symbolic. It is symbolic of the approach that will most certainly increase costs for tenants. There is no way that you can increase the bureaucracy in something like this without imposing costs. That will inevitably be passed on to the tenants. That, in turn, will put pressure on already pressurised housing stock. But we are focused and determined that that will not happen. In fact, this Government actually did consider a full warrant of fitness scheme back in 2013 and trialled that experiment on its own Housing New Zealand Corporation stock. But the cost of that programme was, back then, $100 million a year. It was very clear that that cost would have had to be passed back on to the tenants, so that programme was abandoned for that reason.

I would like to quote from the New Zealand Property Investors Federation executive officer, Andrew King, who noted during the discussion on this bill: “We have been saying for years that a full rental property Warrant of Fitness actually isn’t in the best interest of tenants. It is expensive to administer and comply with and would no doubt be added to over time with the potential to take some properties out of the rental pool.” That is not an outcome that this side of the House supports, and, as a result, we will not be increasing costs to our tenants.

We have already moved to provide hundreds of thousands of tenants with greater protection through strengthened protection. We have provided for smoke alarms, which are estimated to save an average of three lives a year. We are in agreement that Kiwi families deserve warm, dry, safe home—no one disagrees with that—but we must do it in a way that does not have negative consequences.

In a former role—and I note tonight that the last three speakers from this side of the House as former mayors have all had the same role—we would have all participated with the Crown entity the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA). I know from my own personal experience in dealing with EECA through its very enthusiastic advocates—I am sure my one, Mike, will remember coming to the West Coast—that EECA promotes these packages that support home insulation.

There is very clear data now that supports the home insulation packages, and the biggest beneficiaries of those are in the health sector, with absolute reduced numbers of admissions for respiratory illnesses, and that is a direct result of insulating homes and making them warmer and drier. That data is absolutely stark, so there is no question about the impact of that. But EECA is actually running those programmes on behalf of the Government, and the Warm Up New Zealand: Healthy Homes programme, which I have referred to earlier, offers the grants for insulation and retrofitting to make those homes warmer, drier, and healthier.

As a matter of interest to people who hear us talking about these insulation programmes but may not know how to actually access them, the grants are available for homeowners and landlords, and grants of 50 percent of the cost of insulation are now available as well for low-income earners and landlords with low-income tenants. These Warm Up New Zealand: Healthy Homes grants are limited and will finish by the end of June next year, so I do encourage not only tenants to encourage their landlords but people on low incomes and landlords with low-income tenants to take the best advantage of these grants, as they are available right now. If the house was built before the year 2000, and if you own the home and have a community services card, or your tenant has a community services card, then these grants are available. But, also, if you have high health needs you are also eligible for these insulation packages. If you simply have high health needs—yes.

Yes, in summary, my colleague Matt Doocey earlier tonight gave a very inspiring speech and used the rugby analogy of looking at the scoreboard. That is what I would like to finish on—looking on the scoreboard—and the numbers do speak for themselves: 500,000 homes insulated, $566 million invested in warm, dry, safe homes. Numbers speak for themselves.