Regulatory Systems (Housing) Amendment Bill (No 2)

So just some brief introductory comments to this debate on this bill. The Regulatory Systems (Housing) Amendment Bill (No 2) has two parts to it. Part 1 serves to simplify the role of the Community Housing Regulatory Authority and reduces the administrative burden on registered community housing providers. Part 2 amends the Retirement Villages Act 2003 to clarify that the higher maximum fine will apply for breaches of the Act where an operator or promoter of retirement village did not take all the practicable steps to ensure an advertisement was not misleading or deceptive or where an operator of a retirement village contravenes their obligations relating to the code of practice for operating a retirement village.

The code of practice sets out the rights and obligations of retirement village operators and residents, and it’s important that the operators understand the consequences of breaching the code and that the registrar has clarity when detecting such breaches and offences under the Act. Both of these offences are considered to be of a serious nature and are similar to the other offences that currently receive the higher maximum fine.

Let me just also note the Social Services and Community Committee recommended amending clause 7 of the bill to remove the reference to section 26 in section 79(3) of the Retirement Villages Act so that the higher of the two existing maximum fines would apply. And, yes, the committee considered that the offence of misleading advertising was serious and of a similar nature to other offences listed in section 79(2) and considered that the fines should be consistent.

💬 Andrew Bayly: Madam.

💬 Priyanca Radhakrishnan: Madam Chair.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I’m very happy to let the other speaker take a chance if she wants, but anyway, thank you to the Minister for Economic Development for providing a bit of a background on the Regulatory Systems (Housing) Amendment Bill (No 2). I think, as we’ve seen with the previous two bills that have been progressing over the last half an hour to an hour or so, these are about tidying up certain aspects. This one obviously has aspects related to housing, but maybe less than what people might otherwise construe.

The first thing is I think it’s worthwhile just having a look at what it’s actually about. Amended section 172, set out in clause 4, is an issue about dealing with the level of disclosure about what is required from retirement homes, and I see here that the specific clause states that it “does not require the authority to include on the register information about a person whose membership on a provider’s governing body ended before the provider became a registered community housing provider, but the authority has discretion to include that information.” So there’s a little bit of a nuance around the nature of some of the information that’s required.

The second aspect relates to the issue of misleading advertising, and the Minister certainly covered that. So I think it’s worthwhile just to recap that. At the moment, there are certain fines if retirement villages “inadvertently”—and I say that in quoted marks—are sometimes misleading or deceptive in the way that they advertise. What this seeks to do is tighten up those provisions to make sure that people are not subject to deceptive or misleading advertising.

Of course, we have a very large and growing retiree population in New Zealand. It’s vital that we support them and make sure that if they are moving into a retirement home, in fact, they do get what they pay for—and nothing more, but certainly nothing less. So what this does is it deals with this by saying that there’ll be a fine for a person of not exceeding $15,000 or $50,000 for a body corporate, or, in fact, $5,000 or $10,000 for a body corporate, depending on the discretion or misdemeanour or the level of misleading or deceptive advertising. This is all covered in section 79 of the Act.

What the Social Services and Community Committee recommended was amending clause 7 of the bill to remove the reference to section 26 in section 79(3) of the Act. This would mean that the higher maximum fines would apply where an operator or promoter did not take all practical steps to ensure an advertisement was not misleading or deceptive. Now, I don’t think anyone in this House is going to debate that that’s not a good thing. We all believe it is.

The other thing I just note is the Minister’s Supplementary Order Paper 395 has a slight change in the title: “replace ‘Housing Restructuring and Tenancy Matters Act 1992’ ”—

💬 Alastair Scott: Well spotted.

Thank you, Mr Scott. It’s amended to use the title of “Public and Community Housing Management Act 1992”.

So I think this is a good amendment—not terribly significant in terms of legislative drafting, but it is significant in terms of making sure that our older people in our communities are well protected and looked after, and on that basis, I think that it’s inevitable that we’re all going to commend it to the committee.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I rise to make a short contribution in support of this bill, the Regulatory Systems (Housing) Amendment Bill (No 2), and I just wanted to pick up where the previous speaker, Andrew Bayly, left off, actually, because that’s absolutely right. It does two things, this particular bill. On one hand, it makes things a little bit easier for community housing providers. And the second part of it makes things fairer for our senior citizens who could be a little bit vulnerable at that point in time to some of the contravening bits or contraventions—not even sure if that’s a word, but anyway—that this bill deals with.

So as has been mentioned, it tidies up bits and pieces. It’s an omnibus bill. It clarifies and updates statutory provisions in the Act. So what that does, actually, is to make the purpose of the Act clearer. It addresses some of the duplications in the areas and the gaps as legislation has been tweaked over time, and also between different pieces of legislation—just sort of reduces some of those duplications as well. That just means that this tidying up, in effect, keeps our regulatory system up to date and relevant. In terms of Part 1, reducing the administrative burden for community housing providers, it also removes unnecessary, well, red tape, in a sense, but also compliance costs that are related to what they’re currently having to go through with the current legislation.

I just wanted to touch on one point that the previous speaker made, which was some of the information that regulators have to collect at the moment, particularly in terms of information about current and former board members. There’s not a time frame for that, which means that they could be required, under current legislation, to go back decades to find information about those that were on the governance bodies of the villages, the board members who were involved over many decades. That’s actually not necessary for the purposes that we’re talking about today. So that’s one of the things that will be cut out to ease the administrative burden as well.

The other bit that I wanted to touch on was the fact that these might seem like very simple tweaks, but when we’re talking about a population that is ageing, that is growing, and that could be quite vulnerable, some of the offences that are laid out in Part 2, and the changes that are proposed in this particular bill to increase the penalties of some of those offences around misleading—and I’ll just read this bit: where a retirement village operator or promoter hasn’t taken the practicable steps to ensure that an advertisement isn’t misleading or deceptive. Actually, if that isn’t tweaked, the ramifications for people who could be caught up in that could be quite severe. So as the Minister pointed out as well, these are actually serious offences, and we need to take them seriously, and that’s what this bill does. In addition to making things a little bit easier, it makes things fairer for people as well. So I’m really happy to commend this bill to the House. Thank you.

The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 395 in the name of the Hon Phil Twyford be agreed to.

Amendments agreed to.

Parts 1 and 2, Schedule, and clauses 1 and 2 as amended agreed to.

House resumed.

The Chairperson reported the Regulatory Systems (Economic Development) Amendment Bill (No 2) with amendment, the Regulatory Systems (Workforce) Amendment Bill (No 2) without amendment, and the Regulatory Systems (Housing) Amendment Bill (No 2) with amendment.

Report adopted.