Residential Tenancies (Healthy Homes Standards) Amendment Bill

Members, we come now to Part 2. This is the debate on clauses 5 to 11 and the Schedule, “Amendments to secondary legislation”. The question is that Part 2 stand part.

This falls into the realm of niche question—

Chlöe Swarbrick: Give it to us.

Here we go. Why does clause 7 amend the Schedule and replace the definition of “community housing tenancy”? Why does it replace the “Housing Restructuring and Tenancy Matters Act 1992” with “Public and Community Housing Management Act 1992”? It feels to me like this is a change where officials have suddenly figured out that they’ve had the wrong Act in the existing primary legislation for a while—

💬 Hon Member: All along.

—all along—and we’re just going to take the opportunity of this legislative vehicle which has sort of come about at the sort of tail end of the year and there’s a legislative vehicle that’s come available, so we’ll just slip it through. That’s what it sort of feels like to me. It’s just quite an odd thing to do. I have to admit I haven’t looked up the 1992 Act, and I haven’t even looked up the Public and Community Housing Management Act 1992. I suppose I just want to know what the reason for the change is and if anything turns on it. Yeah, thank you, Mr Chair.

Happy to oblige with an explanation. So the legislation that we are amending, the Healthy Homes Guarantee Act, was enacted in 2017. It was one of the very early pieces of legislation that we brought in when we came into Government. Of course, we weren’t content with just one piece of housing legislation; there were subsequent pieces of legislation, in particular the Kāinga Ora bill of 2019—it’s a consequential amendment that resulted from a piece of legislation that was passed after the Healthy Homes Guarantee Act, so it led to change because of that.

I just wanted to ask the Minister, given that we’ve been talking about submitters, in particular, and those property managers, the landlords, and Kāinga Ora, who were all consulted with, and throughout the regulatory impact statement, again, in particular, it consistently refers to statements that were in support of the extension, my question to the Minister is: were there any submitters that were opposed to the extension or that expressed any concerns with that extension? To that effect, what rationale was given by them about those potential concerns that may have existed out there? Because I do find it quite difficult to believe that there is a complete consensus amongst all of those property managers and all of those landlords for an extension, particularly when we consider, based on the survey—which, again, we’ve already canvassed is not statistically significant—that 85 percent of private landlords are already in compliance. So were there any of those submitters that were opposed to this legislation outlined in this legislation?

I will note that the questions the member is asking relate to Part 1 of the bill, not Part 2, the consequential secondary legislation amendments that we’re talking about here.

In terms of how it goes through, the House was given the option to debate this all as one part, but that was not a choice that was taken up by the House. But I will be liberal in my responses—

CHAIRPERSON (Greg O’Connor): The Chair will decide where it departs, but carry on.

Thank you. I will be liberal and answer, even though the ball correctly belongs to Part 1, that there weren’t submissions. I think it makes it clear in the regulatory impact statement: it wasn’t a select committee process where submissions were called for, so I think the member’s probably mischaracterising that. Of course, there were a range of views when stakeholders were consulted, around whether or not some people could fulfil it and others couldn’t, but there was no one who was opposed to it, per se.

Thank you, Mr Chair. I have a question about Part 2, Subpart 1, and it’s this: it’s quite unusual for Parliament to amend secondary legislation, which is what we’re doing here.

💬 Hon Chris Hipkins: No, it’s not.

So Subpart 1 makes—well, it’s not under this Government. Subpart 1—

💬 Hon Chris Hipkins: It wasn’t under your Government either.

Yeah, yeah. OK. [Interruption] It’s 11.25 p.m.

CHAIRPERSON (Greg O’Connor): If members would like to take their conversation out into the lobbies that’s fine. Other than that, we’ll just deal with this as—

The question is this: why are we using legislation to amend a regulation? Because regulation 7(2)(a) replaces 90 days with 120 days, why do we need legislation to do that? I accept the legislation around Part 1, which is the dates, which is fine, but why do we need legislation to amend the regulations?

I completely acknowledge the comments of the Minister before around how we’re on Part 2 of this legislation and state that we sought to continue the debate of Part 1, but, of course, members of the Government decided to try and close that part of the debate. I’d also say, as the Minister outlined in her response around public submissions—

CHAIRPERSON (Greg O’Connor): Sorry, was that a commentary on the Chair?

CHLÖE SWARBRICK: No, Mr Chair; it was a—

CHAIRPERSON (Greg O’Connor): I believe it was. The member was quite repetitive in her questioning, but carry on and avoid commentary on previous decisions by the Chair, please.

CHLÖE SWARBRICK: Thank you, Mr Chair. So, of course, as the Minister has outlined, we didn’t have an opportunity for public submissions, because we didn’t have a select committee phase of debate and public scrutiny with this legislation. And I guess that’s the core point here. Again, it needs to be restated time and again because we have less than a few hours to consider and to scrutinise this legislation when, in the normal course of events, it takes several months of—

CHAIRPERSON (Greg O’Connor): Sorry, if the member can hold, I’ll stop the clock, and I’ll just allow the Minister—there’s a conversation taking place on my right here. Feel free to consult, Minister, and we’ll carry on. I can’t do two things at once, so I’ll just do one. OK, Minister?

💬 Hon Dr Megan Woods: I’ve finished.

CHAIRPERSON (Greg O’Connor): OK, right. So we’ll start the clock.

CHLÖE SWARBRICK: Thank you, Mr Chair. So the point that I was making is that I completely acknowledge the point from the Minister that what we’re referring to here are stakeholders who were proactively solicited, and their opinions were solicited, and they were consulted with in the process of making the policy decisions and, obviously, informing the regulatory impact statement. We didn’t have the opportunity for a select committee stage. We didn’t have the opportunity for those public submissions. So this is the only opportunity that we have in these few hours to discuss and to publicly scrutinise this. And this is the point which I think needs to continually be made.

The part that we are debating, of course, extends the time frame for compliance from 90 days to 100 days. And I would note that, again, in the regulatory impact statement at paragraph 8—but also listed throughout the regulatory impact statement—we have the point, time and again, that—and I’ll quote here—“90 days is very ambitious in the current environment.” And I guess I just kind of invite reflections on the fact that the clock didn’t start when the pandemic arrived; the clock started, as the Minister herself noted, at the point that we passed the healthy homes legislation back in 2017. If I remember clearly that was within the first hundred days. The Minister is shaking her head, and I believe that she will go on to say that it’ll be with the regulations in 2019, which, of course, this part is also seeking to amend. But the point remains that landlords and Kāinga Ora have had several years to comply. The clock started several years ago, and what we are doing now is, effectively, extending the time frame at the end of the race, at the point in time when many should have expected to already be up to date and already had years to get up to scratch prior to the advent of the global pandemic.

I’ll just address the issue in clause 6 of the legislation, which amends the regulation to replace “90 days” with “120 days”. This is a very pragmatic decision. I don’t know if the member has tried to engage the services of a tradesperson in the current climate. The ability to actually get work done within a 90-day period is challenging. People with the best will in the world could procure the hardware to do this—whether that be the batts or the heat pump—but, actually, the ability to get tradespeople to do it has also been a challenge. And that is the reason for extending that out.

There was a subsequent question from another member about why we are using legislation to amend the regulation—that particular clause that he’s talking to. In terms of us being able to do all of the changes that we needed to do at the same time, it required legislation. Believe me, if there had just been a regulatory fix to this, the Government would have taken it.

Just to respond to the point as raised by the Minister, the Hon Dr Megan Woods, and, I guess, to kind of elaborate on the point that I was trying to make: I wasn’t stating that it is easy to get a tradesperson or materials in the kind of shortage that we all know we’re currently experiencing as a result of the global pandemic. The point that I was making is that the clock started several years ago. While I totally take on board that there is the need, currently, in the legislation to comply within 90 days of a new tenancy, what we’re looking at doing, here, is extending that to 120. That that upgrading of a home doesn’t necessarily have to occur at that starting point, it can occur while a tenant is living in a home that is not currently healthy homes standards compliant. The landlord could choose to undertake improving that property. So the point remains that you don’t have to wait for a tenancy to end in order to start this process of updating to the healthy homes standards.

I move, That the question be now put.

Mr Chair, thank you for allowing me to take a call on Part 2 of this piece of legislation, the Residential Tenancies (Healthy Homes Standards) Amendment Bill. I was specifically looking into clause 7(4) and I just had a question about—in regards to the consultation that’s taken place and the changes to the deadlines. And there seems to be one group of houses or house tenancies that doesn’t get an extension, and I wondered if the Minister could elaborate on what went into that, because it appears—you know, Kāinga Ora, they can get an extension now to 1 July 2024; community housing tenancies are 1 July 2024; any other tenancies, there’s a whole range of rules about extending the 90 days to 120 days, and otherwise up to 1 July 2025.

But boarding house tenancies don’t appear to have any form of extension; it’s just that we’re replacing the table with the start date of 1 July 2021. So I’ve looked at what is actually the standard for a boarding house, and it says that it’s a rental property that’s intended to be rented by at least six tenants, each tenant rents their own room in the property, and they share communal facilities, and the tenancies last for 20 days or more. Is it possible that there are boarding houses that would not have had to comply yet because of this? And I’d just be curious as to the answer.

So clause 7(4), in terms of the schedule of the dates that are in there, the principle that underlies all of these dates, of course, is that we don’t pass retrospective legislation. So the time frames that the member is pointing to are, of course, times that have passed. So when you look to boarding houses, they were required already to comply by 1 July 2021, so we can’t retrospectively change that. And I think I made the point in one of my earlier contributions that this is not a time extension for landlords that should have already complied—so if that tenancy has turned over in that time, before those dates, and that is the principle of not having retrospective legislation.

I move, That the question be now put.