Unit Titles (Strengthening Body Corporate Governance and Other Matters) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Unit Titles (Strengthening Body Corporate Governance and Other Matters) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

In this Parliament, we have different types of legislation. Some of it is things that make profound and significant changes that fundamentally change something. Other times, what we do is we modernise and update and incrementally improve the law as it stands. This bill falls into that latter category.

It is a member’s bill, and I want to acknowledge that it is unusual to have a member’s bill of such technical matters, and actually, of such complexity as we have in this bill. I want to acknowledge Government members for supporting this member’s bill in a way that I think has been very constructive and collaborative, because it matters. The reason we need to modernise unit titles law in New Zealand is that we have far more people today living in multi-dwelling housing arrangements than we did when the Unit Titles Act was first enacted.

Actually, we want to continue to encourage more New Zealanders to feel confident about choosing this style of housing. That’s because we are, now, in New Zealand, one of the least affordable places in the world to own a home. I have given many other speeches in this House about why that is, and what the underlying causes of that are. But certainly I think we can agree across the Parliament that one of the solutions to increasing the choices and options of the kind of housing there’ll be available to New Zealanders is to encourage higher-density housing in our urban areas and to ensure that New Zealanders are readily able to choose that kind of housing when it suits their circumstances.

However, at the moment, there’s a lot of people who are very scared about buying an apartment. This bill is about making it less risky for them and taking away some of their fears. Furthermore, there are a lot of people who aren’t just concerned about the buying process and what might or could go wrong during that process. There are a lot of people who are concerned that once they live in an apartment or a multi-dwelling block, they will be constrained by difficulties in the bodies corporate and all sorts of challenges in how shared property will be arranged. So this bill is a very good step forward in addressing some of those concerns.

It’s a bill which, I think, has had many mothers. So I want to acknowledge, in particular, the Hon Nikki Kaye, who, as the Auckland Central MP at the time, picked up the need for reform in this area. She had many apartment dwellers living in her electorate who pressed home to her how important it was that this law be modernised. She picked up reforms that had been canvassed through a review in 2016 that had been conducted by the ministry of business and progressed them in this member’s bill. The member’s bill has also been in the name of Judith Collins, then National’s housing spokesperson, and I have willingly taken it up.

The bill, essentially, does five big groups of things. It has a better disclosure regime for buyers, with the intention that they be able to access and have confidence that they will get the information relevant to their property before they offer on it. It improves the governance of bodies corporate; it improves the regulation of body corporate managers and ensures professional standards apply; it puts better rules around long-term maintenance planning; and it improves dispute resolution practices.

It’s a bill that has been much enhanced by the select committee process. I want to thank the 85 submitters who submitted on the bill, and the officials who helped us work through the issues that they raised. We had a range of experts submit, many who’d lived in apartments themselves, others who’d been tied up in litigation or legal disputes arising in part from the poorly drafted law, and some individuals had terrible stories of what had gone wrong for them, for what they saw as inadequacies in our current unit titles regime. We also had brought to bear people with international experience who were able to provide us some comparison with how behind the pace New Zealand’s unit titles regime has become relative to other countries. The submissions varied in terms of the areas that they focused on. There were a range of views, but broadly, there was consensus about the need for greater transparency, greater accountability, and protection of unit title owners.

The select committee made a range of changes. They’re detailed very well in the select committee report. I would encourage those interested in this debate and these issues to read that report thoroughly. I would summarise the judgments that were made as this: that the balance must be struck—it was the view of the committee—between ensuring that those who are purchasing a property in a unit title arrangement or living in a unit title arrangement have their rights and interests protected and are able to access good amounts of information, balancing that set of rights with the need, also, not to create such a cumbersome and bureaucratic regime that, in itself, it puts people off this kind of living. Striking that balance, as you’ll appreciate, is challenging and involves some nuanced judgments. So the committee, I think, would join me in my gratitude towards the officials for helping us work through some of that balancing act and the resulting changes that came out of it.

However, as is often the way with these things, having published our select committee report, I have gone and engaged further with people living in apartments or who are experts. They have highlighted for me three residual issues, which I believe and hope we, as a House, can continue to collaborate on to make this an even better bill in the committee of the whole House. I wish to signal that I will be putting forward three further amendments. I have written to the Minister to highlight that I would like to work with her and her officials on these, if possible. Those three issues are, first, around the disclosure regime. Now, this is an area where there are conveyancing lawyers who have a range of opinions. I would summarise where they have come to is saying that they share the intent of the officials, but they do not believe that the drafting, as it currently stands, adequately meets their intentions. I understand that behind the scenes they have been meeting with Government officials to explain and further understand those concerns. I would simply ask that the Minister gives mind to that and that we consider whether further technical amendment is needed in this area.

The second key issue is around remediation reports. Now, it was noted by some stakeholders following our select committee report that, actually, we should be quite specific about the fact that people buying an apartment should be able to access, as of right, any remediation reports that have been produced. I find myself in favour of that.

Finally, we had quite a debate about proxy voting. This was about limiting the number of proxies a person can hold and exercise in a body corporate. The bill in its original form is, as it was brought to this House, sought to limit those proxies. Now, some submitters said—and this is a debate that will be familiar to members of this House who have taken part in political committees and other groups where proxies are exercised. Others said, “Look, it’s going to be very hard to make quorum if proxies aren’t enabled in the way that they have been previously.” We did, in this process, seek to alleviate that by allowing unit title holders to direct and specify how their proxy vote would be cast on their behalf. However, I have had it put to me by people with direct experience that they believe as a committee we did underweight the reality of proxy farming as it stands, and its ability to subvert the democratic process when it comes to the governing of bodies corporate. I propose that we do continue to progress some limits to proxy voting, and I will be putting forward an amendment to achieve that.

I want to acknowledge Chlöe Swarbrick who, as the member for Auckland Central, has taken a particular interest in this bill, carrying it on from the Hon Nikki Kaye, who previously had shown such an interest in it. This has been a truly collaborative cross-parliamentary process, the drafting of this law. I want to thank the Minister for her generosity in providing her officials to the committee. I commend this bill to the House.

Kia ora, Madam Speaker. Thank you for this. It’s a real pleasure to speak on this bill. It is, as the member said, an important bill. It might be seen as more of a tidy up, but I think its importance can’t be understated because we really need to make sure that people who purchase homes which are in unit titles can do so with a degree of confidence, and with as few costs as possible, and that those homes are properly kept and maintained in the housing stock. That’s, I think, what this bill seeks to do.

Look, as chair of the Finance and Expenditure Committee, which looked at this, I’m surprised that the member’s coming up with some more amendments by way of Supplementary Order Paper, but I’m sure they’ll be looked at very, very carefully indeed. Look, all members around the table had a lot of input. As a central city MP myself, I was very interested in unit titles, and I know that Helen White also took a significant interest in exactly how we can make, essentially, apartment dwelling and living in a more compact way more efficient and effective. The committee did give the bill a good old working over, I must say, and there was some, as Nicola Willis alluded to, some really important debates.

I’m going to go to proxy voting first. There are a number of things I want to talk about, if I get a chance, but I actually want to talk about proxy voting because she has raised it, and this spectre of proxy farming was identified. Now, in another life, I’ve had a fair bit to do with unit titles, and I know that the politics of unit titles can be almost as fierce as the politics of this place. But I struggle with a rule which refuses the right of one person to give their decision-making power to another, should they choose to do so. If I have a trusted adviser or friend, or even a trusted committee member, or a trusted manager, then why can I not let them exercise my vote on my behalf? Now, I accept that unit titles, as with any neighbour dispute—disputes in unit titles can be fierce, and people can feel that the process was wrong when they don’t get the outcome they want. But I’m not sure that proxy voting, or restricting the amount of proxy voting, is the way to address that.

In committee, we did look at this, and it went to and fro—one of the joys of virtual Parliament is I can see Chlöe Swarbrick quite clearly taking notes, and I’m sure she’ll have something to say on this. But what we did do is something quite important and that is address two things: remote voting is one—the ability of unit title holders, who couldn’t otherwise make the meeting, to attend a meeting remotely and vote remotely—and also to vote in advance, electronically, perhaps by email. And the third thing was to give a proxy to a third party but direct how that proxy is exercised. So they’ve seen the motion, and they have made clear that it’s to be voted for or against, so it’s a very limited proxy. So I think proxy farming, the idea that somehow it’s illegitimate to go out and get votes for a particular course of action—even if we accept that, I think there’s a really substantial set of things which address that in the bill itself.

One of the other things that we did was look at body corporate managers—because, of course, many bodies corporate, simply by dint of their complexity, need a manager—and that places the body corporate owners at something of a vulnerability. So whilst the original bill wanted, essentially, to require industry membership, or membership of an industry organisation—a professional body of some sort—we thought that that was going to be difficult given the fact that there was no real industry organisation that was quite suitable at the present time, and we didn’t think it was appropriate in a member’s bill to construct one from scratch. So, rather, we went down the road of a code of conduct. We thought that it was quite appropriate to impose a code of conduct on body corporate managers to make clear what their obligations were, and, essentially, to give rights to unit title holders if they overstep the mark. Obviously, things like conflict of interest and due diligence and those kinds of things are going to be critical as well.

One of the other things we looked at was long-term maintenance plans. When you’re digging in here it might sound very dull and unimportant but, I can assure you, thank you—I can see you again, Chlöe—but when your roof is leaking and no one has put money aside and it’s a $100,000 or $200,000 job, you get pretty excited about it. So it is really important. For myself, I was a bit sceptical of the ability to opt out of long-term maintenance plans but, once again, if you’re a body corporate and you want to opt out of having them, it’s a big call but over to the owners, ultimately. But what we did do was recognise that there’s a kind of distinction between a long long-term maintenance plan—30 years—and sort of the immediate long-term of 10 years. In 10 years you can have, essentially, a schedule of maintenance, but in 30 years, what you’re going to say is out there we expect we will be re-roofing, or re-cladding, or whatever it might be. So it’s a different kind of plan. The first requires a lot more detail; the other ones are high level.

I’ll just touch on, if I can, one other area, because it was, in fact, new to the bill, and that’s around the role of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), because, at the moment, if there’s a problem in a body corporate, it’s up to the body corporate members to fix that problem, or to litigate, or to go through a dispute resolution process. In some of these large bodies corporate, that may not work. There may be absentee owners, or the owners simply don’t have the wherewithal to do that. So, essentially, MBIE has been given some enforcement powers, including the power to request documents. The one that we really wrestled with, and we really did, was a power to enter. I can say that the committee members, and I think we were pretty much all one here, were concerned about a power to enter. So that power to enter, to see whether the Act is being complied with, will only exist by order of a Tenancy Tribunal. I think that’s a really good protection, to have a sort of quasi-judicial oversight, because, particularly for entry into a residential property, I think the threshold should be set very high, and I think we probably got it about right there.

So this is a really, really important bill. There is a lot in it. The material around disclosure is going to be important, and there was a significant discussion around how it would work in conveyancing terms, particularly with the later disclosure—the ability to cancel or not for non-disclosure. Now, there’s pre-contract disclosure—the kind of pack that you get when you sign the contract—and then, just prior to handing your money, there is the immediate disclosure, or the pre-settlement disclosure. Now, that’s usually an update, and we thought whilst you could defer settlement if you didn’t get it in a timely manner, we didn’t think it appropriate to have a cancellation right in there. So that’s maybe something that the member will be asking us to have another look at. But, certainly, it’s an important point to make sure that people get the right information and that they can look through it.

The idea was to simplify the disclosure process. Again, it’s about cost, because putting that documentation together, the original bill, I think, was a little onerous. It required too much of the seller of a body corporate, and that’s just another transaction cost which will drive the price up, string out a settlement process, and make it more difficult for these really important housing units to be bought and sold.

So, look, this is an example of the House coming together effectively to try and improve something—another little piece of the puzzle of housing in New Zealand. I’m really happy. You can see that there’s probably going to be some debate yet to come. If we make the bill better that’s good, but I’m happy to say that I think the Finance and Expenditure Committee did an absolutely fantastic job and worked really hard with officials on making this bill as good as it possibly can be.

So kia ora. Thank you, Madam Speaker. I commend this to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker, and it’s a pleasure to take my first call as National’s new housing spokesperson on a bill that I won’t pretend to have had anything to do with, but I do want to acknowledge the very hard work of Nicola Willis, who has the custody of this bill, but also Judith Collins, who I see is in the House tonight. The former National housing spokesperson who introduced this bill was the Hon Nikki Kaye, who did all the sort of heavy lifting on it as a member’s bill back in 2016 and 2017 at the tail end of the last National Government.

Nicola Willis: Oh, they were better days.

CHRIS BISHOP: Oh, they were glory days—

Hon Member: Glory days.

CHRIS BISHOP: They were glory days. It’s just one of those lessons, I suppose, that good things take time. And a real example of building support within a particular community and going away and doing the research, which Nikki Kaye did as local MP for Auckland Central—I remember she ran the apartment blues session and a lot of people told their stories, in some cases horror stories, of owning and living in apartments, and then she worked with the sector and developed a bill. And, like many members’ bills that attempt to deal with complicated areas of law, it wasn’t probably perfect when it first turned up, but now it’s been introduced and sent to the Finance and Expenditure Committee, and it’s come back in better shape. And so here we are in early 2022 considering it, and I understand that there’s further changes proposed by the member, and we’ll wait and see whether or not they meet with the support of the House.

But I do want to say that today’s member’s day is really an example of Parliament at its best because we’ve just had the debate on the abortion legislation, the safe areas bill, and as David Seymour noted, that is an example of a bill that again wasn’t in a particularly great shape when it first came into the Parliament. It was sent to the committee. It’s been fixed. It’s now met with near unanimous support of the Parliament over an extended period of time. And this is another example where perhaps not perfect when introduced, but a good start addressing a serious issue or a series of issues, improved by a committee, where a committee put their head down and really got on with the job. And I want to acknowledge Duncan Webb, who I understand is a pretty fair and good chair of the Finance and Expenditure Committee.

Just in passing, I will say that the treatment of the abortion bill and also this unit titles bill stands in contradistinction to the treatment of my bill, which is the lawyers and conveyancers bill, which went to the Justice Committee and met with unanimous support of the Parliament at first reading, and there was no good faith attempt by anyone to improve the bill and work together with the officials to—

Kieran McAnulty: Sour grapes.

CHRIS BISHOP: Well, it is sour grapes. I’m annoyed about it because politics has got in the way of access to justice, and Labour members will have to justify on the campaign trail in 18 months’ time why they have disenfranchised 8,000 lawyers from doing pro-bono legal work who want to do work. So, I mean, good luck with that if you want to defend that. Good luck to you, but I think you’ll struggle to explain why 8,000 lawyers are prohibited from doing pro-bono legal work on the basis that Labour members don’t like me very much. OK, that’s cool. You can do that. But maybe, maybe they like Nicola Willis and Judith Collins more; maybe not.

Kieran McAnulty: That’s not true.

CHRIS BISHOP: Oh “That’s not true.”, says Kieran. See, we play in the parliamentary cricket team, and I know that Kieran thinks I’m all right, but maybe his colleagues don’t. But anyway, that was really just an aside, and he’s right. I do have sour grapes about it, but that’s OK.

This this is an important vote. My first home—[Interruption] What was that?

Hon Member: He’s 12th man.

CHRIS BISHOP: Well, he’s actually our best player, so we can’t make him the 12th man. [Interruption] I’m trying to be nice. We never got that coffee earlier today that we had after a little tête-á-tête with the Speaker.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): I remind the member to come back to the bill.

CHRIS BISHOP: We can go for a coffee too, Madam Speaker.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Order! Order! Thank you. Back to the bill.

CHRIS BISHOP: Anyway, I was going to tell you, Madam Speaker, and Mr McAnulty, about my first house or apartment—you know, my first home, which was an apartment. And like many New Zealanders, I bought my first home in my mid-twenties and I couldn’t afford a house. I was living in Auckland at the time and I could see house prices going up. And like many Kiwis, you want to get on the property ladder and you don’t want to miss out; you’ve got FOMO, fear of missing out, and that drives a lot of price increases. This was back in 2013 and the first home I could afford was an apartment and I bought an apartment in Ponsonby. I can testify to the House that the prospect of owning an apartment did scare me, because you do hear the horror stories—you do. You read about people who buy apartments and it all looks great when you first turn up and you buy into the body corporate, and then a year later, you find that you’re up for the lift, which has broken down and no one has put aside the money to upgrade it. And you’re stung with a 15 grand bill, and when you’ve just bought the apartment, you probably don’t have that much spare cash lying around. So you do read these stories.

And many people listening, although I suspect there’s not that many at this time of night, but people listening in Wellington will know of stories in Wellington and Auckland that are very similar to that. But the critical point is this: we need more apartments, we need more apartments built, and we need more apartments that people live in. And we want people to have confidence to be able to buy an apartment, not necessarily even for their first home. There are many older New Zealanders who move out of the big three and four bedroom house with the picket fence in the suburbs because it’s too big for them. The kids have left home and they want to downsize, and actually there are many older New Zealanders for whom a nice one or two bedroom apartment in the city is something they want to move to.

So the critical point is we need a range of housing types. We do need the suburban greenfields housing houses and we do need the medium and high density townhouses in and around public transport corridors and spines, and we do need apartments in the CBD. And I, for one, would like to see more apartments in Auckland and more apartments in Wellington, because it’s ultimately by getting greater variety of housing types and greater housing supply that we will start to grapple and tackle our housing challenges. And so this bill’s aim of promoting confidence in apartment buying, and particularly bodies corporate, is extremely important. I look forward to the debate as it progresses and as National’s new spokesperson, I’ll be participating in that debate. Thank you very much, Madam Speaker, and I look forward to this bill progressing further.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise as a member of the Finance and Expenditure Committee in support of the second reading of the Unit Titles (Strengthening Body Corporate Governance and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. I’d like to acknowledge not only the member whose name is on the bill, Nicola Willis, but also my colleague Helen White, who has in my opinion picked up much of the real work in making this a better bill. She has helped us get to the result we see in the second reading today. I’m looking forward to hearing Helen White speak on the many parts she has driven as a city-based Auckland MP with many of her constituents living in apartments and coming to talk to her about their issues.

This has been a very large piece of work. When it started at our committee, it started with our member Nicola Willis, who was on the Finance and Expenditure Committee (FEC) at the time. Then she left, and then we had Chris Luxon, and then he left, and then came along Simon Bridges, but only for short time, and now he’s left too. I would like to wish him very well in his future.

Now the member whose name was on the bill is coming back, and I do wish her well in her new role as well today. She may also be returning to our great select committee, which is chaired by Duncan Webb, who has highlighted some of the real challenges that this better bill [Audio failure]

I would also like to acknowledge my colleague Barbara Edmonds, who chaired the [Audio failure] through all-day submissions from Auckland. It was an excellent and efficient day, I must say.

As a regional MP, I have to admit that when I first started working on this bill, I was not as passionate as many of the city-based MPs, and much of this has been brought about by these multi-storey - plus high apartment buildings in Auckland and other cities. So it was much to my delight when I found we would be hearing from a submitter from my own electorate of Tukituki, from Frimley Lifestyle Village in Hastings. The submission aims to highlight a villa; a single-storey, village that comprises 66 villas, made up of 23 duplexes and 20 single units. We heard that in a development like Frimley Village, there are no common spaces like lifts or stairs, and they raised specific concerns, including the requirement for a body corporate manager to engage professional experts and to have a long-term maintenance fund.

They argued that they had already made the longstanding decision to retain in the village all functions of managing the development. Now, that’s not to say that they might not, if they choose, engage professional assistance to help from time to time. The same could be said, as they raised in their submission, about having the unnecessary costs of having, say, a professional surveyor or engineer. Now, I’m pleased to say as the local MP on the FEC that had this submission, they were listened to. I have also been able to follow up with the chair of Frimley Village, actually today when I spoke to Trevor Helson and thanked him for making the submission. He had actually been able to make strong submissions that we listened to.

Now, in the bill, we have, in the second reading, an opt-out provision, which would allow flexibility to manage their own affairs as they see fit.

In cities like Hastings, where we are seeing more density of housing, going up, not out, as part of the place-based housing being proposed, I believe there will be situations where this amended bill will have important protections for unit title holders. And we will be seeing this happen more in the regions. So as a provincial MP I am pleased to have participated in this legislative process, and how relevant it will be for growing regions like Hawke’s Bay in the future.

The main purposes of the bill being introduced tonight in the second reading are: improving information available to prospective unit buyers, strengthening body corporate governance arrangements, increasing the standards of the body corporate managers, ensuring that unit title development adequately plans for and funds long-term maintenance projects, and strengthens the dispute resolution process.

Housing is a huge issue for everybody. We want to have great homes, a range of different living options, and a modern, bright future for everyone. I am very proud to speak to this and to acknowledge Frimley Lifestyle Village in my speech tonight. I commend the bill to the House.

Before I call the next speaker, I’d like to remind all the members in the House to keep the interjections and the noise down. One of the reasons why there was a period of time when we couldn’t hear the member who was giving her speech via Zoom was because it was picking up the noise from this House.

E te Māngai, tēnā koe. Tēnā koe e te Whare. I want to start by acknowledging Nicola Willis, who, as she herself stated, initially inherited this bill from the Hon Judith Collins and the Hon Nikki Kaye, my predecessor in Auckland Central. Nicola has done a stellar job in stewarding this through Parliament and the politics, I might add, associated since then. And I want to thank her for her willingness to collaborate with me, and, actually, for her work as well with the Associate Minister of Housing (Public Housing) in seeking to improve what might seem a very niche and nerdy law but impacts hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders’ lives.

Such is a sign of the times: I am giving my first ever virtual speech in the Chamber whilst isolating as a household contact in my apartment in Auckland Central, in the same way that I had the privilege of working with the Body Corporate Chairs’ Group. I want to here particularly acknowledge Tim Jones and the Auckland City Centre Residents’ Group, and thank you particularly to Noelene and to Adam on apartment isolation guidance for bodies corporate. So too I have had the privilege of working with them every step of the way as this bill has progressed.

While Parliament has recently passed historic laws to increase density and amenity in our cities, which others have referred to, this bill is concerned with how we govern the communities that form in those buildings. It is, at a basic level, about the information that people are entitled to when they are looking to buy into a place. It’s about the conduct that we expect of the professionals brought in to help manage increasingly complicated administration and maintenance. It’s about the reasonable limits to power by any one of the owners within that building, or a block of those owners. Ultimately, it is a rulebook for more and more of our future living.

The first reading of this bill in Parliament happened actually almost a year ago today, on 10 March in 2021. Unanimous support across the Chamber took it to the Finance and Expenditure Committee (FEC), which I was stoked to see Nicola Willis agreed with me on, and I’m pleased to hear, given the party reshuffle, that Nicola will soon be joining us back in her rightful place on FEC. I want to say thank you, as well, to the Minister for agreeing to lend us officials to our committee for the purposes of improving this law, because, indeed, they have. They helped us to process 85 submissions from interested individuals and organisations, 39 of which gave us in-person submissions.

Thank you to all of those submitters who meticulously picked through the issues. It was brilliant to have been able to hold one of those sessions, in a COVID-free period, in the one and only electorate of Auckland Central. Throughout the process of public hearings and evidence, we heard some of the incredibly complex circumstances, the legal fish hooks, international best practice, and local challenges, be they our country’s position on a fault line and earthquake risk and the requisite reasonable planning required; all about the New South Wales model; increasing numbers of developments with shared amenities skirting the grey area of the law and causing future headaches for buyers who couldn’t have known better. And we heard so much more. Those submissions helped to improve this bill substantially, as others have reflected on.

But there were three key issues that I ended up having a sole differing view from the committee, as reflected in our report. As the Green committee member and as the representative of Auckland Central, I still believe that they are requiring as a serious revisit, and I’m confident, as far as the major two go, as Nicola Willis has just reflected on—and I’m keen to see her Supplementary Order Papers (SOPs) to that effect—that we will see progress. We wait in hope that the Minister and Labour members are as well. I might add that I have some SOPs up my sleeve, as well, if they are needed.

The two big issues regarding those changes are disclosure to potential buyers and proxy voting. The third issue, while currently periphery, I do think could pose future issues if not pre-emptively professionalising body corporate managers. There is fulsome mention of it in the select committee report, so I won’t labour it, but I think that we have found, time and again, that where this Parliament has had a good opportunity to professionalise sectors, particularly the property industry, there’s been a broad refusal to act until it is too late. The select committee majority removed previously required professional industry organisation membership for body corporate managers on advice from officials that we had not yet seen enough of a problem to justify the need for it. But just like Parliament refused to regulate property managers in 2008 because at that point in time there wasn’t a sizeable enough evidence of a problem, leading us to 15 years later and now having to fix that problem after a lot of collateral damage, I see this as an unnecessary, missed opportunity to not tighten things up now. It’s gutting that other members of the committee didn’t agree, and I hope a future MP isn’t looking at this speech in Hansard in the future, as I did on the point of property managers, in another 15 years’ time.

But back to the major two points on which I believe we now seem to have, at very least, by virtue of the leadership of the member in charge of this bill, broad consensus to address and to fix, on disclosure and on proxies. I wouldn’t really hesitate to suggest that there weren’t many MPs—although, as we just heard, I would never doubt the intellectual prowess of our chair, “Dr Dunc”—sorry, that’s Dr Duncan Webb—that many of us could seriously follow the changes made in committee to pre-contractual disclosure statements, nor the rationale for the removal of the pre-settlement disclosure. I’ll be the first to admit that I couldn’t, which is why I again registered a dissenting view. It has in turn been validating to know that those are sentiments shared by those with property, conveyancing, and broader legal experience. It’s heartening to know that the member in charge, Nicola Willis, now agrees and that we will be continuing work together to amend those clauses to a far more practical, accessible, and workable set of rules. I feel that this one, hopefully, will be relatively easily resolved.

The second major issue is on the removal of limits to proxy voting. For the uninitiated—very lucky of you—proxy voting is when you get the right to vote on somebody else’s behalf. While that seems to make sense generally, as elucidated by Dr Duncan Webb—life happens, after all—problems, and I mean huge problems, can arise with what’s come to be known colloquially as proxy farming. This is where one group, or individuals, do their darnedest to collect as many votes as possible to force through their will on everybody else. It’s where I’ve heard countless reports of, effectively, corporate takeovers, where owner-occupiers are plunged sometimes into debt by egregious costs forced on them as a result of entities who capture enough of the votes to require excessive work in common areas in order to split the bill and flip their property for more money. It’s particularly dangerous in instances of absentee landlords.

If I may register it on the parliamentary record, I know of many current instances where such proxy farming has occurred in my electorate, with a number of overseas-based landlords caring about not much else more than profit maximisation, resulting in cuts to amenities, security, and upkeep for everybody else in the building. Where those situations are in their most egregious and lessening neighbourhood safety, I have, unfortunately, found that some people, some politicians, and even some news reporters have wrongfully begun to lay the blame in the stigmatising concept of Kāinga Ora tenants, which, firstly, could not be any further from the truth, but it does satiate a deeply dangerous narrative about who does and who doesn’t belong in our neighbourhoods. The fact of the matter is, we should be creating rules to prioritise the views and the values of those who live and breathe our communities, not profit maximisation and fast decisions when they can be bad decisions. While the majority of the committee—everyone bar this lonely Greenie—originally agreed with the removal of those limits, as Nicola Willis has just told us, she has since held conversations that have swayed the National Party stance, and I sincerely hope that Labour colleagues follow.

I’m really looking forward to the committee of the whole House stage in the next fortnight or so, where we can see these improvements come to fruition and, hopefully, debate some awesome SOPs. The Greens are incredibly proud to support this bill, and we will be striving to improve it for all New Zealanders, current and future, who will bring all of this talk of density to life and community-building. Kia ora.

Everyone knows somebody who has bought a leaky home or apartment, and with the massive growth in apartment dwelling over the last couple of decades, sadly the incidence of those who’ve been lassoed with faulty dwellings and massive repair bills has also grown. The damage here isn’t just the financial side, it’s the stress of uncertainty, it’s infighting within bodies corporate, rising repair bills—I know people in my electorate, Taieri, who are living in Dunedin who say their families have actually been torn apart, and their lives have been ruined by the purchase of a leaky apartment, and I don’t think they’re exaggerating their pain.

I want to shout-out to my former TV colleagues, Rachel Stace and John Hagen, for their documentary A Living Hell: Apartment Disasters and then the follow up, A Rotten Shame. They’re both fine storytellers, and their documentaries on leaky apartments that they’ve made are a real labour of love, and they’re an example of the fourth estate doing its job really well. They lift the lid on the leaky apartment sector and some of the cowboy developers who for decades have exploited New Zealand’s housing crisis by making sub-standard dwellings. And so that’s part of the housing crisis that Labour inherited when we came to office.

There’s a lot of work to do to review and modernise the Unit Titles Act 2010. Labour committed to that in 2020, and we will be introducing legislation that is broad and pretty much overhauls the way unit titles are managed. But in the meantime, this bill before us tonight moves in the right direction, which is why we’re supporting it. So it’s really good to see it in the House again, and as others have said it is the end of a long select committee process. So for taking on a pretty messy and problematic sector, and for her perseverance working with us all on the Finance and Expenditure Committee to panel-beat the original bill into shape, I do commend former committee member Nicola Willis, and look forward to seeing her back on the committee.

Labour supports increasing transparency when it comes to the information owners disclose to prospective buyers. We also respect that all-important legal maxim, caveat emptor, and in this bill we think we’ve got the balance right. Others have mentioned what the bill changes—it creates a proportionate utility cost, a code of conduct for body corporate committees, requirements for long-term maintenance plans, and a yearly audit of those plans for complexes larger than 10 units. And it requires sellers to disclose information about a unit to potential buyers, and prevents bodies corporate from entering service agreements for longer than 24 months. So this member’s bill makes some of the changes we would like to see.

When it comes to unit titles, as I’ve said, there’s a lot to sort out, so the bill goes some ways in addressing some of those issues. Many of the changes created by the bill seek to implement recommendations from a 2016 review of the unit title regime. Those recommendations were really about trying to empower apartment owners and avoid leaky home - type situations. So specifically, the changes seek to give prospective owners more information, so as to be able to make informed choices when buying dwellings like apartments; make the governance of apartment buildings stronger and more accountable; increase the standards of body corporate managers to safeguard the interests of apartment owners; and ensure that unit title developments adequately plan for and fund long-term maintenance projects, as we’ve heard; as well as strengthening the dispute resolution process.

As I’ve mentioned, the bill tonight looks quite different now to when it was introduced, and as a committee, we felt the industry-wide obligations were unduly onerous, so we worked hard to make sure the industry compliance was reasonable while still keeping with the intent of the proposed obligations and duties. As a one-time lawyer myself, I could appreciate the real value of having a professor in law chair our committee in the form of Dr Duncan Webb, as we painstakingly made our way through the hundreds of clauses, as we’ve already heard. We discussed things like whether a broom cupboard might be misconstrued as a room for the sake of a long-term maintenance plan, we debated parties’ rights and responsibilities if disclosure is incomplete, inaccurate, or not provided in a timely fashion—including a right for buyers to delay or cancel settlement. We were concerned that some of the original submissions didn’t appropriately reflect how properties are usually bought and sold, and actually most of the submitters shared similar concerns.

So I’d like to acknowledge my Labour colleague Helen White MP, who worked really hard to ensure that what was being proposed made practical sense on the ground in Auckland with the many apartment owners that she had spoken to over many months. They told her that sellers often hire agents to fulfil those requirements, and therefore it seemed to us that requiring disclosure discussions specifically with the purchaser, excluding their agent, put an unreasonable obligation on the buyer, especially at the pre-contract disclosure stage. We heard a diverse range of opinions from submitters about exactly what information should be included in a pre-contract disclosure statement. And based on those views and advice received, we changed up the information required, again, to fine tune the balance and ensure that they worked in a practical sense.

So, for example, we included the requirement for details of any weathertightness issues that had not been remediated. Plus, we included needing details of any other known significant defects that might require remediation. We also said a copy of the body corporate’s long-term maintenance plan should be in those disclosures, along with the body corporate financial statements and audit reports for the last three years—and that was opposed to seven years in the bill as it was introduced. So those are just some of the examples of how technical we got, however we believe the changes were important because they would strengthen the overall disclosure regime while balancing the rights and the obligations of the parties.

This Government believes every New Zealander should live in a warm, dry, secure house, whether they own or rent. There’s no quick fix to the housing crisis we inherited, but we are determined to do it. It’s a problem that’s been decades in the making, and just like the unit titles problem it is basically that there’s not enough new affordable homes that have been built—and our policies are on track to do that. We first moved to stop housing speculation with our ban on foreign buyers, and now we’re removing tax advantages for property speculators. We’re on track to deliver 18,000 public and transitional homes by 2024. We’re replacing the Resource Management Act, which is a massive step in the right direction. I’d like to shout out to my colleague, Rachel Brooking, MP, who’s based here in Dunedin and Otago and who brings her considerable expertise to this work. We’re also introducing new building intensification rules, which other speakers tonight have referred to, and that will mean up to three homes of three stories can be built on most sites without the need for a resource consent. So new rules will result in tens of thousands of new homes built in the next five to eight years, and I’m looking forward to seeing that in my electorate of Taieri. We’ve got lots of people needing homes, apartments thanks to our record low unemployment rate, and needing housing.

So there’s one thing this unit titles bill has taught me, along with the assignment that I attempted a couple of weeks ago for my postgraduate studies into finance and policy. I attempted to do my own analysis on the housing crisis. And what I learnt was this: housing is complicated, unit titles are complex; there is no quick fix. But Labour is using the right levers to sort out both the supply side and the demand side, and unit titles are part of the equation.

So the member Nicola Willis, and before her, Judith Collins, and I think before her, Nikki Kaye, they took on a mammoth task bringing this particular bill to life. They should be commended for shepherding it through this House, and they can take heart that despite the panel beating that it has had—because it is a complex area, as we’ve heard tonight, and I guess the bill was many years in coming. A lot of changes have happened and there were also just a lot of changes still to be made by us—and we’ve heard tonight that there are more changes being suggested by Nicola Willis, which we are interested to see. I think that the bill that came to us at select committee was in a shape where we could work on it. We’ve done that work, we’re happy where it landed. I don’t think it needs any more work, but let’s wait and see. It’s well on its way to becoming law.

So, with that, I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise tonight on behalf of the ACT Party, in support of the second reading of the Unit Titles (Strengthening Body Corporate Governance and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. It must be quite a while since we had the first reading on this bill, because I was in my office earlier and I went and checked Hansard on what I had said in the first reading, and I had said in that speech that I don’t own a home. It’s coming up to nearly a year since I bought a property, so I thought it was quite incredible how long this process must have been at select committee, and how much has changed in that time.

At the time, I referred to the fact that I wanted to—in the future, hopefully—be able to afford a three-bedroom weatherboard home with enough room for a dog, and a garden, and enough surface-level problems to justify weekend trips to Bunnings. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to afford a home with three bedrooms that’s weatherboard, and it doesn’t have room for a dog—definitely not. It does, however, have enough surface-level problems, because I have already gone to Bunnings with dripping taps, and I am very proud that I am able to fix my own home, like many other New Zealanders. But I have been in the situation where I bought into a body corp, like many New Zealanders who have also bought into body corps, because we’re seeing more and more apartment buildings and more unit titles being used for long-term residential development nowadays. And while my home is a well-established one, there are a lot of townhouses and apartments going up all around New Zealand, and more people will be finding themselves delving into the depths of body corporates, and figuring out the ins and outs of what’s happening, and maintenance funds, and long-term projections, and how they get on in a relationship with everybody else who lives around them.

Apartment dwelling and living in townhouses, it’s more than just students in temporary accommodation. It’s more than just young professionals renting in town, wanting to get to live closer to their work for a short period of time until they move out to the suburbs. More and more people are actually choosing to live in unit titles, and to raise their families without a back garden, and without a larger spot of land—but close to parks, and close to their family.

Around 150,000 New Zealanders currently live in apartments, and that is expected to double in the next 20 years. There is a need, when people are buying into these types of developments, to know what they’re buying into: what the maintenance issues are actually going to look like, how the body corporate even operates day to day, and whether they have set aside contingency funds for any future issues. I found, when I was in the process of trying to look for a place, that the body corporate minutes are a goldmine, a treasure trove of really interesting relationships and interactions—things as specific as whether or not a specific unit should have the ability to own a dog, whether one person has complained about the type of carpet that their neighbour has laid down in the other unit next door, and the fact that somebody stomps too loud overhead. There is so much information, and some of it is quite hilarious.

But there’s also some serious points that happen with bodies corporate that happen too. That is, the interactions between, for example, people who live long term in a unit versus people who own them and rent them out as landlords, and the conflicting relationships that can exist between whether people want to put more money aside for long-term maintenance plans or the particular type of roofing style that should be used in the future. There are huge issues, and this bill seeks to go some small way to improve the governance for existing owners, and the disclosure for potential new owners, and strengthen dispute resolution that is inevitable to happen in any form of body corporate or unit title arrangement.

And there’s a really good example, when I was reading through the report from the Finance and Expenditure Committee (FEC), that says that when you are trying to obtain information about a unit title development, it can be a lot more difficult than what you find on a standalone property. For example, a buyer cannot reasonably assess an apartment building’s ventilation system. However, as a member of the body corporate, they might be liable for the shared obligation for repairs and upgrades to the system, and the integrity of the disclosure regime relies on the seller being able to access that information in order to disclose it to the buyer. So there’s a really important relationship there that exists, which is in the interests of both the seller and the buyer and the body corp. Nobody intends to buy into a new apartment development to not be transparent about what’s going to happen in the future. But you can certainly see that you might, in good faith, buy into what you think is being run very well and in 20 years’ time nothing’s been maintained but it’s not through any fault of your own; it’s through the management of the body corporate system. And before you know it, you’re finding it incredibly hard to sell because the information that you rely on to be able to sell your own home isn’t actually able to be found through the body corp. There’s information that the seller needs and there’s information that the buyer needs, and there’s information that the body corporate should be making available. So this goes some way to trying to fix that and make it in everybody’s best interest.

There are also the important points of making sure that we’re not putting too much a costly burden on people that outweighs the benefits. And I thought one really good change that the FEC came back with was about the long-term maintenance plans. They said that they “empathise with submitters’ concerns and agree that it would be difficult to account for the future unknowns, such as inflation or new technologies,” when they were planning on changing the long-term maintenance plans from 10 years to 30 years, and they instead settled on a bit of a middle ground that there should be a detailed cost estimate for the first 10 years and then projections for the following 20 years. So it’s important that people know what they’re buying into and what the long-term maintenance plans are, but not putting such an unnecessary burden on the people who are living in that development that it’s going into too much detail where those costs outweigh the benefits. So I think that is a good middle ground that we’ve settled on.

Parliament should be here to help fix issues to make New Zealanders’ lives better. We should be there for better public policy, and I think this bill is a step in the right direction. On my final note, I would just say that I particularly like the change that allows for more proxy voting via electronic means, and I certainly look forward to being able to vote in my body corporate when I’m down here in Parliament. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Madam Speaker, thank you for letting me take a call on this bill, and I would first of all like to start by congratulating Nicola Willis on this bill. It’s a very important bill, and I’m very pleased that it has progressed with the cooperation of all parties.

I’d also like to thank Nikki Kaye, whose bill was really the first iteration of this bill. She promoted it and she worked with, as I understand it, Grant Robertson on this bill because Grant Robertson is in another big city, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that that’s where we’re seeing a passion for the changes, which are fairly necessary.

First of all, what I want to say about this is that the bill has changed enormously, and it’s changed enormously not because anyone did a bad job, but because times are changing and we’re learning about living together. We haven’t lived together in the same way in cities in the past in New Zealand, and a lot of our habits are actually not particularly useful when you do live together—we don’t really know how to do it. I suspect that in other cities in the world, we’d get this right more often, but we are used to making our own decisions about our own situations and not actually sharing and cooperating. So one of the things that I think this process taught me was that this issue actually goes well beyond the unit title. It goes to the whole area of community living, and we’re going to have to have a really good stream of work on that beyond this, because this was a gnarly piece of work.

It was really hard to get the balances that we did, but it’s only a piece of the picture, because there are still quite a few structures beyond it—things like people who don’t have body corporates, people who are actually living in company structures, etc. So those are the kinds of things that maybe in the future are places we need to go, but right now, what Labour saw was a pragmatic situation where it could add value to this bill and work cooperatively with the National Party and Nicola Willis to make this bill work.

So you will see a lot of change from the first iteration. Those changes are ones that are based on the stories we heard, and the stories we heard were actually fairly dramatic. This is people’s most expensive purchase, and it is also one which is going to attract a lot of people who can’t afford a house in the suburbs.

There’s a lot of vulnerable people buying apartments, and so we heard some pretty sad stories about people who have been caught up in a culture that wasn’t really ready for them. We’ll remember that a lot of the apartments that are in central Auckland are ones that were built at the time of leaky buildings, which adds to the issue, and they have been not necessarily handled in a mature fashion. So those issues that we had around disclosure, which were about making sure that we got the rules right about what was disclosed to a purchaser—those issues came out of really painful experiences for people. I hope that by bringing in this law, I can go from being a person who went through this process very worried about the purchases that people were making on apartments to actually being able to be feeling that people were safely making a purchase which is the most important purchase of their lives.

The first thing that has been done here is there’s been very much a balanced approach taken, but there will be a level of disclosure that a purchaser gets, and there will be a level of comfort about what happens if not everything is disclosed. So there is delay if, in fact, not everything is disclosed, and there’s enough records that they are getting that they know what they’re buying. It’s very, very important that people actually engage in good faith in these things, but these rules will, hopefully, set a culture that is actually one of good faith.

Another part of this is that when people engage a body corporate manager, they put a lot of faith into them. It’s very vulnerable when you do that, because that person has power over a lot of things, and this bill was one where we had actually gone for a code of conduct in that area. So those managers will be expected to behave in a certain way.

There are also issues, really, around remote voting. We’ve got this issue about proxies that perhaps will come up for a little bit more debate because it sounds like there may be a Supplementary Order Paper about this, but one of the things to keep in mind about proxies and the information around those is that now people will have an option of voting for themselves remotely. So they won’t necessarily have to engage in the proxy voting situation by giving their vote to someone else in the same way. They will be able to actually directly engage in a process when they are involved with their body corporate.

There’s also a real distinction made between very big body corporates and little ones. There’s been very much a pragmatic approach taken to how much we can expect simple structures to do, and you’ve heard my colleague Anna Lorck talk about that. Simple structures won’t have to do the same amount as the big structures, because having a big apartment—like we heard from somebody from Metropolis. Metropolis is, basically, a city. It’s 500-plus people. That is going to have a lot more complex issues and it’s going to need a much more professional level of management. We heard about that alongside other people we heard from who are in single-level dwellings that are connected by shared walls, but they have simple structures, and those structures won’t have the same level of need for maintenance, etc., and they won’t have the same level of professionalism required in their management.

The code of conduct that was used for body corporate managers was actually borrowed from Queensland. Queensland has quite a complicated structure, and we leaned on it because it had got it right in this instance. So I’m confident that that part of the bill is spectacularly robust.

We’ve also got maintenance plans. When you think about when you buy something that’s so important, it’s very easy to fool yourself that you’ve got a great deal if you don’t actually know what the cost of upkeep is going to be. It’s pretty important that people know what they’re in for, and so there is a plan here to maintain the building that is much more detailed in the first 10 years and is high level out from that, and that will actually let somebody buy a house or buy an apartment knowing what they’re buying. We’ve been pretty pragmatic about that, as I think you’ve heard from other people, but we haven’t made it rigorous at the level of that later part of the years, because, practically, it wouldn’t be possible. It’s very hard to tell what happens in the future, but it’s pretty easy to actually plan out to 10 years.

We’ve also put in a dispute resolution process, and that’s important because the processes that we had weren’t fit for purpose. We’ve actually just raised the cap and we’ve put the disputes of under $100,000 into a much more user-friendly pathway, because when litigation is so expensive and so intimidating, it tends, again, to come back because of the people who are feeling most vulnerable and whose purses are tightest. They’re the ones who suffer under that system.

As Dr Duncan Webb said, we took very seriously the issue about the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment people entering the property. We had a good look at it because, obviously, it’s something that we probably—many of us on the committee are lawyers and we all care about powers of entry. So that really did get a lot of scrutiny.

Finally, penalties. Penalties are something that are there for non-compliance. You’ve got to have teeth in these things, and there are teeth, but, basically, this is a very, very pragmatic bill that has moved a long way from where it started.

So I am grateful to Nikki Kaye for bringing this issue into the ballot originally, and I’m grateful to Nicola Willis for pursuing it. Thank you. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Thanks for the opportunity to take a short call on this bill. This is a bill that had a lot of the work done by the Hon Nikki Kaye. I don’t think that Grant Robertson did anything at all, actually, other than to note in a Wellington Central meeting that he did think that there were some really good points in the bill but the Government wasn’t supporting it. I was with Nikki Kaye at a meeting with Phil Twyford, who was then the Minister of Housing, in 2018, where we suggested that the Government take over the bill and actually turn it into a Government bill so that it could have all the work done that the Government was saying needed to be done, and that request was refused. So I don’t think we should suggest that this is—in any way, shape, or form—a Government bill. I think the current Minister of Housing is correct, though, to support this bill, and I’m pleased to see that sort of cross-party support for it.

We all know, those of us who have lived in apartments instead of a freehold single-unit property, that living in an apartment in a body corporate situation is significantly not the same as living in a freehold property with land around it and your neighbours a wee way away. There is required a significantly more respectful acknowledgment of the fact that your neighbours are upstairs, downstairs, and beside you, and that consequently when we get to some of the horror stories that come from apartments, it is not just that people are being picky; sometimes it’s because the way of life that some people undertake is actually not suitable for apartment living. At this stage, we are currently living in an apartment as we have more renovations done to our house, but we are living in an apartment block where there are no animals allowed. So there are real restrictions on people’s decisions, and that is something which people know when they buy into or rent into these properties: that there are restrictions.

This, however, is a bill that deals with things such as the issues around long-term maintenance programmes, the ability of people who are buying into properties to actually understand what the costs might be. I think it’s a real shame that we see, sometimes, properties advertised as having no body corporate fees. What that generally means is that they’re a cross-lease, which, by the way, brings its own issues. But there is this sort of myth around, and I don’t know whether it’s because of the stories about leaky apartments—I mean, you could say the same about leaky houses and leaky anything else, too—but it is important that we address the fact that we do need to have more people able to access apartment living in a way that gets them housed.

I look at the fact that the United Kingdom is slightly smaller than New Zealand in size, they have 68 million people; we have 5 million people and we can’t house the people that we’ve got. There’s something incredibly wrong. That’s why I support the ability of housing to be intensified in ways to get people housed. It is an absolute disgrace that property in this country costs so much. It is an absolute disgrace that we have people, 25,000-plus, on the State house waiting list. It is an absolute disgrace that we don’t have enough housing for people. There is no reason, other than restrictive use of land, the cost of land, the fact that we have so many rules. And we’re worrying about leaky homes; we should be worrying about the fact that we’ve got people in tents and living under bridges. It’s about time that we do have an obligation to make sure that people have an opportunity to purchase a home; to have a stake in the ground, as such; to be able to have something to leave to their children—an opportunity to be part of a property-owning democracy and to know that nobody can kick them out of their accommodation. That is something that we should celebrate.

I’m very happy to have been the member whose name this bill was in, and I’m very happy, also, to pass it over to Nicola Willis, who is already doing a fantastic job in the portfolio. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Good to see the member opposite remains an irony-free zone. A shame that speech wasn’t made in about 2013, when the Salvation Army were told by Bill English in his office that they had a major housing problem coming and could they help with it, and they had to tell him they couldn’t. What a shame that that member didn’t stand up and make that speech about then, because we probably wouldn’t be in the situation we are now, where fortunately—I’m very proud to be a member of a Government that has actually now hit record number of consents.

Hon Judith Collins: Point of order, Madam Speaker. The member, who has now resumed his seat, has no idea about what speeches I gave at those appropriate times.

GREG O’CONNOR: Well, if I get a lazy moment some time over the winter, then I’ll go through Hansard and find one, shall I—to that speaker. I’m sure that there’ll be some riveting reading.

But anyway, perhaps I should get back to the topic. This is a topic that really is a time, because even that last speaker did speak of how many people there are in the UK. In fact, just a bit of accuracy: if you overlay a map of the South Island over the UK, you will see it’s actually vastly smaller than the whole of New Zealand land area itself. But she does make a good point: as you do walk around the UK, around anywhere around Europe; any of the major capitals, Barcelona comes to mind—where certainly you’ve got to walk a long way from city centres before you’ll see any single-level dwellings. You may get the odd relic of wealthier times in the area, but certainly living in apartments, living multi-storey, is part of life in the Northern Hemisphere. As a result, the laws around, the regulations around, and the way that people live have evolved accordingly.

Of course, in New Zealand, we haven’t. We have looked forward to our quarter-acre paradise, designed at a time when those people who owned those houses, or were even renting them, were expected to put in a garden out the back, there was room for it, and they would actually grow their own vegetables and supplies. Well, those days are well and truly gone. If you go to any town or city in New Zealand of any medium size, you’ll find many of those back lawns now have been subdivided and the dreaded cross-lease that the previous speaker talked about is a reality, even if it is really only down a driveway.

I personally nearly bought a property recently myself, became aware of the complications that were going to arise as a result of it being a unit title, particularly since one of the people on the unit title didn’t live in either of the flats on the property but did own the land around, and was going to be able to do, essentially, what he wanted as an equal partner in that.

Many speakers before me today have spoken of finding out just—well, human nature initially, particularly where there is a sharing, because when you live in those sort of confines, if you can’t rely on human nature, if you can’t rely on the goodwill of your fellow man or woman in that area, then you will actually require some sort of governance; some sort of oversight.

In fact, it’s quite important that while we discuss this tonight, it is an amendment bill, to go back to actually what the Unit Titles Act 2010—it’s the law governing building developments, where multiple owners own a unit title, and there is shared ownership of common areas such as lifts, lobbies, or driveways.

More New Zealanders are choosing to live in apartments and townhouses. The annual number of townhouses, flats, and units consented exceeding 10,000 for the first time in August. So, again, all talk really, be it around your local territorial authority, your local council, district councils, is all now about intensification, particularly in the city. While many residents’ associations and others are naturally concerned to preserve the nature of their areas, the reality of it, I think we all know, is we can’t continue to just build out, particularly where you drive into work and you see what once was beautiful, growing, luscious, and fertile land now being housing. That’s pretty much the case around most cities and even towns in New Zealand now. It simply can’t continue, and the reality of it is: we simply must go up. If we’re going to go up, we need the sort of rules and regulations and guidelines that this piece of legislation actually enables.

This long-term maintenance plan—I think I was on the committee that considered this bill and really that was, I suppose, the part of it that really struck me, as we started talking about the need for a 30-year long-term maintenance plan. So what’s that all about? Well, clearly that’s the sort of plan—there’s nothing worse than buying into a building, into an apartment, into a unit, and suddenly finding out the lifts are going to need replacing in five years’ time and it was well known to those who perhaps got out, perhaps to those who have been part of the body corporate, not minuted, and so there was no way they would have been able to find out. So you get in and all of a sudden find not only is it the dreaded “leaky” that many speakers have spoken about tonight but actually you’re up for the lifts.

Also, just another aspect is of where someone who did buy into a body corporate, they were on the property, the property they actually occupied was industrial property, which wasn’t even connected to the largely residential and semi-commercial property connected to it, which did have lifts, had quite high maintenance long-term maintenance costs, and although these particular tenants or these owners were never going to be beneficiaries of that, they were also up for the costs. So these are the sorts of protections that people will need—just working through the bill, the various aspects of it—as I say, going back particularly about the long-term plans.

The other thing—and again one of the earlier speakers talked about how it has been some time since we did discuss this bill here. Since we did so, of course we’ve now had COVID, we’ve all learnt how easy remote access can be, evidenced by the mere fact here we are standing doing a virtual Parliament or a hybrid Parliament, something that was inconceivable—actually wouldn’t be conceived; some people wouldn’t conceive it last year, but actually it was inconceivable at all before 2020. So for the bill which we are in, we are concerned about the proxy part of the bill—proxy farming. I think anyone who’s been involved in many of these organisations, and they often are amateurs, know that some hopefully well-meaning individuals who can take over, who have probably got time on their hands, can take over the running of these things, can get proxy votes from those who either deliberately or just through ignorance are quite happy to have their vote going to individuals who may or may not have their own best long-term interests at heart.

So, again, when one looks at this bill and says, “Why are we digging so deep into this”? it is an incredibly important part of ensuring that we do give the protection to what is really going to be the next generation. What I’m finding in my own Ōhāriu electorate is that some of the developers up there who probably experimentally started building what we’d call side-by-sides or tenement buildings, they felt that they probably wouldn’t really be selling, suddenly found there was a huge demand for the types of buildings they built as something of an experiment and now they can’t build enough of them. So what we are seeing is that we have got a generation coming through that probably doesn’t necessarily need or want the maintenance of a back lawn, which on the surface of it looks nice, but don’t get a nice growing spring, making one bored enough either from reading Hansard of the previous speakers’ speeches or watching grass grow, which are probably about the same. But some people actually don’t necessarily want that type of property and will end up very happy to be living downtown or living in a city where they can walk to the type of things that perhaps the next generation is more keen on.

So there was a lot of work to do on this bill. It was certainly a learning experience for many of us, I know, on the committee and I think that we have got it into something of a workable bill and of course I do have to at this stage congratulate those who have been part of getting it to this part of the process. So I’m happy to commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I would actually like just to take the previous speaker, Greg O’Connor, to task. There was a bit of a gratuitous flick or two at the Hon Judith Collins—quite uncalled for—and I thought it was a bit rich to say he would be implying that reading the Hansard would be quite dull. Well, we had to just suffer 10 minutes of dullness, so I think it was a bit rich.

I would like to say that actually in 2018 I remember the Hon Judith Collins bringing this bill to caucus. So this bill’s been around quite some time, and it’s great congratulations to the member Nicola Willis for bringing this right through at this point, and the Hon Nikki Kaye, who’s been involved with it. This is a really technical bill. It is very unusual for a bill of this technicality and how dense it is to be a member’s bill. And I know from my own experience with the Friendly Societies and Credit Unions (Regulatory Improvements) Amendment Bill or Act in my name, which was quite technical as well, how difficult that can be when you don’t have the resources at your disposal that a Minister would have. So it actually speaks a lot to the capability of the member in charge of the bill that she managed to get it through in the form that it has; although, albeit that we’ve had member after member standing up and taking credit for improving the bill on the way through. But I can assure you, Madam Speaker, and the House that the quality of this bill has a lot to be thankful for from the member Nicola Willis who has steered this admirably through this stage.

I have been on the Finance and Expenditure Committee for part of this bill’s life—not all of it by the way—and I can say sitting through some of those hearings was really interesting, but boy you had to pay attention. It was very technical in nature, and particularly if it was a part—coming in fresh, it took a bit to catch up on. And as someone who’s got involvement with some body corporates, I know how important it is. It is usually that a home or an apartment is the biggest investment that people actually have in their entire life, so it’s not only money that they’ve got invested in that property, it’s their heart and soul. And they are putting everything on the line in something that most of us don’t have a lot of expertise in. Even if you know how to wield a hammer, that doesn’t mean you understand how a lift works and how the various maintenance activities are needed on those particular buildings. I think that where people fall down is not because of ill will usually, it’s because of lack of skills in that area.

This bill is trying to capture those gaps in the legislation and make it much fairer for those people who are members of a body corporate. I think it’s never going to be perfect. I think we’ve got it into a very good state. I’m not claiming, unlike others, any credit for that, but I think it is the people that came along and gave evidence to the select committee that actually had a massive impact on the quality of this bill in the end. It is testament to the select committee process. I think most members of the public don’t realise how important this is. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got all the resources of the ministry behind you or it’s a member’s bill, it’s never perfect when it goes to a select committee, and it’s really dependent on evidence from those people coming before the select committee, the committee’s work to try and distil all that evidence, decide what needs to be done and what not to be done that ends up with a piece of legislation that’s workable. So I’d like to thank all those people that did come along to the select committee and give up their time. It was very important, it was appreciated, and we all listened very intently to their evidence.

So I think, as Nicola Willis said earlier, that this bill had very many mothers. Like what John F Kennedy said, which was that success had many mothers and failure was an orphan, this bill is not an orphan. This is going to have, as we’ve witnessed tonight, lots of mothers and fathers in this House tonight.

There were 85 submitters with a lot of experience in different areas. It was quite an effort by everyone concerned.

I note that Nicola Willis is going to bring some Supplementary Order Papers (SOPs) through the next stage, particularly around conveyancing and remediation reports. I think that’s really important. I know from one of the bodies corporate I was involved with, with earthquake damage here in Wellington—and I think that the importance of getting all of those details fairly to the purchaser is really important. That’s one area where dishonesty is—there’s a real opportunity there for someone to be dishonest about what they know, and when you get a deal where one party has more information than the other, that is a very dangerous place to go, particularly that, as I said earlier, this will be one of the biggest investments that most people make, and it’s all on the line. For them to be led up the garden path, as it were, or buy something that is a liability they were not expecting, is very unfair. I’m sure the SOP will go some way to fix that.

Also proxy voting, which has been touched on by a number of people—that was a very contentious issue. I’m still not sure what the right answer is. I note that the member bringing the bill is clearly not quite satisfied with where it sits at the moment, so she’s going to bring an SOP to fix this bill, or remediate the bill. I would really look forward to reading that SOP and debating it when we get to the committee of the whole House. So I think that is going to be a very important area. Because of the nature of these things, often people don’t live in their bodies corporate all the time, and therefore find it difficult to attend meetings and be a part of the process. So it’s really important that they have their say; albeit we don’t want that to be used in an unfair way either. So I look forward to reading that.

We had some debate at the end about the size of the UK, and I think that the Hon Judith Collins is a bit closer to the geographical facts, anyway, than the other member.

But it is a growing trend that I see, anyway, in New Zealand, of building apartments. I note that I had the pleasure, with Andrew Bayly, to visit a company called Hector Egger down in Queenstown, building modular homes. I think these are the type of thing that we’re going to see in New Zealand—much, much more of—and this is a really positive thing. Joseph Mooney was on that visit as well. I can’t speak highly enough of that particular company and the type of home that they are building. We have a shortage of homes in New Zealand for lots of reasons, and I think the Resource Management Act has a heck of a lot to do with it, setting urban limits has got a lot to do with it—all of those sorts of things. But building modular homes that are put up in three days, as Hector Egger are doing in Queenstown, is absolutely the way for New Zealand to go. That is the future. They can build a very good house at a very good price, and a lot of those are going to be in bodies corporate.

So it is essential that we get this legislation together. I congratulate the member once again. I look forward, very much, to taking part in the next stage of this, and then ultimately seeing it become an Act. I congratulate all those involved. Thank you.

This debate is interrupted and is set down for resumption next sitting day. The House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. tomorrow. Pō mārie.

The House adjourned at 9.59 p.m.