Swarbrick ChlöeCHLÖE SWARBRICK (Green—Auckland Central): E te Māngai tēnā koe tēnā koutou e te Whare. In 2023 this is the state of housing for renters in Aotearoa New Zealand [Holds up images of rental properties]. But in 1988 our national Housing Commission declared—and I quote—New Zealand does not have … huge insoluble problems of homelessness and substandard housing that confront many other nations." This was the final report of the then disestablished Housing Commission which to that point had reported detailed data every five years to keep the country and policy makers informed about the foundation of what we then considered a stable society. It was of course a home for all New Zealanders to call their own.I was born six years after that report and in those years and across my lifetime deliberate political choices—specifically political choices—made by people sitting in these chairs in this Chamber have shredded that housing dignity and stability once guaranteed for all New Zealanders trading it for a game of Monopoly which the pecuniary interests register tells us also happens to disproportionately benefit around half of the MPs in this Chamber with interests in more than one property.The housing crisis—which means that in raw terms we have the most expensive housing in the world on pretty much any metric you choose to measure not to mention that that extortionately expensive housing is also making people sick—didn't happen overnight. This dire situation is the direct result of political decisions. It is disproportionately hurting the 1.4 million New Zealanders who rent in this country that this Parliament by a majority—and as an overwhelming majority of comfortable homeowners—continues to structurally disempower.In 2017 we in the Greens worked with Labour to introduce the healthy homes standards and a slate of amendments to the Residential Tenancies Act removing for example no-cause convictions and allowing renters to go to the Tenancy Tribunal anonymously. Some standards we agreed obviously were better than nothing—a set of rules to ensure it's clear how a game should be played is important but those rules are pretty meaningless if there is no referee to meaningfully enforce them.That's what we have with the healthy homes standards. Last year my written questions exposed that the Government has no idea about the level of compliance with regards to healthy homes standards for private rentals it has no idea how many landlords or property managers have self-excluded themselves from compliance to the healthy homes standards and it has no idea how many companies are holding themselves out as capable of verifying compliance with the healthy homes standards let alone the variance in their approaches. The 1.4 million New Zealanders who rent are left to shoulder the burden of enforcing these basic rules—their foundational human rights to adequate affordable housing.It's a funny thing because whenever the Greens mention renters we are immediately shouted down and told that the solution to this problem is somehow that landlords just aren't given enough free rein that the solution is somehow more commodification of basic human rights. Ironically this is exactly what the national Housing Commission warned against back in that 1988 report: that the shifting of responsibility from the State to the private sector that the selling of State houses with rent controls and the creation of the accommodation supplement would—and I quote—"'add little to the total housing supply while allowing private landlords and property speculators to make even higher charges for a non-expanding supply of housing' which would in turn 'raise the purchase price of land and rented property'."Of course we now know that they were right. We remain one of the only countries in the developed world that continues to provide special tax treatment and preference to properties incentivising the flow of capital into unproductive property speculation or what the University of Auckland researchers called—and I quote—"a politically condoned finance-fuelled casino."In fewer than 40 years political decisions have made housing not only one of the major drivers of inequality in this country but one of the major determiners of physical and mental health not to mention educational achievement and school attendance. Who pays the cost? Well disproportionately it's 1.4 million renters in this country.Over the last few weeks over the noise and the nonsense that comes out of this place we've been asking them to tell their stories and we've compiled just 50 of the 700 diabolical stories that we have heard which we know are just the tip of the iceberg. We know this because we have spoken to those renters and we have seen the outright fear that they have expressed in coming forward and risking a black mark against their name. We know the solutions: it's a rental warrant of fitness a register for property managers and landlords and rent controls—Parliament's move next."