Swarbrick ChlöeCHLÖE SWARBRICK (Green—Auckland Central): E te Māngai tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. A few months ago we sat in a select committee and the organiser of Rent Strike VUWSA—that is Victoria University of Wellington Students' Association—Azaria Howell waved around a packet of two-minute noodles. This was our symbol of the money left behind in the pockets of students and whānau after student accommodation was paid for—in fact on the flip side the quality of the sense of wellbeing that she felt she was receiving from her student accommodation provision. It reminded me of the point made by students a wee while ago that when you're broke for a few years that's not any more just being broke that it's not some temporary rite of passage; it is in fact poverty.We've rightfully spent a lot of parliamentary time debating housing in this country and the Greens have fought long and hard to ensure that the voices of the 1.4 million New Zealanders who rent are also in that picture. But student accommodation which is home to thousands particularly thousands of young New Zealanders has never really been a particularly well understood part of that puzzle until this inquiry came along and this inquiry came along because things weren't working all too well.The year 2019 saw the devastating death of Mason Pendrous in a University of Canterbury Hall managed by Campus Living Villages or CLV. My greatest condolences to his family. And here I want to actually pay tribute to the words of his stepfather Anthony Holland who said and I quote He wasn't a young man that died alone—he's a young man that changed the law and it doesn't give me comfort but it makes me feel a little bit happier that he's changed the world." "He was a very very bright very mature young brave man."Within a few short months thereafter everybody in this Parliament voted to implement a legislative interim code of conduct on pastoral care. The intention was there but unfortunately the teeth to enforce the rights of students were not and in March 2020 the global pandemic reached our shores. In our country's first COVID lockdown my inbox—and I'm sure those of my colleagues in this Chamber—were flooded with tertiary and polytech students who'd had conflicting advice about whether to stay or to go. Others were being charged for vacant rooms including those that they had been locked out of. The more that I dug into these issues for students the more roadblocks I found and the more complex I found this area of student accommodation was.In fact it felt or turned out that the rules were set up to exclude them from access to the rights that are enjoyed by other residential tenants—those are renters—and financial compensation for wrongdoing access to the Tenancy Tribunal and in fact also to enable certain suspect developers to market student units to investors with an effective guaranteed return on that investment because of explicit long-term contracts with certain providers despite having no meaningful obligations in the alternative.I reached out to the Minister of Education—and I want to thank Chris Hipkins for responding to me—about the desperate need to improve not just formalise and make permanent that interim code of conduct because it was falling short. So thereafter across this House we instigated the inquiry into student accommodation. I want to thank members across the House notably also my forebear in Auckland Central the Hon Nikki Kaye for not just entertaining the idea but for collaborating so wholeheartedly in it.As has been noted the Greens were proudly the only party to maintain throughout as reflected in this report that student accommodation should not be for profit. When a priority like that competes with wellbeing you can understand why students come out sometimes feeling like cash cows. I am also incredibly proud of the work that will see real mediation avenues with compensation available for the first time to students. This won't sit in the Tenancy Tribunal because as we identified they aren't quite equipped with the right kinds of expertise because student accommodation provision importantly has far greater expectations placed on it. We will also see greater transparency of services costs and expectations published online and it will all be monitored by an independent body not the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. Institutions throughout this inquiry told us that they were doing great and had been unfairly targeted. But students told us that they wanted and needed stronger protections. When we raise standards we ensure that nobody is left behind and provide a platform to showcase reputations that truly go above and beyond."