Wall Louisa: Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWall Louisa: Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 24 May 2016. Volume:714;Page:11118. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]LOUISA WALL (Labour—Manurewa): I am specifically going to talk about Supplementary Order Paper 172. I want to commend my colleague Metiria Turei for specifically focusing on a 3-year term. The reason I do so is that I have just read an extract in the National Business Review from Philippa Howden-Chapman’s book called Home Truths: Confronting New Zealand’s Housing Crisis and actually the average tenancy is 11 months. The impact of that on families and on communities is pretty intense.I specifically want to talk about a Child Poverty Action Group report called The revolving door: Student mobility in Auckland schools dated May 2014. The impact of transience on our children’s learning is immense and I am sure the Minister in the chair Nick Smith would be interested to know that within that report essentially it said: “ ‘Overall we found that student mobility often produces an array of negative psychological social and academic consequences for children…’ ”. But surprisingly in that particular report it was not just the children living in transience who were affected it was actually the entire school community. So what we know is that stable communities produce better outcomes for the social good. And the relevance to electorates like mine in South Auckland is that our Pacific and Māori rates of homeownership are actually incredibly low—for Pacific it is 18 percent; for Māori it is 28 percent.So this piece of legislation is incredibly important and this amendment that Metiria Turei is trying to have endorsed here in the Chamber today is incredibly important. Allowing children to live in a home for 3 years is actually going to produce much better outcomes and this is reflected in a Ministry of Education report from 2004. It came from an Education Review Office finding that basically said that carefully planned and sequential learning experiences were required for sustained learning that built upon previous learning. So the impact on our education system of having a housing system that does not provide stability to our most vulnerable communities and community members is incredibly important. The reason that I am standing up to support this particular part of Metiria Turei’s Supplementary Order Paper is that enabling our families who are the most vulnerable to have 3 years of living in the same home is actually going to have a huge impact on our children’s learning.But not only that—we think that children’s learning actually starts as 5-year-olds or 6-year-olds when we have compulsory education but what Shirley Maihi found at Finlayson Park School in my electorate was that it actually impacts on early childhood education learning. So the compounding effect of children not having sustained early childhood education when they are 3 4 and 5 then means that they enter the school system and they are already behind. The long-term implications for not enabling our families and our children to have some security in that tenancy are incredibly important. This then leads to the first part of Metiria Turei’s Supplementary Order Paper which is that when the tenancy terminates the tenant has the right to renew that tenancy hopefully for another 6 years. So in fact we build an ability for families to create homes to be part of communities to be part of their school communities and to have a secure base to be able to go to school from and for parents to be able to get extra education and to go to work. But I think we completely underestimate how vital a home is in the overall development of our children and society.I hope that people who are here today in the Chamber participating in the debate will take seriously the impact of insecure housing on the ability of our children to learn because I think that it is missing in this whole debate. We are not talking or thinking about the ongoing consequences. We know there are 26000 “neet” kids out there—kids who are not engaged in education employment or training—but they do not just manifest out of nowhere; they actually manifest because fundamentally at the beginning of their lives those children do not have stable base they do not have a home they do not go to early childhood education and they do not go to school. For people who think that this is irrelevant I have got within my electorate kids who have been to—