Bakshi Kanwaljit SinghKANWALJIT SINGH BAKSHI (National): Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker. I stand in opposition to this Residential Tenancies (Prohibiting Letting Fees) Amendment Bill in its third reading. I would like to start my comments by saying that this bill is going to put a lot of pressure on the tenants and definitely it is going to affect some of the people in the business.Mark Patterson: Really?KANWALJIT SINGH BAKSHI: Yes you can listen to my logic too.My understanding is there is no free lunch anywhere in the world. So if you are going to stop having this letting fee being paid to the property agents they are going to get this money from somewhere else and obviously they will ask for landlords to pay the letting fee so that they can continue on with the business.The Minister the Hon Jenny Salesa mentioned that it is only the landlords who get the benefit of the letting fee being charged from the tenants but the benefit goes to the landlords. I totally disagree with that because the reason is those agents get the properties from the landlords which they put up in the market and then the tenants can get into those properties and have their houses. So it is totally wrong to say that the tenants don't get any benefit out of this.As I said there's nothing like a free lunch and definitely when landlords will have to pay this kind of money to the agents definitely they are going to increase the rents. So it is going to affect again the tenants and we have already seen in the past 12 months that there has been an increase of almost 6 percent in the rents from $400 to $425 which is almost a $25 a week increase in the rent. I can assure you that I have discussed this issue with some of the very experienced people in this industry and everyone says that it is not going to make any difference. There is no evidence that this will help the tenants in any manner.If we take the average of about $600 rent which is prevailing in Auckland it means they will have to pay almost $10 to $15 extra every week as their rent to the landlords because the letting fee will be passed on to the landlords and they will be ultimately passing it on back to the tenants and that is going to hurt their back pocket.The previous speaker the Hon Ron Mark mentioned about the minority view by National. I totally agree that there are more ways that we can help the tenants rather than this. The Hon Ron Mark also mentioned that we did not do anything but I would like to remind him that during the last term we brought in legislation that was going to ensure that all the landlords would have to ensure that their houses were insulated so that the people living in those houses could have the benefit of good health. So that was part of our legislative programme last term where—I can't remember but definitely New Zealand First must have opposed that legislation.Before I conclude I want to give an assurance to this House that this side the Opposition is very cooperative. As you must have seen earlier today we supported a good bill on child poverty. So wherever there is good legislation this Opposition will support it. Wherever there is bad legislation we will oppose it. With these words I conclude my contribution.