O'Rourke Denis: Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2) — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Rourke Denis: Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2) — First Reading[Sitting date: 04 May 2016. Volume:713;Page:10820. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENIS O’ROURKE (NZ First): This Government has made an unutterable mess of every aspect of housing policy in New Zealand resulting in a dangerous price bubble for Auckland and excessive rent increases—Hon Dr Jonathan Coleman: We let you have two letterboxes.DENIS O’ROURKE: —in the main centres and a continuation of poor quality rental houses. That member’s mouth is more like a letterbox and he should close it.Last year I read Shamubeel Eaqub’s book Generation Rent and I was impressed by the differences it described between New Zealand’s rental market and legislation and those of other developed countries which have much better developed rental markets and much better legislation than we do. There were three essential differences that it described. One was fair rents—and this Government does need actually to pay attention to that and there does need to be regulation to ensure that rents are fair as is the case in other countries and as is not the case in New Zealand. When you look at the situation in both Auckland where the severe housing crisis there has resulted in unaffordable rents for many people and Christchurch where you get the same situation mainly because of the long-term effects of the earthquakes there—in both of those situations the market actually failed. Rents exploded people were hurt and this Government did absolutely nothing whatsoever about it.Secondly the other point the book made was that New Zealand does not have secure tenancies—and I am coming to the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2) Mr Assistant Speaker in the third point. But the second one is that New Zealand does not have secure tenancies. Our tenancies tend to be short term with very little protection against eviction and it is too easy to get rid of tenants in circumstances where they have nowhere else to go. The third point is one that this bill addresses and that is the question of the quality of rental properties. There are far too many damp old dumps in New Zealand that are being let to people on low incomes who cannot afford anything better. Some of those properties should actually be ineligible to be rented altogether. Those who wish to continue to rent them out need to bring them up to standard or just get out of the market.The Government again needs to do much more to improve the quality of rental properties so that people who cannot afford to buy their own homes have a genuine alternative and we are not seeing that as a result of Government inaction and its Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill which Dr Smith is so proud of. It makes only some minor changes requiring smoke alarms and insulation but does little else. It actually still uses a 40-year old insulation standard that dates from 1978. There were dozens of submissions on that bill imploring the Government to apply much higher standards especially than the standard that is regarded as the 2008 insulation standard which was the one that would be adopted in this bill.That is an important distinction between the Government’s very poor effort and this bill which actually goes a hell of a lot further. We are not seeing improvements in heating standards or insulation standards in New Zealand because the Government has not done anything and because the Government has not given any signals about that in its proposed legislation. In addition to all of that we are not seeing improvements in weatherproofing and in damp and draughty homes and all of that needs to be attended to as well.This bill makes a valuable contribution by requiring the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment to set minimum standards and that is what is missing in current legislation and it will have to do that within 5 years effectively. But that may be too long and New Zealand First will wish to question at the select committee whether that can be reduced to 3 years. We would also like to take a close look at clause 6 to see whether that could be expanded to do other things such as to require earthquake resistance fire resistance and attention paid to minimum sizes of homes for families single people and for couples and so on.Finally this bill is a good start. I believe it needs to go the select committee so we can all have a good look at it make the improvements that are needed and pass it because that is what this country really needs.