Little AndrewHon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister of Justice): Thank you Madam Chair. It's a pleasure to rise in this very important stage of this very important bill one with which I have an intimate acquaintance since I originally sponsored it. The question that the honourable list member who's just spoken Michael Woodhouse raises given that we're on clause 1 and talking about the title is: can the content of the bill provide the guarantee that he seems to be looking for of warm and safe and healthy homes—or at the very least healthy homes because that's the other word in the title of the bill? Not just homes and of course not just healthy but a guarantee—I want to engage him on that point.It is pretty clear in this bill what it is all about. It is about upgrading the landlord's responsibility to tenants through the tenancy agreement to meet these elevated but actually vitally important obligations. You see if they were there already or if landlords were already observing these very simple obligations then we would not have this bill and more importantly we wouldn't have 42000 children turning up to hospital each year with respiratory conditions—avoidable respiratory conditions. We wouldn't have people with cold damp homes with black mould running up them homes that are not properly ventilated or homes that are not properly insulated. If the current regulations and the current legislation provided for those things then this bill would not be necessary. But it is because those problems exist. There is a problem for which this is a remedy and it is the failure of far too many rental homes and the landlords who own them to provide a safe and healthy environment for their tenants.When you look at the specific guarantees that this legislation will provide a requirement that things must be specified in a tenancy agreement—and what are those things? Madam Chair I'm not departing from clause 1 in talking about it. I am talking about what the guarantee is that's referred to in clause 1 and the aspects that will be guaranteed are there laid out in replacement section 138B in clause 6 on Supplementary Order Paper 1. So there will be requirements under regulations for heating for insulation for ventilation for moisture ingress for draught stopping for drainage and for any other material thing. Look if it was any more specific it would be requiring landlords to put the telly in one corner and the couch opposite it. We haven't gone that far because we're not into nanny State; we're into allowing people to make their own choices about how they furnish their homes and where they put the furniture. But when it comes to minimum standards of health and safety in the 21st century this is the least we could do and we have to do it because it's not being done now.When this bill talks about the Healthy Homes Guarantee" it is very clear about setting up very specific obligations allowing for regulations to make very specific obligations referred to in the tenancy agreement that will lift the quality and the standard of the homes that are falling short right now. It is about that guarantee and it is about making them healthy and above all it is about ensuring that people when they go to the place that they call their home can call it a home—their place of sanctuary and their place of safety—in a way that too many cannot do right now. That's the guarantee—that's what it's guaranteeing.Is it too much to ask in this day and age for the growing number of people—young people couples and families—who are dependent on rental accommodation to at least be assured that they will have minimum standards observed and is it too much to ask for this House discharging its responsible duty to the citizens of New Zealand to require rental housing to meet that minimum standard and for this House to give permission to the executive to create regulations to ensure that that's going to happen? That's what the bill is about—short and simple clear on its face. That is the guarantee. New Zealanders want it because they've voted for it and now they'll have a chance to get it."