Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Madam Chair. I think in that exchange between Messrs Little and Dr Smith we have now come to the nub of the question of whether the title Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2)" is accurate or whether it should be given another title. In two interjections by Mr Little on Dr Smith's speech Mr Little described the 1978 regulations insulation standards as being inadequate—I'm paraphrasing. I hope I caught the essence of what he has said. He then said that what the regulation will do is provide for "Better insulation." It's very important that I accurately characterise what he said because my question to the Minister is this and it is fundamental to our consideration of this bill. I implore him to provide the committee with an answer. Under the regulations when they are passed will houses currently legally insulated to the 1978 standard be required to upgrade to the 2008 standard? Will houses that are just 10 years old but that were insulated under the 2001 standard of 87 percent of the maximum thermal properties be required under the regulation to upgrade to the 2008 standard?Unless we know the answer to that question we are flying blind. We are asking for a virtual blank cheque from landlords—and bear in mind that the Government is the largest landlord in the country—and a detailed regulatory impact assessment should have advised the Government and Mr Robertson who is already $13 billion in a hole how much Housing New Zealand—Hon Iain Lees-Galloway: Keep digging Michael.Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: Oh we're digging deeply into the costs that are being incurred on that side and this could be one of them. This could be a massive cost on Housing New Zealand because the Government should set an example. I'm sure it's not the Government's expectation that they set one law for private landlords and a lower standard for Housing New Zealand. So what I want to know is (a) will those regulations when they're passed require those legal homes to be insulated under the 1978 and 2001 standards but not to the lofty standard that Mr Twyford had last year—when he paraded around Parliament with insulation material—or not? That is going to determine whether or not this bill truly is a healthy homes guarantee. I would contest that anyway and the reason is that despite not being the absolute gold standard in insulation in fact both the 1978 standards and the 2001 standards are still very very good.Now Dr Woods came in and talked about growing up in the 1970s in cold houses. Well I can probably guess at Dr Woods' age. My guess is that she lived in a house—like I did—that had the pre-1978 insulation standard which was virtually none at all. So to ask landlords to upgrade at a cost of potentially hundreds of millions of dollars to go from the 1978 and 2001 standards to 2008 is the heart of the question that we have to answer tonight.I do hope that the Minister in the chair Phil Twyford when the opportunity arises—and it's not actually in clause 1 so I'll give him time to think about whether or not he is going to give us when we come to the appropriate clause on the contents of the regulation—I think it is clause 4 or 5. I'll need to go back and have a look. It has the six categories which are without exception already contained in the Residential Tenancies (Smoke Alarms and Insulation) Regulations or the Housing Improvement Regulations. We need to know: is all we're doing asking landlords to certify that they are complying with the law—in which case this bill does less than nothing; it wastes the House's time—or is it going to set a higher standard in which case we should be able to have a cogent coherent discussion about the costs and benefits of those higher standards?"