McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): The last speaker Denis O'Rourke talked about what the Government does not do. I am not going to talk about what we do do because we have done quite a bit in this field interestingly. What I want to talk about is why we have some challenges in New Zealand around the types of homes we have here. If you look at the history of homes in New Zealand we have built homes out of wood with very little inside them. In other words if you live in a house like mine there is a bit of scrim stuck on a bit of wood inside the house and it is a wooden house with single pane windows. They give all sorts of trouble. The reason they give trouble is that we have got such a varied climate in New Zealand.If you look at housing stocks around the rest of the world not many places have used wood to build their houses. So we have some challenges in New Zealand around our housing stock which many other countries do not have. When the houses get to an age—many of our wooden houses are in excess of 100 years old. Many of the rental houses we are talking about in the course of this bill are over 100 years old. When they get to that stage it is extremely difficult—particularly if they are low to the ground with a very small ceiling area—to change the structure of those houses and the nature of them.We do have some significant challenges in New Zealand around the type of housing stock that we have historically had here. I think if you look at my own electorate you get to a place like Taumarunui where you have extremes of temperature. It is extremely cold in the winter and sometimes it is extraordinarily hot in the summer. There are a lot of very old wooden houses because Taumarunui is one of those very early settled places in New Zealand. It is extremely difficult to get those houses and bring them up to scratch today.So one of the challenges we have—Denis O'Rourke: Look at the new technologies. Has the member done that?IAN McKELVIE: Yes Christchurch—the great technology they used in Christchurch was pretty simple. If we could do that in Taumarunui it would solve all our problems. The issue we have got with houses in a place like that is how we bring them up to the standard and bring them up to the standard at a rate that both the landlords can afford to do it at and that the tenants can then afford to rent them at at the same time. I am not making excuses for it. That is just how we are in New Zealand and it is different from the rest of the world. So there are some very big challenges in that area.So what then tends to happen as landlords do better is that they sell those houses and upgrade their own stock. So rather than upgrading the house they upgrade the stock. Sure upgrading the stock achieves the same thing but they sell those houses to first-home buyers and so then the first-home buyers have got effectively the same problem that the landlord had initially. If you looked at the insulation programme that we have had for the last 6 years running in New Zealand some of those houses have been the beneficiaries of that and it has done a great job for New Zealand. So this is a vexing challenge for us in New Zealand—much more difficult I think than almost any other country in the world faces and that is for the reasons I have outlined.If you think about the context of this bill there is a proposal in this bill that there will be an inspectorate put in place to inspect those houses and one of the problems that we have with all Government inspectorates is that they cost a whole lot of money. If you think about the proposal that may be in place for this—may be because we do not know and I will get on to that in a minute. The proposal that may be in place to administer this bill could cost as much as $225 a house a year. I do not know of any landlord who is going to carry that cost without passing it on so straight away we have this large cost passed on to the tenants of those houses.I think the other issue that we have got with these inspectorates—or with publicly owned Government owned or council-owned housing for that matter—is that they are never as well run as the privately owned operation. So once you put a regime in place to inspect those houses they will tend to be let go by the landlords and that is effectively what will happen. I take my own case where the Manawatū District Council had a stock of 207 community houses which it ran pretty badly to be fair. It then put those houses into a trust. That trust was able to bring those houses up to speed and they are very pleasant places to live now. So the community trust which effectively is a community-owned organisation has brought those houses up to speed and by insulating them by rebuilding them to some extent and by using some money from outside of the system to upgrade those houses it has done a great job of it.So I think there are some challenges around the way we structure the ownership of some of these houses. Sure this bill is designed to deal with tenanted houses but it is also deals with community housing and deals with Government housing and all other types of housing that we put together. So it does create some challenges and I think that the moment that you put an inspectorate in place you have created a bureaucracy which creates a whole lot of problems of its own.I want to talk a little bit about the need to have homes be warm and dry because clearly it is important that we do have warm dry homes. But again as with many members' bill that come to this House this bill does not lay out clearly the conditions on which it is anticipated this will be implemented. So there is no real guide for us when we discuss this bill as to how it will be implemented in due course. So for example there is a proposal that a house should be set at a certain temperature. There is no way you are going to get a house to run at the same temperature in a place like Taumarunui as you are in a place like Hastings or somewhere else. It is almost impossible to do that. Of course those people who live in those places are going to live in a very different environment and will consequently operate at a very different temperature.So I think one of the difficulties that we face as a Parliament with members' bills is that there is no clear guidance as to how it is anticipated that those members' bills will be implemented; nor is there any clear guidance nor has there been any clear consultation other than the opportunity to submit to the Government Administration Committee as to what impact that might have on the total housing market on the tenancy agreements or on the rental property market throughout New Zealand. I think that is quite a challenge for this House as well.We have seen a number of members' bills coming into Parliament in recent times where the ability of the community to comment on the bill as it gets made up has a very big impact on what happens when the bill gets here because suddenly they are panicked into thinking: Well this is going to be implemented and how's it going to be implemented." Of course no one really knows how it is going to be implemented when it comes to the House and so I think these members' bills often create some very interesting—or difficult I guess—challenges for Parliament but they also create some very difficult challenges for the Government departments which have to then try to put together a set of regulations around how this might be implemented.So whilst I congratulate the member Andrew Little on having his bill drawn—and this is the first time I have had a look at this bill because clearly I was not part of the select committee process that brought this bill to the House—it does create a whole lot of challenges I think which are interesting for us to try to resolve. It creates some pretty big challenges for the Government department that has got to implement the legislation and to get it in place.As I said I did not have the opportunity to listen to the submissions or take part in the select committee process so it is a little difficult to comment on how we got to some of these conclusions that have come back to the Parliament. I think there is merit in a lot of the proposals that come to the House in members' bills. There is merit in a lot of proposals in this bill. But as has been said by earlier speakers on this side of the House many of the issues that are touched on in this bill have already been touched on in the course of Government legislation and things like the Warm Up New Zealand: Healthy Homes initiative which in my part of New Zealand has made quite a contribution to a large number of houses in a small town like Taumarunui where there has been help with upgrading house insulation and things like that so it does a pretty good job.I can see why a bill like this would come to the House but I can also see that the Government has done a lot of work on getting some of the issues raised in this bill to the point it has and I can also see the difficulty in trying to implement a bill like this without having had a very clear pathway and a very good discussion amongst all those people who have gone down the path of implementing the bill. With all that I am opting to oppose the bill so thank you."