Alexander Marc: General Debates 
Alexander Marc: General Debates 
[Volume:611;Page:8131] 
MARC ALEXANDER (United Future) 
: 
 I would like to address the issue of landlords’ rights yet again. Steve Maharey has made some noises of late and he has picked up some of the recommendations that I floated a little while ago. Some of those things included the ability of the courts to use Government-held address information to trace tenancy tribunal order debtors new processes for Work and Income to help beneficiary tenants to meet rent arrears and the investigation of improved access to tenancy tribunal decisions. Those are small steps but they are in the right direction. The Minister has taken legislation that has no teeth at all and he has given it ill-fitting dentures instead. But that is merely a start. One of the things that has to be looked at is the simple fact that enforcement does not go to the core of the problem which is the injustice of the legislation that landlords have to operate under. I think that the Minister has to get real work with landlords—be like a landlord himself—and realise the kind of strain and pressure that is put on them when trying to do something that is a lawful activity: putting roofs over the heads of New Zealanders where Governments simply cannot do so and they fail to meet the need. 
One of the things that the Minister has done is to look at the ability to track tenancy tribunal decisions through the Ministry of Social Development in situations where landlords have previously been left chasing shadows because of virtually unenforceable tenancy tribunal orders. But bad tenants are by no means always beneficiaries. There needs to be a look at how that can actually enforce responsibility. I am less enthusiastic about some of the other aspects such as the plan to ensure that tenants are not evicted by covering rent arrears through Work and Income. 
Simon Power 
: What! 
MARC ALEXANDER 
: That is right. The problem is that that will do nothing to make those tenants any more responsible. It is a start but all that it will do is to ensure that the money flows through to the landlords. That needs to be looked at and protected. But it will not make the tenants responsible it will not make it easier to break up the tenancy agreement and it will not be easier to get rid of bad tenants. That is the problem. Landlords are still left in limbo whereby they have bad tenants whose rents are paid for through tax but they are unable to effect any change in who is living under the roofs that they have provided through hard-earned tax-paid income. That simply is not fair. 
The bottom line is that Steve Maharey has addressed enforcement and information sharing—which is good—but not the substantive inequalities that are present in the Residential Tenancies Act. Nor has he taken the opportunity to do so in the Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill. The bill does very little to address any of the issues other than that of boarding houses which is a very small component of the problem. I would like to ask him whether he will consider making further changes to the Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill to include wilful abandonment of a property as an offence and to remove the maximum limit on bond payments of 4 weeks so that it could be the subject of negotiation instead and could reflect the perceived risk of damage. If not I ask him why not? It seems eminently reasonable to me that if someone has a saleable commodity such as a roof over a person’s head—no different to any other product that is out there in the marketplace—it should be subject to negotiation between the purveyor and the purchaser of the product. There is no reason to assume that an unequal relationship exists there. 
If members look at the Act they will see it specifies what tenants must do but there is no provision of offences if the conditions are breached. Meanwhile sections 12 17 18 19 23 27 29 30 48 and 137 contain offences against the landlord with fines or—members should get this—imprisonment provisions. There should be an equivalent set of obligations and penalties on both tenants and landlords. There is nothing in the Act that allows tenants to be thrown into jail if they wilfully damage a rental property or if the rent arrears fall well and truly behind. Nothing in the Act provides for any of that at all. That is quite simply not fair. We are talking about 230000 privately owned and operated rental housing units in this country. The average value of them is about $180000 each. That is a sizeable investment for most New Zealanders. These are not necessarily big industries that can accommodate such infringements and absorb such losses.