Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Madam Speaker. Good things come to those who wait and what a debate tonight. I really hoped to follow my friend and colleague Chlöe Swarbrick. You know despite being from fairly different perspectives I think we are friends; I hope Chloe would say that. I hoped to follow her because I thought her speech was so interesting. If you cast your mind back to what Chlöe Swarbrick said she said two things: one is that housing is a human right. I think that's very interesting and I'll come back to that. Then she pointed out that we are tonight extending the deadline for healthy homes compliance and there's going to be a new date after which in theory all houses whether they're the Government's houses or the private sector landlords' houses must meet the healthy homes standard. You put those two things together—housing is a human right and there's a certain date where they must reach the standard—and it leads to the question of what happens if a house reaches the date and it doesn't meet the standard? This is a really difficult thing for the Chlöe Swarbricks of the world because does she want that house to be emptied out? Would she rather have a person kicked out of a house and be homeless than live in a house that does not meet the healthy homes standard?Now I'll give it to Chlöe Swarbrick and the Greens—no matter how illogical they hold their beliefs passionately. The Labour Party they are a bit more like National; they are very pragmatic. When it comes down to it there's always an escape hatch and as Chlöe Swarbrick pointed out actually what happens when you get to the end of the road and you meet the 1 July 2024 or 2025 deadline? Well you can be fined the tribunal can seek information about what you're going to do but there's no real consequence because no sane person would actually say they wanted to kick someone out of a house and make them homeless instead of having them in a home that hadn't passed the healthy homes standard.Once you've worked through that it tells you something interesting about this whole healthy homes policy. You see the thought is that somehow it's going to be possible that passing a law will actually improve the quality of housing. The problem is that that just could not be. All it could do is force people to take resources away from some things they were going to spend money on and put more of it into housing. You see people already have the option of buying or renting a nicer house but often people don't because they can't afford it or they would rather spend their money on other things such as food or education for their children or clothing or entertainment or whatever it is that they want. What the healthy homes standard really does is forces people to take money that they've chosen not to spend on healthy homes and spend it on housing of a certain standard. That's all it does—it forces people to take money away from other things and put it into something that the Government thinks they would be better to do. It doesn't actually make people better off. In fact it makes them slightly worse off because they have to spend money on what was their second-best choice. If they had already decided to live in a house that met that standard then this law would make no difference.The problem with this law is that it is effectively the same as saying We would rather people had no home than live in a home that breached the healthy homes standard." But as Chlöe Swarbrick pointed out that's not actually what the law does and it cannot do. So why do we have this law? It's a very good example of the kind of thing that Governments and political parties—especially over on the left but sometimes on the right of the blue variety—do all the time. You see the reason they passed the law is not because it will leave people better off. We've shown that this law can't leave people better off because you're not actually going to kick people out. What it does show is that it will reward politicians because they're seen to do the right thing. They hope that nobody is looking closely enough to check whether it's actually delivered. If people did look a little closer they would see a law that hasn't been met on time that has to be extended tonight and that actually if people don't comply there are no consequences because if they were people would end up being made homeless instead of living in a house that hadn't met the standard. Then if they look a little bit more closely what they see is that all this law has done is force people to spend more of their scarce income on housing than they would otherwise choose to. It says "The Government knows how to use your household budget better than you do." as if somehow the Government has greater knowledge. That's all it is. But of course none of those things matter because so long as the Labour Party can get up and say "We've done something to deliver a better level of housing to people." then that might be enough to get them re-elected and the whole process continues on but people are all the poorer.It all turns into a good example of what Chlöe Swarbrick was talking about earlier. You remember she had two ideas. One is that you don't actually get kicked out of your house—of course you don't. But the second was that Chlöe Swarbrick said that you have a right to housing. Well the interesting thing about a right is that you can only have a right if somebody else has a duty that corresponds to that right—a duty to actually deliver. If you have a right with no duty then actually you don't have any right. The people on the Labour benches they're exasperated because they try not to think this way otherwise it hurts their wee minds but it's true. When they say that there's a right to housing what they're really saying is that somebody else has a duty to provide it for you. If it was just a right that you provided your own housing that wouldn't be any kind of right at all; it's only a right because you expect somebody else to do it for you. The great difficulty as we've seen already with Chlöe Swarbrick's speech is that actually you can't force somebody to get a home up to standard and if they fail to do it your basic choices are either to kick someone out and have them homeless or continue to live in the same house. You can't enforce the duty of getting the house up to the healthy homes standard. The whole thing is a nonsense. It is a PR game. It is spin designed to allow the Labour Party to tell voters that it has lived up to their expectations to their feelings. But once you analyse how it actually works you see that at best all it is going to do is re-prioritise some people's household budgets to pay higher rent than they had already chosen to pay.It's nice to have these debates sometimes. It's nice to have my old mate Chlöe Swarbrick here because sometimes we can actually learn a little bit about Parliament about politics and how policy actually works. I particularly look forward now to what I think is about to happen that somebody from the Labour Party is going to jump up in exasperation with lots of "Tut tut tut! How could you be so stupid? Don't you know everything that I know?" attitude and try and prove me wrong. The people at home will be able to figure it out for themselves. All they have to ask themselves is have these people from the Labour Party shown how anyone can have a right to something without forcing someone else to deliver on the duty of giving it to them? And is it possible that a healthy homes standard can make you better off if you already had the option of buying a better home but either didn't have the money or had chosen to spend it differently? And what actually happens when a house doesn't meet the deadline? Do you move out and be homeless or do you keep living in the house because you have no other way of delivering? Thank you Madam Speaker."