Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you very much Madam Chair. I was just hiding under my desk in my office working away for the constituents of Epsom electorate and I heard Chlöe Swarbrick's speech. I was moved to come down to the House and put a few things straight because Chlöe Swarbrick's speech demonstrated everything that is wrong with the world today especially the standards of political discourse. She went to great pains to point out that she's one of five people in the pecuniary interests register who does not own a house and therefore had some greater authority to speak on this bill than people who might own a home.Well this is the problem: we have a political debate that is not based on any sort of reason or logic or a discourse about what might get better results for the welfare of New Zealanders going forward but rather this idea that we each have intrinsic values which can't be challenged or we might be hurt that we can't have the debate; that somehow it's identity that matters in politics more than the actual facts such as whether clause 4 in Part 1 of this bill corresponds with the intention of the House when the bill passed its second reading and before that when the House sent this bill away to the select committee.We actually do need to have robust debate about whether or not this bill will make things better or worse for New Zealanders. Chlöe Swarbrick's speech simply did not do that. I think it is worth noting that it is an example of the way that the quality of political discourse has collapsed not only in New Zealand but around the world as a victim of identity politics. But it is also a fact that we need to recognise that this whole bill actually—and particularly the idea that clause 4 by banning the types of fees or the format of revenue collection that a landlord can use to cover their costs is going to solve a real problem—is pantomime politics. The idea that simply saying that a fee or charge cannot be levied for the grant continuance extension variation or renewal of any tenancy agreement and that this is somehow going to solve a problem in the real world rubs up against the fact that Governments may well be able to shift costs but Governments cannot avoid costs.There's an old economist Thomas Sowell who says that good economics is really just about relentlessly asking the question: what happens next? So after this bill what happens next? Do the considerable costs of recovering the time and the effort used to search for and vet tenants—do those costs disappear once this legislation goes in place? Or are they shifted? My contention is that the costs will be shifted and they'll be recovered in one of two ways by landlords. Either landlords will charge more in rent over time to cover the costs they can't cover with letting fees or they will be covered by tenants spending more time queueing and searching because there are not agents available to cover that search process for them.So when you have a price control one of two things happens. Either the money gets recovered somewhere else in higher fees elsewhere or people spend more time queueing because you actually won't to be able to pay somebody to do the searching and the very hard work that people have to do when arranging tenancies.But going back to Chlöe Swarbrick's speech it was in a way appropriate for this bill because the real problem in New Zealand is that we still build half as many homes per capita as the baby boomers built in their peak of the 1970s. That's why there's a shortage that's why people feel that rents are high and that's why tenants are hard up.This bill represents an age of superficial politics where simply trying to pass a law to try and shift the cost is seen as doing something when really it is not. It is a substitute for the real action that the Minister in the chair Phil Twyford very well knows is necessary with infrastructure with land use planning—none of which he's actually managed to do despite all the promises he made when he came into this position. It's a shame to stand here in this Parliament and be debating laws that will make no difference other than cosmetic—actually they'll make things worse.