Twyford Phil: Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTwyford Phil: Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 11 May 2016. Volume:713;Page:11014. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): I was listening to the comments by the Hon Dr Nick Smith about what a great bill this is. Oh that it were so! The New Zealand Herald only a few days ago described this bill as yet another grudging half measure from the Hon Dr Nick Smith. It is hard to disagree with that verdict.I will come back to Dr Nick Smith but before I go any further I want to quote the Children’s Commissioner Dr Russell Wills who is someone whose word I place great store by—he came to Parliament to submit on this bill—pointing out that New Zealand hospitalises around 42000 children every year with preventable diseases of poverty. Many of those are directly related to cold damp and mouldy homes. Dr Wills told Parliament that the standards in Nick Smith’s bill which we are debating tonight are inadequate. He said: “Government made a promise to [New Zealand] children … we will make your houses healthy.” Three years on from that Budget promise this bill Dr Wills said will do little for children living in cold damp and mouldy housing. It is the Children’s Commissioner said a wasted opportunity and a broken promise to our children. So I invite the House to reflect on those words from Dr Russell Wills the Children’s Commissioner.Let us talk about the problem that this bill purports to solve: 42000 hospitalisations every year. In fact in the latest research from Otago University the team under Professor Philippa Howde-Chapman which has done world-acclaimed public health research on these issues estimates actually that the latest figures indicate that the rate of hospitalisation is more like 50000 per year. What is the consequence of that? Generations of young New Zealanders growing up with permanent health defects; bronchiectasis a permanent hardening of the lung tissue that leaves the people who have it with lifelong respiratory disorders and premature death; epidemic rates of asthma and rheumatic fever—and I could go on. There is a host of conditions—respiratory and infectious diseases that we should never even see in New Zealand in the 21st century. Many countries in Europe have not seen these diseases since the Second World War and so many of them are closely linked with poverty overcrowding and cold damp and mouldy houses.So Nick Smith after obfuscating denying and diverting for so many years finally brought this bill to the Parliament. He obviously thinks that we should be celebrating in the streets tonight. Well we are not because it is as Russell Wills said a missed opportunity.There are two primary defects in this bill. One of them is that it has nothing to say about heating. It is the simplest thing for anybody to understand—that if you insulate a cold damp house it is still a cold damp house. Although the insulation might make it cheaper to heat that house that is not much comfort for people if there is simply no affordable modern heating source in that house. We also know from the research that there is a big problem with low-income families relying on unflued gas heaters which are a health hazard and are an expensive and inefficient form of heating. What commonly happens actually is that all the members of a family will crowd into one room in the winter to try to stay warm together and to avoid the expense of heating the whole house they will heat only one room. That room then becomes a Petri dish for infection. So that is the first defect. The bill has nothing to say about heating standards or ventilation for that matter—the other really important thing in preventing mould.The second big defect in Nick Smith’s bill which the Social Services Committee by majority has failed to address—and I want to stress that the Labour Greens and New Zealand First members strongly argued that the loophole in Nick Smith’s legislation standards should be closed. The proposed standards exist in draft regulations that have been released alongside this bill. What they say is that if a house has been insulated to the 1978 building standard which would be as thick as this insulation sample then under Nick Smith’s bill it does not need to be upgraded to the modern 2008 standard which is as thick as this other insulation sample. So this is Nick Smith’s 1978 standard that he is legislating with this bill which will allow in his own words “hundreds of thousands of houses in New Zealand” that have insulation to this standard which could be 20 years or 30 years old—they will not have to upgrade to the modern 2008 standard.I find that unbelievable. I find it unbelievable that in a bill that purports to be about improving the quality of New Zealand housing the Minister Nick Smith is legislating to allow hundreds of thousands of New Zealand houses to continue with this redundant old-fashioned 1978 insulation standard. One submitter after another—public health organisations paediatricians community organisations the insulators who do the retrofitting work all around New Zealand and community energy groups—came along to the select committee and told us that that was the most ridiculous thing to do. Yet the National Party members supported by their Minister voted to keep this loophole in the bill. It is a real shame.I want to talk about a matter that the Minister addressed in his speech where the record needs to be set straight. Nick Smith is fond of crowing that the National Government has insulated 300000 houses as if this was National’s idea and its initiative. He likes to point out that the last Labour Government insulated 50000 retrofits. The truth is that the whole idea of retrofitting houses and rental properties providing subsidies and insulating them and providing a modern heating source is something that was developed under the last Labour-led Government. I want to pay tribute to Jeanette Fitzsimons the then Green Party co-leader and David Parker who was the Minister of Energy under the last Labour Government. They decided that not only was insulation important but a clean heating device was also important and with the help of New Zealand First Greens and Labour they brought in under the emissions trading scheme legislation a $1 billion fund in the emissions trading scheme Act to be used over the period to 2024 for improved energy efficiency and clean-heat retrofits—$1 billion to be spent insulating houses in the period through to 2024. That was legislated for.But what happened when National came in? It abolished those provisions. It gutted the emissions trading scheme. It backed wealthy farmers who were responsible for producing 50 percent of the carbon emissions that this country is responsible for. It gutted the emissions trading scheme it got rid of this provision and then it had to scramble to get some money together to fund the subsidy programme. So what National did was it backed millionaire farmers. It chopped up the scheme that would have put hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders into warm dry homes. It repealed that fantastic scheme and its inadequate substitute that we see here tonight in this bill does not include a clean heating device.That is a travesty and Nick Smith should stop rewriting history and acknowledge that if the emissions trading scheme had not been gutted and these provisions for clean-energy home retrofits had not been abolished then far more New Zealand homes would have been retrofitted and far more children would have been spared the unnecessary hospitalisation and diseases that are caused by these housing conditions.Research by the University of Otago showed recently that insulating to the 2008 standard would cut emissions by about 3000 children. Under Nick Smith’s—