Swarbrick ChlöeCHLÖE SWARBRICK (Green—Auckland Central) (remote): E te Māngai tēnā koe. Tēnā koe e te Whare. I want to start by acknowledging Nicola Willis who as she herself stated initially inherited this bill from the Hon Judith Collins and the Hon Nikki Kaye my predecessor in Auckland Central. Nicola has done a stellar job in stewarding this through Parliament and the politics I might add associated since then. And I want to thank her for her willingness to collaborate with me and actually for her work as well with the Associate Minister of Housing (Public Housing) in seeking to improve what might seem a very niche and nerdy law but impacts hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders' lives.Such is a sign of the times: I am giving my first ever virtual speech in the Chamber whilst isolating as a household contact in my apartment in Auckland Central in the same way that I had the privilege of working with the Body Corporate Chairs' Group. I want to here particularly acknowledge Tim Jones and the Auckland City Centre Residents' Group and thank you particularly to Noelene and to Adam on apartment isolation guidance for bodies corporate. So too I have had the privilege of working with them every step of the way as this bill has progressed.While Parliament has recently passed historic laws to increase density and amenity in our cities which others have referred to this bill is concerned with how we govern the communities that form in those buildings. It is at a basic level about the information that people are entitled to when they are looking to buy into a place. It's about the conduct that we expect of the professionals brought in to help manage increasingly complicated administration and maintenance. It's about the reasonable limits to power by any one of the owners within that building or a block of those owners. Ultimately it is a rulebook for more and more of our future living.The first reading of this bill in Parliament happened actually almost a year ago today on 10 March in 2021. Unanimous support across the Chamber took it to the Finance and Expenditure Committee (FEC) which I was stoked to see Nicola Willis agreed with me on and I'm pleased to hear given the party reshuffle that Nicola will soon be joining us back in her rightful place on FEC. I want to say thank you as well to the Minister for agreeing to lend us officials to our committee for the purposes of improving this law because indeed they have. They helped us to process 85 submissions from interested individuals and organisations 39 of which gave us in-person submissions.Thank you to all of those submitters who meticulously picked through the issues. It was brilliant to have been able to hold one of those sessions in a COVID-free period in the one and only electorate of Auckland Central. Throughout the process of public hearings and evidence we heard some of the incredibly complex circumstances the legal fish hooks international best practice and local challenges be they our country's position on a fault line and earthquake risk and the requisite reasonable planning required; all about the New South Wales model; increasing numbers of developments with shared amenities skirting the grey area of the law and causing future headaches for buyers who couldn't have known better. And we heard so much more. Those submissions helped to improve this bill substantially as others have reflected on.But there were three key issues that I ended up having a sole differing view from the committee as reflected in our report. As the Green committee member and as the representative of Auckland Central I still believe that they are requiring as a serious revisit and I'm confident as far as the major two go as Nicola Willis has just reflected on—and I'm keen to see her Supplementary Order Papers (SOPs) to that effect—that we will see progress. We wait in hope that the Minister and Labour members are as well. I might add that I have some SOPs up my sleeve as well if they are needed.The two big issues regarding those changes are disclosure to potential buyers and proxy voting. The third issue while currently periphery I do think could pose future issues if not pre-emptively professionalising body corporate managers. There is fulsome mention of it in the select committee report so I won't labour it but I think that we have found time and again that where this Parliament has had a good opportunity to professionalise sectors particularly the property industry there's been a broad refusal to act until it is too late. The select committee majority removed previously required professional industry organisation membership for body corporate managers on advice from officials that we had not yet seen enough of a problem to justify the need for it. But just like Parliament refused to regulate property managers in 2008 because at that point in time there wasn't a sizeable enough evidence of a problem leading us to 15 years later and now having to fix that problem after a lot of collateral damage I see this as an unnecessary missed opportunity to not tighten things up now. It's gutting that other members of the committee didn't agree and I hope a future MP isn't looking at this speech in Hansard in the future as I did on the point of property managers in another 15 years' time.But back to the major two points on which I believe we now seem to have at very least by virtue of the leadership of the member in charge of this bill broad consensus to address and to fix on disclosure and on proxies. I wouldn't really hesitate to suggest that there weren't many MPs—although as we just heard I would never doubt the intellectual prowess of our chair Dr Dunc"—sorry that's Dr Duncan Webb—that many of us could seriously follow the changes made in committee to pre-contractual disclosure statements nor the rationale for the removal of the pre-settlement disclosure. I'll be the first to admit that I couldn't which is why I again registered a dissenting view. It has in turn been validating to know that those are sentiments shared by those with property conveyancing and broader legal experience. It's heartening to know that the member in charge Nicola Willis now agrees and that we will be continuing work together to amend those clauses to a far more practical accessible and workable set of rules. I feel that this one hopefully will be relatively easily resolved.The second major issue is on the removal of limits to proxy voting. For the uninitiated—very lucky of you—proxy voting is when you get the right to vote on somebody else's behalf. While that seems to make sense generally as elucidated by Dr Duncan Webb—life happens after all—problems and I mean huge problems can arise with what's come to be known colloquially as proxy farming. This is where one group or individuals do their darnedest to collect as many votes as possible to force through their will on everybody else. It's where I've heard countless reports of effectively corporate takeovers where owner-occupiers are plunged sometimes into debt by egregious costs forced on them as a result of entities who capture enough of the votes to require excessive work in common areas in order to split the bill and flip their property for more money. It's particularly dangerous in instances of absentee landlords.If I may register it on the parliamentary record I know of many current instances where such proxy farming has occurred in my electorate with a number of overseas-based landlords caring about not much else more than profit maximisation resulting in cuts to amenities security and upkeep for everybody else in the building. Where those situations are in their most egregious and lessening neighbourhood safety I have unfortunately found that some people some politicians and even some news reporters have wrongfully begun to lay the blame in the stigmatising concept of Kāinga Ora tenants which firstly could not be any further from the truth but it does satiate a deeply dangerous narrative about who does and who doesn't belong in our neighbourhoods. The fact of the matter is we should be creating rules to prioritise the views and the values of those who live and breathe our communities not profit maximisation and fast decisions when they can be bad decisions. While the majority of the committee—everyone bar this lonely Greenie—originally agreed with the removal of those limits as Nicola Willis has just told us she has since held conversations that have swayed the National Party stance and I sincerely hope that Labour colleagues follow.I'm really looking forward to the committee of the whole House stage in the next fortnight or so where we can see these improvements come to fruition and hopefully debate some awesome SOPs. The Greens are incredibly proud to support this bill and we will be striving to improve it for all New Zealanders current and future who will bring all of this talk of density to life and community-building. Kia ora."