Upston LouiseHon LOUISE UPSTON (National—Taupō): Thank you Madam Chair. I do want to thank the Minister for taking a call and there are a couple of issues that I want to just come back to—in the earlier contribution I made—because I don't believe they were adequately addressed or perhaps they were misunderstood.But before I come to that I want to just address two comments by speakers in this debate. One was Chlöe Swarbrick and the view which I iterated in my initial comments around the disdain for landlords which I find entirely offensive. If members come to this House to assess the ability of landlords based on a small number of the population that happen to work in this building I think it shows how completely out of touch they are with ordinary New Zealanders. The very hard-working New Zealanders—and this is coming to a comment that the Minister made as well. There are approximately 270000 landlords in New Zealand. There are no corporate or institutional residential landlords. And of those 270000 residential landlords there are approximately 546000 properties. So it backs up what I said in my contribution on Part 1 of the Residential Tenancies (Prohibiting Letting Fees) Amendment Bill that by far and away the majority of landlords are mum and dad investors who have one perhaps two properties.And the Minister in answering some of the questions referred to the landlord's business". Well thousands and thousands of landlords don't consider that they're in business. They don't consider they're in the business of being a landlord. Yes there are regulations and obligations that they have to comply with but those mum and dad investors aren't in the business of investing. They might be teachers they might be nurses or they might be truck drivers that have worked incredibly hard to save up for a rental property which will be their retirement fund and so for them to have the ability to purchase expert assistance in getting a tenant for their property—which is the intention in Part 1. Section 2of the principal Act is amended in Part 1 and when it refers to the letting fee we're not talking about big businesses. We're not talking about big-business people or fat cats as the Green Party seems to think landlords are. The majority of them are hard-working New Zealanders who have scrimped and saved to put money into an investment—not a business an investment—that they will use for their retirement. So I just want to make that very very clear. So this particular impact means that those landlords won't be able to have a property manager who then collects a letting fee for that service.Now the Minister in attempting to answer my question about process misinterpreted a key point. The two rushed parts of the process were before the bill was introduced and in its implementation. So the first part the part that the regulatory impact statement clearly indicates is there was insufficient time for Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment officials to consult with the sector before the legislation was even drafted. That is the poor process that I refer to in this House. That is a process that should not be repeated by this Government and it's happening over and over and over again. In terms of the select committee process that was one of the ones that wasn't truncated. I think that's a bit of an exception in this House at the moment. We did hear from a good number of submitters—some for some against—and I want to thank my colleague Dan Bidois for going through some of the comments specifically that the submitters raised.But I want to come back to the second part of the process that was absolutely rushed and that's what happens after this point. So we're in the committee stage; there's yet to be a third reading of which we don't know the date and yet this is going to be implemented on 12 December. So the very landlords that I am talking about in this particular debate might have a week they might have two weeks to implement this legislation. That is an outrageous process. That is deeply unfair to the—and let me quote that number again—270000 landlords in New Zealand. Now of the properties—546000 properties—not all of them have property managers. About 50 percent do. So we're not talking about every single property that this could apply to but that's still a very large number—270000 properties. Given that we don't know when the third reading will be or when the bill will be given the Royal assent by the Governor-General potentially they'll have a week to implement it which is grossly unfair.I come to my third point in response to the Minister's comment and this is around the international experience; the country that was quoted a lot is Scotland and they banned letting fees in November 2012. Unfortunately the evidence showed both sides in terms of the impact on rent. The study by LSL Property Services and UK Tenant Data said that one immediate effect of the fees ban was that the rents increased from January 2013 to the following year January 2014 by 4.3 percent when they had been static in the year prior—4.3 percent. I am sure the Minister doesn't want to see a 4.3 percent increase in rents this year. That was a risk that was clearly identified in the regulatory impact statement so I'd be very keen to hear the Minister's response on that. He clearly quoted Scotland. This is another part of the evidence in terms of the implementation from Scotland that I would like the Minister to comment on.He also referred to the UK and Wales. Wales was looking at what Scotland did as Ireland was but instead they decided the problem was around disclosure. The Minister mentioned transparency in his comments so I do want to come back to that because it appears that some of the problem that the Minister wants to solve is around transparency and disclosure of the letting fee—what it covers who it covers when it should apply etc. So Ireland and Wales instead of banning letting fees actually introduced greater transparency and had a requirement that the letting fees be disclosed by the property managers. The UK put a similar requirement in to make sure that tenants are well-informed. So it is important in this House that when international examples are quoted they are quoted accurately.The final point that I do want to make comes back to this wider reform. I want to reiterate the risk. When legislation like this is put in piecemeal when there is a bigger piece of work then the policy intent of this does harm. So in the interests of legislation being concluded next year which is what the Minister indicated around the broader residential tenancies reforms it would make sense for this issue—and whether it's the problem of increased rent or upfront rent. At the end of the day someone still pays the increase whether it's an upfront fee or whether it's an increase every week—4.3 percent is what happened in Scotland—or is it the issue of transparency of the letting fee itself?The other thing that's important on the international comparisons is to look at the type of property owners and landlords here in New Zealand compared to other jurisdictions. I would say that in some of those countries the profile is quite different because of the very issue that these are not people in business. They are not in the business of owning property. The majority of them might have one or two properties and the fact that they want to engage professionals to provide support that helps tenants who are looking for properties—and at the moment it's a particularly tight market—is a service to them as well as the landlord.I think it is important that National's opposition to this piece of legislation is well understood because the reality is that this will have a further increase on rents for the very New Zealanders that the Government supports or purports to support."