McCallum GrantGRANT McCALLUM (National—Northland): Thank you Madam Speaker. Well great news. This is great news: the war on landlords is coming to an end. Finally we have some common sense coming back to our rental market. This is what the tenants require and this is what the landlords require. Look one of the early things we did was we've brought back into play the ability for people who run a business—like every other business—the ability to deduct interest as a business expense. That's the first thing we brought back to the table for landlords.During the campaign I got people coming up to me who were mum and dad investors and this figure was something that was pointed out to me by one of my colleagues: 83 percent of rentals are owned by mum and dad investors—83 percent. These are the people that have worked hard saving a few dollars for their retirement so they can enjoy themselves in their twilight years. They came up to me and showed me their little profit and loss account and they were losing money under the previous Government. Losing money going backwards—why? Because the previous Government declared war on them. They didn't care about landlords and they didn't care about the fact that they were looking after themselves. Appalling! So we're changing that and it's desperately required. Then the other thing we're going to do now is actually allow people to have fixed-term tenancies. Well actually as was indicated by the member for Queenstown—well Queenstown and the Southland area—when he pointed out that you couldn't do that because there weren't enough rentals available for the workers in a seasonal occupation like skiing for people to have places to stay. So what was happening? They were staying in cars and that sort of thing which is just appalling—absolutely appalling—and not what we want to achieve. But one of the actual real highlights of this bill—the real highlights—is the pet bonds. The pet bonds are the real big—they allow us to bring our pets so people can take pets into rentals a really really good thing to be able to do. In fact I can talk about pets. I've got a few of my own. I've got a dog called Mack and another dog called Bell and they would love to be able to move into a rental but they wouldn't have been allowed to under that Government. It would have been too hard. It would have been too hard. But now under this Minister we're going to be able to bring them into a rental and there's good terms around it. It's just what we require right and it makes for a much better outlook. It shows that we care about animals on this side of the House. Believe it or not we actually care.Carl Bates: And people.GRANT McCALLUM: And we care about the people—that's correct. That's right.Also the other side of the House gets so very righteous about the fact that the State is the only one that can look after them and you look at what they did to the market. What did they do to the rental market in New Zealand? I'll tell you what they did. They drove up the price of renting a house by 170 bucks a week. How does that help anybody? That is a disgrace. You should hang your heads in shame. An absolute disgrace. We are focused on actually allowing people to rent their houses and there seems to be this view that good landlords want to kick out good tenants. Why? If you've got a good tenant why would you want to kick them out? Landlords are running a business. If you've got a good tenant in there you want to look after them which is another good reason for the pet bonds. The good tenants often have pets and they want to be able to bring their pets into their houses.It is great to get to the stage where we're finally going to allow landlords in this country to be given the respect that they deserve particularly the mum and dad investors. We on this side of the House understand who they are understand how important they are and understand that they are looking after themselves. They're not going to rely and look on a Government to look after them; they want to look after themselves and that's what we're about on this side of the House: personal responsibility and actually allowing people to get on and do business in a fair way. I commend this bill to the House.