Turei MetiriaRESIDENTIAL TENANCIES (SAFE AND SECURE RENTALS) AMENDMENT BILLFirst ReadingMETIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green): I move That the Residential Tenancies (Safe and Secure Rentals) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Social Services Committee to consider the bill. I urge members tonight to vote for this Residential Tenancies (Safe and Secure Rentals) Amendment Bill which will make sure that renting will give families the same security and the same quality of life as if they owned their own home. I urge members to consider the nearly 1.5 million New Zealanders—1.5 million New Zealanders—who live in rental accommodation in this country. That consideration includes over 400000 children who live in rental accommodation in this country and their need their right for a safe and secure home in which they can grow and thrive.Renting should not be a second-class option but it is. Renting should not be a driver of respiratory illness in children but it is. Renting should be a secure stable and affordable housing option for families—if only it was. We all know—all of us here in this House—from the constituents the family members and the communities that we work with that renting in New Zealand is increasingly expensive unstable and for children quite dangerous actually.We also know that the vast majority of landlords care for their properties well and they want their tenants to live well and healthily in the homes that they own. Landlords want to make sure that their homes are safe for their tenants and especially for the children in those homes. So this bill works with the desires of landlords to have good homes long-term tenancies and stability for their tenants and with the desires of tenants to be able to have stability and security in their homes so that they can take care of their children over the long term. This bill will bring those two desires together and improve the quality of renting and tenancies in New Zealand.The tenancy law we have in this country in terms of the respective rights and responsibilities between landlords and tenants is very old. There have been some changes around the edges but in large part the legislation has remained the same for quite a few decades now. It is now time for us to modernise the law to make sure it meets the needs of 21st century New Zealand families who are increasingly having to rent for longer and in more expensive and difficult circumstances. So let us make sure that the law balances better the rights and responsibilities of landlords and tenants. This bill will benefit over 450000 households in this country so it will have a huge impact on thousands and thousands of New Zealand families and make sure that they have better safer and more secure housing.I just want to go through the changes that are set out in the bill. The bill makes six changes to the law. The first allows a tenant the first right of refusal when their lease expires. The point of this is to allow tenants to continue to live and reside in the community where they have put down roots the community that they love. This is critical for tenants: to have the choice to stay in their homes if they want to. This would mean that a landlord cannot use the ending of a tenancy to evict a tenant who has otherwise been a perfectly good tenant. There are some bad landlords who will do that; who will use the tenancy to evict a tenant because they want to put the rent up to an extraordinary degree or for other reasons. But what we are talking about here is families who have put down roots in their community and have treated this house like their home. They should have the right to be able to stay in the home that they have built there for themselves and for their children.The second change to the law that this bill makes is it requires landlords to write into the tenancy agreement the calculation that the landlords will use to increase the rent. The bill does not prescribe what that calculation is; it simply requires the calculation to be in the tenancy agreement. And the reason for this is to make sure that everyone—tenants and landlords—knows exactly how much the rent is going to go up by. So particularly for tenants this is critical—that they can plan for future expenses. At the moment tenants can go into a tenancy with absolutely no idea of how much their home is going to cost them in the next 6 months in the next 12 months. That is simply unfeasible for families who are increasingly living on tighter and tighter budgets and struggling to be able to pay the basic bills. So at least with this law change tenants are able to calculate future rent rises and to financially plan for those future rent rises.The third change is that this bill will restrict rent increases to no more often than once every 12 months for periodic and fixed-term tenancies. Again this is to enable tenants to have more certainty and security in the rents that they will have to pay so that they know they can financially plan and keep that tenancy. A great deal of the driver for homelessness is rents going up too fast too quickly for tenants. They are moving from place to place as they try to find tenancy that they can afford; it is particularly critical again for low income families on tight budgets.The fourth change is the bill will restore the minimum 90-day notice period required from landlords. The bill will remove the right of landlords to evict tenants under the 42-day notice rules. There is absolutely no justification for giving families who have built a home in that house who have lived here sometimes for a year or 2 years or even more who have roots in that house to have only 42 days to have to leave it. I do not agree that just because a landlord says that he or she wants their family to live in that house that that is a justification for evicting a family who has used that house as their home where their children have used that house as their home. That family who lives in the house who pays their rent is entitled to much better decency than this law allows. We must get rid of the 42-day eviction notice period.I have also had significant feedback from tenants' organisations about this. They say that Housing New Zealand is one of the worst when it comes to using even the 90-day notice provisions actually for evicting tenants for no good reason. So if this bill gets through to select committee tonight we would want to look at means by which tenants can appeal the decision to use a 90-day notice to evict. These are people's homes where they have their children; they need to have more stability and security than even this bill provides.The fifth change that this bill will make is that it removes the obligation on tenants to have to pay leasing fees to rental agencies. Leasing fees are just a rort. There is no justification for why tenants should have to pay these companies any money. These companies are performing a service for the landlord. It is a significant increase in the cost of moving into a new home particularly for those families who are struggling to be able to maintain tenancies. Leasing fees are a major barrier to families who are trying to get into a home. It is an unjust barrier. It is unfair. It needs to be gone. There is absolutely no justification for charging tenants those fees.The sixth change that this bill would make is a fairly simple one actually: to create a default lease term of 3 years for longer-term tenancies. This can of course be changed in the agreement. So it does not hold landlords or tenants to a 3-year term but it does start to set the framework in law and in the culture of tenancies in this country to encourage longer-term tenancies and to allow for tenants to have greater control over the home that they build in the house that they rent.I urge members to allow this bill to go to select committee. There will be things that others do not agree with and I am open to making changes. But we cannot—when homeownership is at the lowest it has been in 60 years—allow tenants to continue to suffer the full burden of that. Under the existing law they do; under my law there is a chance of fairness for ordinary tenant families and their children. Thank you.