White HelenHELEN WHITE (Labour) (remote): Madam Speaker thank you for letting me take a call on this bill and I would first of all like to start by congratulating Nicola Willis on this bill. It's a very important bill and I'm very pleased that it has progressed with the cooperation of all parties.I'd also like to thank Nikki Kaye whose bill was really the first iteration of this bill. She promoted it and she worked with as I understand it Grant Robertson on this bill because Grant Robertson is in another big city and I don't think it's a coincidence that that's where we're seeing a passion for the changes which are fairly necessary.First of all what I want to say about this is that the bill has changed enormously and it's changed enormously not because anyone did a bad job but because times are changing and we're learning about living together. We haven't lived together in the same way in cities in the past in New Zealand and a lot of our habits are actually not particularly useful when you do live together—we don't really know how to do it. I suspect that in other cities in the world we'd get this right more often but we are used to making our own decisions about our own situations and not actually sharing and cooperating. So one of the things that I think this process taught me was that this issue actually goes well beyond the unit title. It goes to the whole area of community living and we're going to have to have a really good stream of work on that beyond this because this was a gnarly piece of work.It was really hard to get the balances that we did but it's only a piece of the picture because there are still quite a few structures beyond it—things like people who don't have body corporates people who are actually living in company structures etc. So those are the kinds of things that maybe in the future are places we need to go but right now what Labour saw was a pragmatic situation where it could add value to this bill and work cooperatively with the National Party and Nicola Willis to make this bill work.So you will see a lot of change from the first iteration. Those changes are ones that are based on the stories we heard and the stories we heard were actually fairly dramatic. This is people's most expensive purchase and it is also one which is going to attract a lot of people who can't afford a house in the suburbs.There's a lot of vulnerable people buying apartments and so we heard some pretty sad stories about people who have been caught up in a culture that wasn't really ready for them. We'll remember that a lot of the apartments that are in central Auckland are ones that were built at the time of leaky buildings which adds to the issue and they have been not necessarily handled in a mature fashion. So those issues that we had around disclosure which were about making sure that we got the rules right about what was disclosed to a purchaser—those issues came out of really painful experiences for people. I hope that by bringing in this law I can go from being a person who went through this process very worried about the purchases that people were making on apartments to actually being able to be feeling that people were safely making a purchase which is the most important purchase of their lives.The first thing that has been done here is there's been very much a balanced approach taken but there will be a level of disclosure that a purchaser gets and there will be a level of comfort about what happens if not everything is disclosed. So there is delay if in fact not everything is disclosed and there's enough records that they are getting that they know what they're buying. It's very very important that people actually engage in good faith in these things but these rules will hopefully set a culture that is actually one of good faith.Another part of this is that when people engage a body corporate manager they put a lot of faith into them. It's very vulnerable when you do that because that person has power over a lot of things and this bill was one where we had actually gone for a code of conduct in that area. So those managers will be expected to behave in a certain way.There are also issues really around remote voting. We've got this issue about proxies that perhaps will come up for a little bit more debate because it sounds like there may be a Supplementary Order Paper about this but one of the things to keep in mind about proxies and the information around those is that now people will have an option of voting for themselves remotely. So they won't necessarily have to engage in the proxy voting situation by giving their vote to someone else in the same way. They will be able to actually directly engage in a process when they are involved with their body corporate.There's also a real distinction made between very big body corporates and little ones. There's been very much a pragmatic approach taken to how much we can expect simple structures to do and you've heard my colleague Anna Lorck talk about that. Simple structures won't have to do the same amount as the big structures because having a big apartment—like we heard from somebody from Metropolis. Metropolis is basically a city. It's 500-plus people. That is going to have a lot more complex issues and it's going to need a much more professional level of management. We heard about that alongside other people we heard from who are in single-level dwellings that are connected by shared walls but they have simple structures and those structures won't have the same level of need for maintenance etc. and they won't have the same level of professionalism required in their management.The code of conduct that was used for body corporate managers was actually borrowed from Queensland. Queensland has quite a complicated structure and we leaned on it because it had got it right in this instance. So I'm confident that that part of the bill is spectacularly robust.We've also got maintenance plans. When you think about when you buy something that's so important it's very easy to fool yourself that you've got a great deal if you don't actually know what the cost of upkeep is going to be. It's pretty important that people know what they're in for and so there is a plan here to maintain the building that is much more detailed in the first 10 years and is high level out from that and that will actually let somebody buy a house or buy an apartment knowing what they're buying. We've been pretty pragmatic about that as I think you've heard from other people but we haven't made it rigorous at the level of that later part of the years because practically it wouldn't be possible. It's very hard to tell what happens in the future but it's pretty easy to actually plan out to 10 years.We've also put in a dispute resolution process and that's important because the processes that we had weren't fit for purpose. We've actually just raised the cap and we've put the disputes of under $100000 into a much more user-friendly pathway because when litigation is so expensive and so intimidating it tends again to come back because of the people who are feeling most vulnerable and whose purses are tightest. They're the ones who suffer under that system.As Dr Duncan Webb said we took very seriously the issue about the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment people entering the property. We had a good look at it because obviously it's something that we probably—many of us on the committee are lawyers and we all care about powers of entry. So that really did get a lot of scrutiny.Finally penalties. Penalties are something that are there for non-compliance. You've got to have teeth in these things and there are teeth but basically this is a very very pragmatic bill that has moved a long way from where it started.So I am grateful to Nikki Kaye for bringing this issue into the ballot originally and I'm grateful to Nicola Willis for pursuing it. Thank you. I commend this bill to the House.