Turei MetiriaMETIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green): Renting should give families the same security and the same quality of life as owning their own home does. Renting should not be a second-class option. Renting should not be a driver of respiratory illness in our children. Renting should be a secure stable and affordable option for New Zealanders in this country. Renters want that tenants and families want that and landlords want that too. The vast majority of landlords in this country care well for their properties. They care about their tenants. They want their tenants to live well in these homes and to live healthily in these homes and they go to great lengths to make sure that these homes are warm and dry and secure for their tenants. So we in the Green Party want to make the law work better for landlords and for tenants. We want the law to incentivise good landlords and good tenants and make sure that those few bad apples who rent out homes—those few bad landlords—are held accountable for the homes the cold damp homes that they let to their tenants. My Residential Tenancies (Safe and Secure Rentals) Amendment Bill will take small but none the less important steps to improve renters' lives in New Zealand by encouraging longer term and more secure tenancies in this country. My bill will benefit over 450000 households in New Zealand. We have had a considerable increase in the number of renting families because housing is now so unaffordable to purchase that families have no choice but to rent and to rent long term. So for 450000 households in this country the law needs to work better for them and the Green Party will deliver that. My bill makes six changes to the law. The first allows a tenant the first right of refusal when their lease expires so that they can put down long-term roots in the community they love and have raised their children in work in and play in. This means that tenants will have the choice of being able to stay in their home when the lease expires. It does not interfere at all with landlords' rights to evict should they choose to but when a lease comes to its natural close that tenant in that home the home they have built has the first right to say they want to stay. My bill will require landlords to write into the tenancy agreement the calculation that that landlord intends to use to increase the rent over time. This is just a means by which there is transparency between the landlord and the tenant about the rent increases. It will be up to the landlord and the tenant to decide what that calculation is. There is no prescription for it. But it means that the tenant will know by about how much the rent will go up and can therefore budget for that when they are planning their financial future. My bill will restrict rent increases to no more than once every 12 months. At the moment it is once every 6 months. That is too frequent for tenants especially when they do not know how much it is going to go up by. By having the rent calculation in the agreement and restricting those increases to once every 12 months there is greater transparency and it is much better for the families to be able to plan their financial future. They will know when the rent is going up and they will know by how much. My bill will restore the 90-day notice for landlords if they want to evict a tenant. The eviction process and the reasons for eviction will all remain as in the current law. There are no changes to that in my bill. But my bill will remove the 42-day notice. So many tenants now are so vulnerable that they are being moved from home to home as landlords are trying to decide what they want to do with their houses. But the problem is that that house is the home of the tenant. Especially for families with children who are very vulnerable in these situations they need more security than a 42-day notice period. So we would restore the 90-day notices across the board for all of the reasons that evictions can be made. My bill is a small but important step for renters and for landlords to improve the circumstances for families in this country and I urge all parties in this House to support the bill when it comes up for first reading. Thank you.