Salesa Jenny: Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSalesa Jenny: Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 31 May 2016. Volume:714;Page:11527. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JENNY SALESA (Labour—Manukau East): Talofa lava. Happy Samoan Language Week. Fa‘afetai tele lava for this call on the Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill. This bill will introduce a few useful provisions for providing some standards for housing in the private rental market. However it does not go far enough to address the dreadful circumstances in which many of our families are living particularly during this time as we go into the cold winter months.Introducing minimum insulation standards as proposed by this bill for private rental houses is indeed a step in the right direction but it is a wasted opportunity because this National Government should be doing more. When a freezing cold house is insulated but there is absolutely no requirement for modern efficient heating that rental house still remains a very cold freezing rental house. It does not magically become warm and dry. During winter it will still leave so many of our children our families and especially our elderly—who are prone to feeling the cold so much more than those of us who are younger—at risk of all kinds of respiratory illnesses. Our freezing cold houses are something that we should address in this bill but that unfortunately is an opportunity that this Government has not taken up.Each year over 40000 of our children particularly our poor vulnerable kids are admitted to hospitals for all kinds of respiratory illnesses. That is also a cost that we see in a different part of society in the health bill. This current Government is not considering that we could actually prevent some of that cost should we actually put insulation and heating in this bill. This is not acceptable. We know that the condition of many of the houses in New Zealand is that they are not warm dry and healthy.We also know that too many of our houses are contributing to the deaths of some of our children. Research shows that over 70 percent of children especially those kids who are living in poverty live in rented accommodation and most of them around 53 percent live in private rental houses. I have got to say that this percentage is even higher for Pacific and Māori because for Pacific families only 18 percent of our people own houses; 82 percent of Pacific families rent either from the State or from private landlords.No child should be living in a house that makes them sick but the sad fact is that thousands of our children are admitted to hospital for respiratory illnesses and worse around 15 children each year die from pneumonia. Emma-Lita Bourne is an example of one of those children—a toddler from Ōtara in my electorate of Manukau East who unfortunately died a preventable death from complications of pneumonia. According to the coroner the condition of the house that she lived in which was not an insulated house and was a freezing cold mouldy house contributed to her death.The Hon Nick Smith in his speech earlier on in this third reading of this bill stated that “Cost is important and we should be careful about imposing cost that that cost imposed is not more than any percentage gains.” Where does one start with such a statement? The costs that are much more important to a local MP like me are children’s lives. Too many of our children die preventable deaths and that is something that we as members of this House could do something about especially in bills like this one. We should do everything as members of Parliament to ensure that we are saving as many children’s lives as possible regardless of where they live.In Budget 2013 3 years ago this National Government committed to mitigating the negative health outcomes of poverty and poor housing. The Children’s Commissioner Dr Russell Wills in his submission to the Social Services Committee stated that he was very disappointed in this bill. In his view this bill will not improve the health of thousands of children living in poor quality housing. This is yet another example of another broken promise from this Government where it committed to doing something and it has not actually delivered on that promise. Thank you.