Twyford Phil: Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTwyford Phil: Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 08 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8626. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): Labour is voting for the Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill. It is better than nothing and deals with such an important issue as making New Zealand homes warm and dry which I will argue is one of the biggest public health challenges that this country faces. We welcome this bill coming to the House—it is a small incremental initiative—but sadly it falls a long way short of the kinds of policies that this Government would be advocating if it was serious about dealing with this problem.The bill has four big defects which I will speak about in more detail. The first is that it does not propose any standard for heating of rental properties. It has an excessively long 4-year phase-in period for landlords. There is no provision thirdly for setting standards for mould or ventilation. Finally there is a massive loophole in the proposed regulations that will flow from this bill that will allow houses that are currently insulated with the 1978 standard for insulation to retain that standard. They will not be required under this bill as it is currently drafted to meet the 2008—the current Building Act—standards for insulation. So there are four big weaknesses which I will return to.This issue is incredibly important. I think that in recent years New Zealanders have come to the view that it is high time we fixed up our rental housing. Around half the children who are growing up below the poverty line in New Zealand are living in private rental housing which is currently more or less unregulated. Many of them are living in substandard cold damp and mouldy housing that is a threat to their health. In this country we hospitalise about 40000 children every year from poverty-related diseases—asthma gastroenteritis bronchiolitis. It is a blood-curdling list of poverty-related diseases that we simply should not have in significant numbers in this country but we do. The problem is the toxic cocktail of poverty overcrowding and poor quality cold damp houses.The polls show—public opinion tell us—that New Zealanders want this problem fixed. People believe that every child growing up in this country deserves to grow up in a warm dry home. One of the reasons is that very credible public health research done in this country shows that every dollar you invest in the retrofitting of houses through insulation and heating can save up to $5 in public health expenditure. It is a no-brainer. We should be doing it. The public want to see it done. But this bill that Nick Smith has brought to the House is a classic “Nick Smith special”. It is another—yet another—grudging half measure by a Minister who has been dragged by public opinion kicking and screaming to do something about a problem but who insists yet again on doing the bare minimum to try to convey the impression that the Government is actually doing something about the problem.I want to quote Professor Philippa Howden-Chapman of Otago University’s Wellington campus who won the Prime Minister’s Science Prize earlier this year for the work that she and her colleagues have done documenting the public health effects of poor quality housing. She said that houses “get damp and cold and mouldy but it also damages the people living in them particularly babies children and older people. It damages their lungs. If they have heart problems it’s harder for their circulatory system to work. And so people who live in cold houses it’s likely to aggravate their heart conditions but for children we get this terrible terrible battery of respiratory infections and close contact infections because people have to crowd together in one room. So it’s pretty shocking in a country that is as wealthy as we are; we can’t make our houses warm enough for people to keep healthy in.” That is a very important part of the New Zealand housing story.If the National Party members opposite had voted for my Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill in April this year which would have regulated minimum standards for both heating and insulation then we would not be here wasting time with this excuse this half measure of a bill. But the good news is that this House will get the chance to debate and vote on Andrew Little’s Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2) which will achieve the same effect. It will legislate both for modern efficient fixed heating sources in a house and for insulation standards because we need homes that are both warm and dry.The huge gap in Nick Smith’s bill today is that it imposes only insulation standards; it does not impose heating standards. Under Nick Smith’s bill we will see landlords around the country implementing an insulation standard but they will insulate cold damp homes. They will still be cold damp homes and children will still be getting sick. This Minister Nick Smith is pandering to slum landlords—pandering to the bottom of the market—because he will not do the decent thing and legislate standards for both heating and insulation.One of the big defects that I mentioned in this bill is that in Nick Smith falling over himself so as not to offend slum landlords he has designed into this bill a massive loophole that will allow houses that were insulated with the standard that has been required since 1978 which is 70 millimetres of insulation fibre—70 millimetres.This here is the thickness of insulation that is required under the 1978 standard and under Nick Smith’s legislation if a house has this level of insulation in the walls and the roof that is OK—it can continue. But since 2008 new houses in this country have been required to instead have this thickness of insulation. It is much much thicker and more effective. That is why houses that have been insulated with this standard are warmer and drier because they have this thickness. But Nick Smith falling over himself to pander to the slum landlords at the bottom of the market is going to require them to have only this thinner thickness of legislation if they have already got it in the house.That is a massive loophole. It is a flaw right at the heart of this bill. Nick Smith is happy for them to have this 70-millimetre insulation but if houses have been insulated since 2008 they have got this much thicker insulation fibre. Well I am sorry Dr Smith but you are letting down hundreds of thousands of New Zealand kids who are growing up and getting sick in cold damp houses because you are not willing to do the right thing and require private landlords to do this. Not only are you not requiring them to have an efficient heating source—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order!PHIL TWYFORD: Not you Mr Assistant Speaker—Dr Smith you are not willing to require this from tens of thousands of private landlords whose properties are already insulated with a patently inadequate level of insulation set from the 1978 standards. This bill is not going to require them to upgrade their standards.The question is: why will Nick Smith not do the decent thing? Why does he always bring weak grudginghalf measures to this House no matter what the policy issue is? In this case we are talking about cold damp homes. The first reason I submit is that he is pandering to slum landlords. Most of the good landlords in this country have already insulated their homes. Most of their properties already have this thicker insulation. The Property Investors Federation has been publicly advocating for heating standards and legislation but Nick Smith has brought a bill to this House that falls short of what the federation has been arguing for. He is pandering to the bottom end of the market and he will not do the decent thing. The good landlords and the professional landlords in this country are tired of being undercut by the bottom end of the market which is trying to make a profit at the expense of providing decent healthy accommodation. Those landlords are willing to put their tenants’ lives and the lives of their children at risk because they will not provide decent standards.The other reason is that Nick Smith cannot bring himself—he cannot find it in himself—to regulate properly to make markets work better for ordinary Kiwis because that is not in the DNA of the National Party. Its members will not do the decent thing. They are pandering to slum landlords. This bill falls a long way short of what it could do.