Bidois DanDAN BIDOIS (National—Northcote): It's a pleasure this evening to take a brief call on the Residential Tenancies (Prohibiting Letting Fees) Amendment Bill. I was quite surprised actually by the member Priyanca Radhakrishnan who has just resumed her seat. She talked about fairness but she sat down with a few minutes to go. We gave her five minutes of fairness and she only had three minutes of fairness to say.I must say it is a sad evening in this House when we move to prohibit something rather than improve the regulations and improve the market behind it. It's a sad evening for all of those tenants property managers and owners who are being punished for the sake of a few rogue property managers. This bill is a bad bill. It's not going to make life financially easier for tenants. It's not going to add any more properties on to the market which is what we actually need and it's going to have a lot of unintended consequences which we all heard in the Social Services and Community Committee hearings.I want to talk about some of the submissions I heard and about what this Government could have done to improve the regulations and the transparency of letting fees. One story we heard from the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand said that all property managers should be licensed they should all have a code of conduct—there currently is none—and there should be a database of those rogue property managers so that they can be banned from charging letting fees.What about another submission I hear you say Madam Deputy Speaker. Well the Independent Property Managers Association said that we should focus on raising standards in the sector rather than banning letting fees. There's another one: IQ Property Management in their submission said that both tenants and landlords benefit from letting fees. So when they hear the members opposite in the House saying that only landlords benefits well that is a shame because these submissions that we've had clearly state a different matter.So the consequences of this bill are to be clear that landlords will start to look for long-term tenants because that is going to be much more financially viable for them. We know that rents under this Government have already gone up by $25 a week and we have told this Government—and they've heard it loud and clear—that by banning letting fees you're simply going to pass those costs on to tenants through increased rents.And tenants are going to be worse off. Let's just say that the fees are going to be passed on to tenants through an increase of say $2 a week which is pretty minimal. But that's $700 on average a year. And if you're there for two years or three years then that's $1400 or $2100 that you're paying extra in the pocket just because there is no letting fee. So the result of this is that the rents will go up. It's going to get harder for people to go into rental properties. There are going to be more properties taken off the market which is exactly the opposite of what we need to be doing.So what we need to be doing is focusing on building houses. We need to focus on things like improving the transparency of the rental market and we need to regulate these rogue operators—of which there are few—so that we can have overall transparency in the letting fee market.I also want to say this has been rushed through the House both from a select committee perspective but also the date at which it commences 12 December—that was despicable. I want to express my dissatisfaction at the members opposite for wanting to rush this through the House just so they can go away and make sure that this process has been done before Christmas-time. So I will oppose this bill rigorously in the House as will my National colleagues.