Davidson MaramaMARAMA DAVIDSON (Co-Leader—Green): Almost half of our population in this country are renting a home and do not own their own home. For Māori that is well over 60 percent and for Pacific Islanders it is well over that again. Where is the care from the Opposition and the pleading from the Opposition for those people many of whom struggle to find a secure place to live? Where are the pleas from the Opposition talking about the actual difficulty of not having a secure home? If we are wanting to focus on challenges and difficulties in this House then we have an obligation to do that for the least empowered for those with the least resources and for those who do not have the capacity to send in some emails to every single MP across this House. If we wanted to extract the voices and the emails of people who have been pleading and living with unfair power imbalance for generations and for decades we would have been swamped with those voices. They may not be as coherently organised as property managers but you can bet your life that those voices are many they are strong and they are spread throughout our entire country and they are far too busy trying to sort the real difficulty the daily challenge and reality of just stressing about even having a house to live in let alone trying to write emails in an organised attempt to keep that power imbalance as the status quo. That is the campaign that the National Party are supporting and that they are using and weaponising. They are weaponising a few tenants who need to be supported to be better tenants. They are weaponising the small minority in order to smear the entire population of tenants—of people who rent in this country—when we know that those tenants are trying to do their best. They are trying to do their best but the status quo of power and the rules in the system have been working against them for generations and for decades. So yes some people will be feeling some discomfort right now at the suggestion of fixing those unfair rules. Yes I expect that as we start to correct the power imbalance in this country—oh yes—we will see some complaints. Yes we will see some complaints from those who are wanting to protect that power imbalance and the Opposition MPs from that side of the House are trying to hide behind the guise that this bill will make it worse for some people who rent. That is not why they are opposing this bill. They are not here to put on the floor of this House the voices of mums with children who have to shift schools several times in a year or several times over a few years. They are not here reading out those stories in this House. They are using this legislation and trying to say that it is going to make it worse. They're trying to say Let's not change it because it's only going to result in some players pulling out of the market." If people using housing as a business are not able to run a business in a way that is fit for human decency then that is up to them to choose some other way to run a business—to choose some other pathway to make wealth. That choice is up to them. We know that for the most part property owners and landlords can actually abide by rules of human decency. We know that using this legislation as a weapon against rewriting those tenancy rules is an excuse to uphold the current imbalance of power. The Greens are proud to support the Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill. We know that renting in this country needs to be a dignified choice and that renting in this country still needs to provide a secure valuable dignified life for anybody who chooses to rent or who is unable to own a home. I want this House despite the fact that there is literally only a handful of MPs who do not own a single property—only a handful of MPs in this House do not own their own property and yes I am one of them. Regardless of what properties and portfolios of properties we might own across this House I want this House to represent at least half of the population—and more if you're Māori and Pacific and low-income—who need a voice in this House. Just because MPs are mainly not renting that does not mean that people who rent do not deserve a voice in this House. So I am very proud of this essential start to correcting the unfair system. I will not budge and the Green Party will not budge from continuing on this start. There is more to do. We know that alongside fixing the rental rules and helping mitigate against any people pulling out from running a house as a business—which by the way still leaves behind a house. It's still there. I know that ramping up public and community housing which we are doing—and which this Government has done in a bigger quantity than any other since the 1970s—needs to happen alongside fixing our rental laws. It is unacceptable for this country to continue with that power imbalance. It is not acceptable that some people in our communities have to stress and do not know whether or not they will be moved on at any moment. It is not acceptable that those at the back of rental application lines who know that they have got almost zero chance of being preferred tenants because the market is currently so skewed towards favouring particular tenants—I know that we need to stop the ability to do rental bidding because those very groups think that the only way that they can get a foot in the door is to bid higher than what is being advertised and to even bid outside of what they know that they can afford. But they are that desperate—they are that desperate—to bid a higher rent and to offer a higher weekly rent because they know no one else will look at them. They know that they are good tenants. They are good tenants and they just want to put down roots. They just want to be able to form support networks in their communities. They just want to be able to enable their children to attend the same school to make sure that they can provide a network of support in their own neighbourhood. We are proud to support this start to the change of legislation. We will continue to work to make more changes so that we can truly correct the power imbalance. Thank you Mr Speaker."