Bishop Chris; Woods MeganCHRIS BISHOP (National): Thanks very much Mr Chair. One of the things that's happened in the review period we're talking about is the interest deductibility changes that the Government made have started to bite. Of course 1 April just gone they started to bite even more for many landlords out there. Of course interest rates have risen very steeply in the last 12 to 18 months as well. So the twin combination of the phased removal of the ability for landlords to deduct interest as an expense allied with very steep rises in interest rates have put a real crunch on a lot of people. The material that the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development survey in terms of the rental market does show actually that that is a real pain point for landlords.So I'd just ask the Minister whether or not the Government has given any consideration to an alleviation of those interest deductibility changes because I think it's now fairly clear that that removal of interest as a legitimate expense for rental property owners is putting upward pressure on rents and at a time when we have a real cost of living crisis that is really hitting families hard. We're at 50 percent now; next year it's 25 percent; the year after it's zero. So I just ask the Minister: is any relief on the way for mum and dad landlords who can no longer deduct interest as an expense?Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Minister of Housing): I'm happy to give just a very quick response to that. Has consideration been given to bringing back interest deductibility for landlords? The answer is that there is interest deductibility for landlords of course; there is interest deductibility for landlords that want to help us solve the housing crisis that want to add to the housing stock. So new builds have a 20-year exemption and are eligible for interest deductibility. We haven't seen the over 200000 building consents that we've seen during our time in Government happen by accident; it's because there's a programme of intentional policies around ensuring that we are for the first time in a generation putting all the efforts into increasing supply.In terms of it driving up rents unfortunately the facts just don't match the member's arguments. If we have a look at the year-on-year rental increases it's either 2.3 or 2.7 percent—I don't have the statistics sitting right in front of me; 2.7 my officials are telling me thank you—for the 12 months to March 2023. You put this against wage growth for the same period which is in the 7 percents. So what we can see is that rents are—and that is new rents; I think that's a really important point to note—actually rising at a much lower rate than wages are. So the arguments don't stack up there.We also see the number of rental properties entering the market continues to grow. There was around a 3.1 percent increase of rentals available in the market over that year. So the narrative that the member is trying to run—that we've got fewer rentals and rents are escalating at a rate that we haven't seen before—simply is not correct. The evidence shows that not to be the case and in fact if we stack that up against previous periods when the National Government was in power we see much higher rates of rental growth and actually far fewer rental properties as a proportion entering the market.