McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's kind of the time of the electoral cycle when you look across the House and you don't know who's going to be here next week and who's not but I want to acknowledge you because I know that you and Clayton Mitchell and Gareth Hughes are in safe territory because for the next six weeks you'll have a very peaceful time not having to worry about where you're going to be on 20 September. But I do think that there are plenty in the House and some of us who may well not be here and we're at the mercy of the population for the next six weeks.I just want to comment on the Minister as well because I've noticed in my time in this House that Ministers are usually pretty confident when they put legislation to the House and so they don't generally have to barrack the Opposition every time they criticise it. I notice Minister Faafoi is a little nervous about this so perhaps he's not quite as confident in this legislation as he should be.I suppose I wanted to just comment on one or two other things before I get on to the bill itself. I listened to Ron Mark with interest. I've noticed Ron Mark sitting on the fence on quite a few of his speeches in the last few weeks and he was firmly on the fence today. I didn't know which side he was going to fall on for quite a while. He did fall on the side of the Government in the end. I don't know how he got to that point though because his arguments certainly didn't back that perspective.Last of all I want to just comment on a couple of comments that Marama Davidson made which actually are absolutely pertinent to this bill because she made the comment that the New Zealand investment market lacks opportunity to invest elsewhere and I think she's right. I think that's what's driven the kind of penchant we have in New Zealand for investing in residential rental property. Private investors have for a long time been attracted to residential investment property as a proposition because it is a much easier and more understandable form of investment than any other we have in New Zealand. It's created some of the challenges we have today because most of the people who invest in this sector—I think something like 70 percent of them—are what we might term mum and dad or family people who have a little bit of money left over who want to invest for their retirement. They buy a house and they put it into the rental market. Now we have a system in New Zealand now which we didn't have some years ago where we have a large number of property managers in that rental market. Many people use them but of course there's a cost to that and so when you're sailing a little close to the wind as many people do who invest in rental property it makes it more difficult.The other thing that's happened in the course of this Government's term is that they put two or three pieces of legislation in place which I think have had perverse effects on the rental market. One was the Overseas Investment Office changes which effectively prohibited overseas purchase of houses in New Zealand. That effectively dampened the market and created a much tighter rental market. The next thing was the ring-fencing of losses which certainly tightened the market up again and the other one was extending the brightline test. All these things put more pressure on the rental market and to a large extent have caused some of the increase in rental prices that we've heard about already today. I think this bill will do the same thing and the reason it'll do the same thing is because almost all rental—most commercial things are calculated on a risk-based proposition and I think this bill puts more risk at the hands of the property owners. That will inevitably in my view lead to higher rentals being charged.There is another clause in this bill which I think will lead to a higher rental price being quoted and that's the fact that you can no longer—and I'm not sure it's a good or bad thing—change the rental quote during the course of a negotiation. I think that's a reasonably strong thing. The problem is it will cause landlords to put a higher upfront price on those rentals. You'd have to think as a consequence of some of those changes it will lessen the number of landlords in the market.For those electorate MPs in the House—and there aren't that many—we get a lot of inquiry—or complaint I suppose—about rental properties of varying types through our offices. Most of them interestingly in my case relate to the Government or community housing trusts; they don't relate to private landlords. So we've got a bill here which in some ways has created two types of landlord the private landlord and everyone else because the rules don't necessarily apply in the same manner to the housing corporation or to community trusts as they do to private landlords. That's really differentiating between the two and I'd have to say that in my time I've seen many more people mistreated by Housing New Zealand than I have by private landlords in this sector. I think that that's one of the challenges we have and I think that it's very hard to put in place legislation that tidies up the mistreatment of people when we're dealing with probably 1 or 2 percent of both tenants and landlords in this instance.Most people are never going to have a problem with this piece of legislation because if you think about the objective of a tenant and a landlord the objective of almost every good landlord—not all of them but almost every good landlord—is to have a tenant in residence for as long as you can. It costs no money to change and from a tenant's perspective if they're happy with the house they want to stay there as long as they can. That's the perfect situation. So this piece of legislation should have no real impact on those people. The problem is it's the problem landlords and the problem tenants that are challenged in this situation and it's very hard to put in place a piece of legislation that equally protects the landlord and the tenant and I think that's where this bill struggles. I also think that it would be difficult to put a piece of legislation in place that satisfies everyone with respect to that. I do however think though that this puts a significantly greater risk on the landlords and as a consequence of that is going to lift the cost of rental even further.I also listened to Ron Mark with interest because as I said he sat on the fence and he wasn't sure which side he was going to fall but one of the things he talked about was the issue of community housing trusts and how poor they were as landlords and I don't agree with that. I mean as I said earlier we do get a little more complaint through our offices around community housing and Government-provided housing but I don't agree with his point because actually we have some very good community housing trusts. He talked about the Wairarapa trust which owns a large number of housing in the Wairarapa all of them run on a community basis. They like many other community trusts round New Zealand provide a very good structure in behind which gives support to those tenants gives support to the people around them and I think they do a pretty good job—I think it's a pretty good model for a rental process. But back to the point of this bill I do think that there's some challenge in this and I do think we're going to see landlords leaving the market. As Ron Mark again said the Government cannot provide all the things for all people.Just the last comment I want to make—and a couple of people have commented on it—anyone who thinks that the Government's lowered the number of people sleeping on the streets should come for a walk with me round Wellington in the morning. I'll tell you what there's a large number more people sleeping on the streets now than there were some seven or eight years ago and I don't think we've done anything yet to improve that situation. I also don't think we've taken the people as someone said earlier out of the Toyotas because they're still out there.So I think we've got a long way to go with respect to providing a better environment for renters and for people in the industry and we need to in future look after those landlords who provide good opportunity for tenants. I think that this bill doesn't do that; I think it creates a threat to some of our landlords and I think it's very unfortunate. So that's really my contribution. I think that it's unfortunate that we go to this length to try and achieve something and I don't think it will succeed. Thank you.