Upston LouiseHon LOUISE UPSTON (National—Taupō): I want to take just a brief call in this second part of the Residential Tenancies (Prohibiting Letting Fees) Amendment Bill. I just bring the House's attention to the penalty of $1000 and come back to the point I made earlier around the very tight time frames in which this legislation is being passed and how I think it's a terrible process for those who are affected by this—property managers as well as property owners or landlords Let's say for example this legislation doesn't pass in this sitting of the House. Potentially it doesn't pass until late November - early December. It gets the assent by the Governor-General and the implementation date is 12 December 2018. Nowhere—nowhere—is there the ability for the penalty to be waived in the instance where there is such a ridiculously short implementation date. I think that's grossly unfair. For all of the landlords out there this is absolutely outrageous.As I said before the majority of landlords don't see them owning a rental property as a business. So these are not you know 270000 business people sitting out there watching Parliament getting legal updates on everything that affects their business. These are mum and dad investors who have worked hard and might have one property—two if they're lucky—and all of a sudden we're talking about significant penalties in Part 2 of this legislation and a ridiculously short implementation date. I want to pick up the comments the Hon Alfred Ngaro spoke about around the number of these mum and dad investors who don't treat their owning a rental property as a business who are now exiting or considering exiting the market. So when we talk about the market this is the person who has a rental property. Chlöe Swarbrick in her contribution in an earlier part considered that was a good thing—considered it was a good thing that landlords exit the rental housing market. Well I think that's a bad thing for tenants because if they think currently the pool of houses available to them to rent is small guess what—guess what. This Government is making it harder for people to own properties that they make available to others to rent. If it is that much more difficult they will exit—so there'll be even fewer properties available for people to rent.So this particular piece of legislation although you know it sounds good—prohibiting letting fees sounds good and in terms of the submitters that appeared before us there's no denying from the side of the House that there are some challenges there are some problems with some of the letting fees. The Minister himself said in an earlier contribution that greater transparency of the letting fee is something that could have been resolved through this particular piece of legislation. But no; instead the simpler option which has unintended consequences was just to ban them—to outright ban them. So instead it means those individuals who have worked hard and own an additional property in addition to their own that in most cases is their retirement savings fund—as opposed to a business entity—will be punished. They will be punished by legislation that has a ridiculously short commencement date of 12 December this year. It could have easily have been next year. Had the Minister been insistent on 12 December why didn't the Minister put a Supplementary Order Paper to enable or to ensure that people who were adjusting to this change weren't ridiculously punished with the $1000 fine purely because of the short time frame of the implementation?So I do want the Minister to respond to that. My question is very specifically why did he not consider the need for a transition when this is a ridiculously short time frame 12 December—either having had a later implementation date or allowing for a transition to ensure that New Zealanders are able to comply?