Bidois DanDAN BIDOIS (National—Northcote): Well I must say I used to watch the House from my television about six years ago and I used to ask myself Do these people know what they're talking about? Do they actually read the bills that are being debated?" and Paul Eagle right there has convinced me that they do not in fact read the bills that are being debated because quite frankly what a drivel of a speech that was from the member. I want to say to Ben in Paul Eagle's electorate that the issue at hand is about supply and that supply is greater than demand. So if that is the crux of the issue that the member opposite has raised then surely the solution to that problem is to build more homes. I'm not talking about 18 homes or 24 homes but I'm talking about massively increasing the supply which this Government clearly is not doing. But today and at this moment it is a very sad day to be in this House. It's a sad day because it's a day where this Government chooses to ban something outright rather than improve the market and improve the efficiency and the transparency. It's a sad day when 95 percent of the property managers out there in New Zealand—the good property managers—are disadvantaged just because of the small rogue operators that are operating in this market. This is a bad bill. I've said this to you before and I'll say to you again: it will not make the life of tenants any easier. As my colleague the Hon Judith Collins said it's about whether this bill is going to make it better for the lives of others and she as well as I concluded that it will not in fact do that. It will make people in long-term tenancies worse off under this bill than before the change happened and there are so many other ways that they could have improved this bill through the process of this Parliament. But instead they chose to continue with the ideology of banning rather than improving. Let me tell you about some of the improvements that we had in the submissions process and countless numbers of submitters gave productive ideas on how they could improve this bill—how they could improve the objective that this bill sought to adhere to—but that wasn't taken up in the committee of the whole House. The first was around improving the transparency of fees. We've talked a lot about it and we had it in our minority view that this House could have improved the legislation around the transparency of fees so that tenants know what they're paying for up front. We also had an idea from the submission process around splitting the fees because as we've heard it is not only landlords that benefit from the service but also tenants. The third idea that came up in the submissions process is around a code of conduct for property managers in the market. Now this is something that I think we should have considered and I feel very passionate about it. It is around having a code of conduct for all property managers—including those 2 to 3 percent rogue operators—which should set the standards for letting fees which would outline what they could charge and which would have put some standards in place for the code of conduct of rogue operators. We presented this in the committee of the whole House and again it was not taken up by the Minister or the Government side of the House. There were a lot of other ideas but I just want to say of course that in the bill itself which Paul Eagle has to read—you should read the bill because it states it's actually an unlawful act to charge a fee. Fundamentally we on this side of the House believe that if there is an agent that is willing to provide a service and if there is somebody willing to pay for that service where is the role in Government in that service? We should be allowing that economic relationship to take place. We've all been there. I'm a renter myself and I've paid a letting fee over six times in the last 10 years. I just think that that side of the House should have considered the fact that they didn't need to intervene in the market place as it stood. But—[Interruption]ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Order! Settle members.DAN BIDOIS: We have heard loud and clear about the effects of this bill and the unintended consequences of this bill on the public of New Zealand. Let's run through it very clearly: long-term tenants will pay far more over the lifetime of their tenancy because of increased rents we will have landlords and property managers who will find workarounds and find ways to vet tenants to make sure that they get the right tenants in place—and we heard that throughout the submissions process—and we will not solve the crisis that Paul Eagle's constituent desires to be solved which is around the supply of houses in the market.We also heard about a Scottish example where they banned letting fees and the report found that there was no clear evidence that banning letting fees led to rent increases. But just because there was no clear evidence it doesn't mean that that was conclusive. We all know that it's hard to apportion rises in rents to supply and demand or to market changes versus in fact changes in letting fees. We heard very clearly from property managers in the sector how they will change their behaviour—and how property managers and owners will change their behaviour—through the cost increase from the bill and that is simple: they will charge their landlords and the landlords will pass it on to tenants. So that is very clear and on this side of the House we stand firmly opposed to a bill that is a straight-up ban.Quite frankly this Government—rather than improving markets and improving outcomes and improving the transparency they are ideologically in favour of banning things. We saw that with the oil and gas exploration ban. That's going to have massive unintended consequences on the New Zealand economy.I just want to say that I will be opposing this bill in the House in the third reading. Thank you."