Nash Stuart: Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeNash Stuart: Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 24 May 2016. Volume:714;Page:11134. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]STUART NASH (Labour—Napier): I would like to talk first and foremost about something called a social contract. The social contract is a philosophical term and it talks about the moral and the political obligations that are dependent upon members of society to look after the health and well-being of others. Basically what it says is we have an obligation to build the sort of society within which we all like to live. This is where I think every single landlord understands the social contract and if they do not we legislate to make sure they abide by the moral and social obligations that society has put on them.I would agree with Mr Faafoi and other speakers that this bill does not go far enough in this. There is an implied social contract and that is that a landlord will provide a tenant with a warm dry safe home. It does not matter whether it is a private landlord or the Government in the form of State houses. Insulation I believe is a fundamental part of that social contract when we are talking about tenancy and when we are talking about rental accommodation.If we talk about the sort of society we want to create—and this is related to clause 38 with regard to insulation—I think that most of us find for example rheumatic fever which is a disease of poverty to be abhorrent. The cost to the health system of a child diagnosed with rheumatic fever from when they are diagnosed to when they die about 50 years later is about $1 million per person. It is extremely high. So I think we have to enforce this obligation on landlords to provide tenants the sort of warm dry house the landlord himself or herself would be prepared to live in or put their own children in.I am a landlord myself. Last winter I installed four heat pumps in a block of apartments. I can tell you that I did not change the rent one cent. The reason for that is that I reject the Minister for Building and Housing’s argument that if we impose a cost on the landlord then that will only translate into higher rents because what determines the rent is in fact the market. If I had said “What I’m going to do is I’m going to put up the rent by $3000 a year for every single one of my tenants in this block of apartments.” they would have been well within their rights to say “If that is the case then we are handing in our notice.” and I could well have ended up with an empty apartment.For me—and I know for a lot of landlords—the ability to have tenants in there that are going to stay for a long time is much more important than ramping up the cost every single time I possibly can. I have not increased the rent at all and yet I have installed four heat pumps. That is because that is how the market works and I reject the notion that placing an obligation on landlords to provide warm dry healthy homes means an increase in rent because that is not the case. The market determines the rent and tenants have the ability if the rent is too high to say “I’m not going to stay here anymore.”When we talk about insulation the evidence is incredibly clear. If a person or a child or a family lives in a home that is warm and dry then it is safe and it is healthy. My son is in hospital at the moment. I do not want to talk about my son—I do not want to bring my family into the debate—but on the wall in the children’s ward there is a list of 10 things that children need. One of those things is a warm safe dry environment. What children do not need is to live in homes that do not provide them with the sort of security they require to be the best they possibly can be.I just think it is inherently unfair to not require landlords to provide that sort of house. Not to do that is manifestly wrong and I think it breaches the implied social contract between society Parliament the Government and those who rent a house for whatever reason. Let us be honest about this. We have talked about the housing crisis in a number of ways and I would like to acknowledge as someone who lives in Napier that the housing crisis is not simply an Auckland issue at all. There are 130 people on the waiting list in Napier. This is a crisis that goes across the country and I want that to be known because this is often assumed to be simply an Auckland crisis. It is not. But we must provide tenants with warm dry homes.