Genter Julie Anne: Joint Family Homes Repeal Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Genter Julie Anne: Joint Family Homes Repeal Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 25 July 2012. Volume:682;Page:3929. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green) 
: 
 E te Mangai o te Whare tena koe. Tuarua ki nga mema o to tatou Whare tena koutou katoa. Tuatoru mihi atu ki Te Wiki o Te Reo Maori na reira tena koutou tena koutou katoa. 
[ 
Greetings to you the Speaker of the House. Secondly greetings to you all members of our House. Thirdly acknowledgments to Maori Language Week so greetings to you all collectively. 
] 
I rise to speak on behalf of the Green Party regarding the Joint Family Homes Repeal Bill. As my colleague Holly Walker said earlier the Green Party will be supporting this bill to the Justice and Electoral Committee so we can have a closer look at it. I would like to congratulate the member Simon O’Connor on bringing a fairly simple but sensible bill to the attention of the House though I must say it is troubling that the Government is unable to implement simple recommendations of the Law Commission and instead leaves it to its backbench members in their capacity as personal members to undertake what really should be core Government business. I believe that Chris Auchinvole has a similar member’s bill implementing Law Commission recommendations about habeas corpus which will be coming up before the House very soon. 
So this bill seeks to repeal the Joint Family Homes Act 1964 as we have heard and replace it with nothing at all because the world has moved on and moved past the need for this Act. The Act in question enables the dwelling occupied as their home by a married couple and owned by either or both of them to be vested in the husband and wife as joint tenants by a reasonably cheap and simple procedure. At the time we heard what the ostensible benefits of the Act were but the Law Commission noted that of the five principal benefits of the original legislation the only remaining ones were some protection against creditors and some savings in legal costs but only in a minor sense because they benefited only married couples and therefore were discriminatory against everyone else. 
Offering a benefit to traditionally married couples and not to single homeowners or those in non-traditional relationships or living situations is potentially discriminatory and certainly does not keep pace with our evolving understanding of what can constitute a relationship. It is our hope that this bill in removing discrimination against non-traditional families is one step—of many—in our evolving understanding. We would be thrilled if non-discrimination were extended to adoption laws allowing more people to become parents and if it were extended to marriage equality. 
It is a shame that this Government’s progress seems to be driven from the backbenches and wider party membership sometimes in conjunction with other political parties and lacks the commitment of the front bench. Although it may not be a priority for the Prime Minister for example there is most certainly a clamour in New Zealand to formally modernise its laws to formally recognise other relationships. I also think that there is a lost opportunity for this Government to modernise our approach to residential developments and the laws around them. If we are to overcome many of the challenges that we are facing including in housing affordability in transport and in debt we are going to need to modernise the different laws that affect residential development. At the moment the real estate market is not responding to demand because of significant market failure. That is something that the Government could be addressing but unfortunately it is not seeking to address that. 
What I am talking about for example is liberalising the parking requirements in district plans making sure that planning rules support types of development that are not limited to single stand-alone family houses on quarter-acre sections which have been unintentionally subsidised I think by the traditional approach to planning. Also bank lending practices tend to be biased towards single stand-alone home ownership and incentivise only property investors to purchase apartments or townhouses so that leads to a low quality of development and a real shortage in the supply of high-quality high-amenity dwellings that are not stand-alone family homes. 
So although this bill is seeking to modernise one particular law and remove discrimination I think that the Government could turn its mind to a whole lot of other factors that would enable New Zealand to respond to the challenges facing it. 
The Green Party agrees with Mr O’Connor that the principal Act is no longer necessary. We look forward to taking part in the select committee hearings on this bill and gaining full appreciation of the bill before us that as we can reasonably imagine will be passed into law. Thank you.