Williams Poto: Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliams Poto: Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 31 May 2016. Volume:714;Page:11519. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): The one thing I can say about this Government is that it is not aspirational for the people of New Zealand. The Government is not aspirational for the tenants of New Zealand and it sure as heck is not aspirational for those people who are looking for housing. Housing is a big hot-button issue at the moment is it not when you think of the number of people who are reported to be living in cars. I think I saw a report this morning that a 15-day-old baby is living in a car with her mother.How did we get ourselves into this situation? It is because this Government is not aspirational for people when it comes to housing. When we think about the whole suite of legislation and policies that this Government has put out for tenants in New Zealand we think about Housing New Zealand’s reviewable tenancies programme for example which forces people out of their homes. Whether they have lived there for a year or for 6 years or whatever it forces people out of their homes. It does not allow them to build up that social capital that they need by living in and being part of a community.This Government is not aspirational for tenants in New Zealand and it does not take seriously the deaths of children like Emma-Lita Bourne. That was a tragedy but unfortunately she was not the only child to die in a house that was cold and mouldy and damp. We could take the huge step of insulating our properties better and forcing our landlords to meet some minimum standards for our kids in this country. There is no protection for tenants in New Zealand any longer. There is no security of tenure. The Government actually leads the way in forcing people out of their homes by the reviewable tenancies programme. That is shocking.There is no stability. There was a programme recently on television about transience and the impact that transience has on the social outcomes the health outcomes and the educational outcomes for young children. There was a mother who said that her child had moved to seven schools in the period of a couple of years. That is not the way that you set the foundation for a child to have the best start to make the most of it and to reach their full potential. You only do that by having them in a home that is stable and in a community where they can then learn to reach out to those community networks and build that social fabric.The Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill is about setting a minimum standard that will have a huge impact on the health of the children of New Zealand. The Children’s Commissioner told Parliament in a submission that there are 42000 hospital admissions a year and 15 children a year dying due to cold mouldy and damp houses and the Minister for Building and Housing wants us to insulate homes to a standard that is way below any recommended by any of the submitters who submitted on the bill. I do not see how the Minister’s argument—that he is wanting to reduce any further costs to the tenants—actually washes. When you weigh that up against the fact that you are committing children to unhealthy lifestyles and potentially to death from living in these cold damp homes the arguments simply do not stack up. That is why I say that this Government is not aspirational for the tenants of New Zealand. Otago University showed that insulating to the 2008 standard would reduce hospital admissions for children by 6 percent. That is 3000 children. That is an enormous number. Can you imagine? That is like 10 primary schools’ worth of children who would be saved from having hospital admissions and it would impact on 19 percent of the rental properties.I cannot buy the argument that the Minister presents. This Government has lost the Kiwi Dream. It used to be the Kiwi Dream that we could own our own homes. In one generation we have gone from being a generation of homeowners to one of renters. In one generation we have gone from homeownership to renting. We must as a Parliament be cognisant that there are people who are in a much more vulnerable position because they are now tenants as opposed to being homeowners. We should do what we can to ensure that legislation actually supports tenure for those tenants.Let us face it—there are some bad landlords but there are some great landlords. There are some very good landlords who do everything they can and to whom legislation does not need to apply because they already keep their homes to a really high standard. But unfortunately there are some landlords for whom the minimum standard will be all that they will ever want to achieve. And there are some other landlords who do not even meet those minimum standards. But we know all too well that unless you provide the standard you provide the opportunity landlords will not avail themselves unless they are compelled to do so.The submitters were really clear when they came to the Social Services Committee that insulation was not the only part of the answer. It was half of the answer and the rest of it was about providing appropriate heating. As Phil Twyford has already said you could install a good quality heat pump to run relatively inexpensively for about $3000 and that would go a long way to supporting the insulation. Having a home that has been insulated means that you can heat the home and keep it warmer and drier for longer. There are a lot of electorate MPs who go out and meet constituents. I know and my colleagues here know that when you go out to some of our constituents’ homes in the middle of winter—some of us who live in the South Island know that South Island winters tend to be colder than North Island winters. I know so many constituents who live in homes where they can afford to heat only one room. They will often all sleep in that room particularly on very cold nights because it is the only room they can afford to heat.I think about when I was a young mum and I had a premature baby at home. Can you imagine what it would be like for mums taking their babies home to cold damp homes? You give baby its evening meal put baby in the bath and you want to keep baby nice and warm so that they have a good night’s sleep. That is part of the issue that many of our young kids and our children have: they cannot sleep because the homes are so cold. When you cannot sleep when you are a young kid it disrupts your ability to learn. You are often ill and it impacts on your ability to actually get a decent education.When we think about the opportunity that has been missed here let us look at what could happen. We could look at Andrew Little’s Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2). What does that include? Not just insulation. That includes methods of heating. It wants us to look at minimum indoor temperatures—so an ambient temperature of around I think 19 or 20 degrees. Homes heated to about that temperature are good for keeping us warm and also for keeping many of those bugs at bay. Good ventilation so that we can have homes that are dry and that do not allow mould to grow; draught stopping; and drainage—these are all very important aspects to having a warm dry home that have not been considered and that could so well have been considered.We are supporting this bill. It is less than a half measure; it is probably a quarter of a measure. We could have done so much better for the people of New Zealand. Thank you.