Barry MaggieHon MAGGIE BARRY (National—North Shore): Thank you Madam Chair Tolley. When I was the Minister for Seniors over the past three years I had been very much aware of the issue around this particular bill and I would like to draw attention to aspects of the Rates Rebate (Retirement Village Residents) Amendment Bill.When this bill first came before the House there were problems with it and I think that the Supplementary Order Papers that the member Ms Dyson has put forward go in some way to making this bill more clear more simple and more straightforward. However there are some questions remaining and I would be very interested to hear how the member proposing this legislation would deal with those.One of the things that has become very apparent is that the old regulations around people going into retirement villages meant that some of them depending on their age and so forth could be signing up for life. The capped service fee for life has been an issue for many of the retirement village owners that I have heard from who have expressed concern at the idea of doing rebates on effectively what are fixed costs which may well have been paid off by the residents after a period of a decade or two. Thankfully people are living much longer and healthier lives. This is of course a good thing. It means of course though that we have an ageing population. When people are in a retirement village environment they tend to stay there. The villages are now expanding.I feel that the capped service fee and the cost to the owners of these facilities is therefore going to be a growing problem and I wonder if the member has given thought to how there might be some amendment or capacity for some of these villages who in all good spirit and faith have signed people on to these capped service fees and then find themselves unable to run their own facilities in the way that they want to because they simply don't have the money to do the work that they do if the residents aren't paying it.When we look at what has happened in the way that rates rebates are calculated—as the member pointed out earlier there are of course a number of places around New Zealand that do things differently. I am in addition to being the spokesperson for conservation in the Opposition also the member of Parliament for North Shore and I'm very well aware that the Auckland Council's rates remission policy does enable the Auckland Council to remit the uniform annual general charge and as well as that the transport levy which is a targeted rate for residents of retirement villages although we are hearing more from Mayor Goff that that may go when the fuel tax which will come in at some stage next year comes in. So there is a level of uncertainly as to what exactly people will be paid back.A remission that is applied to the rates of the retirement village where the applicant resides where an agreement exists between that retirement village operator and the council—those benefits are passed on to the resident but not in all cases. It seems to me that when we look at what occurred to the residents of Auckland in the last few weeks which is where we went online and found out our re-evaluations and for many people in the electorate that I represent people's values for their land—not so much the improvements but for their land—have gone up by up to 75 percent. Happy on the one hand of course that the properties have gone up in value; feeling a little bit sick and worried as to what may happen in June next year when the ratings come up.The reason I'm giving this as an example is because if the rates go through the roof—which people are fearful of—then the rates rebate rate is going to be negligible and is not going to make any difference to people on fixed incomes who are capital rich—their properties can be sold for a great deal of money—but don't have the sort of disposable income that would allow them to meet the extra cost. In a retirement village situation for example if they're not on a fixed-rate contract—and there are some variable contracts around New Zealand—they may then find that they are in a position where they are being charged too much.So with the land values shooting up in many parts of Auckland I wonder how that is going to be accommodated—and those burdens when it comes to people who are paying goodness knows $7000 to $10000 annually. If you extrapolate that out in the area that I represent—Ryman Healthcare for example have just put in or are about to commence building a very large retirement village and they will be doing a lot to ensure that they recover their costs. So will it then become prohibitive for people to move into these retirement villages? I feel that there are a lot of issues of this kind.