PoliticsAugust 7, 2020

Parliament went out with a bang

Contributing writer

Here’s a snapshot of a single day in parliament. A day where changes were made to laws that govern everything from the milk in your refrigerator to the speed you can drive your car, and to Netflix, and war crimes, and who tests your water. It was a big day.

The 52nd parliament is over. The legislature we’ve grown accustomed to seeing, with Jacinda Ardern in the prime minister’s seat and Winston Peters to her left, met for the final time yesterday and went out with a burst of new laws.

While you weren’t paying much attention to the work of the green chamber, 22 new laws were given royal assent over the past two weeks, with 19 approved by the sovereign’s representative yesterday alone.

In total, the Ardern-led coalition passed about 190 pieces of legislation. They also dealt with an extraordinary three years, including a natural disaster, terror attack and the calamity of Covid-19.

Instead of looking at the kind words and many more insults exchanged between the five parliamentary leaders at the close of parliament, here’s a list of laws given the governor general’s signature yesterday.

Remember to breathe.

The budget was approved. It’s the document that’s at the centre of the government’s Covid-19 economic response and will spend billions over the coming years to speed New Zealand’s recovery.

Separately, parliament passed a money bill to ensure the government has enough cash to deal with emergencies in the coming months. This is standard before an election.

On the subject of money, a Covid-19 response bill was approved allowing charges at managed isolation and quarantine facilities. The border fees will apply to anyone leaving New Zealand after August 10 or coming back only for a visit.

Learning a lesson from the coronavirus, ratepayers can now get rebates without travelling to a council office. That required a law.

There was also an expansive Covid-19 response bill that amended eight acts of parliament, making a number of administrative changes to the laws, including changes to reporting times for agencies and local governments. Some changes to tax schedules also happened here.

An equal pay bill was approved to make it easier to raise remuneration within female-dominated jobs. The Queen’s representative also approved a bill to increase pay for care and support workers, including mental health and addictions workers.

A law making all types of female genital mutilation illegal in New Zealand also was signed.

A number of things got restructured. One of the most significant was a complete replacement of the law that governs the public service. The State Sector Act, from 1988, was replaced by the Public Service Act. The new law makes it easier for public servants to move between departments and creates a stronger commissioner to oversee the public service. It’s a pretty significant change and you probably didn’t read a single story about it. Stories were written, but there were a few sex scandals burning when it first came up.

The dairy industry also got restructured, including some big changes to the regulation of Fonterra. The new law reflects that Fonterra’s effective monopoly in years past is over.

An overhaul of the New Zealand Transport Agency was approved, giving it a new structure and more powers to enforce and manage speed limits across the country.

The Te Ture Whenua Māori amendment was signed, which modifies succession, dispute resolution and some of the governance of Māori land.

There’s a new registration system in forestry for log traders.

An overhaul of the veterans’ system that increases supports.

A law with wide cross-party support was approved that changes the way municipalities can borrow for infrastructure, making it easier for them to finance building roads and sewage for new housing.

In the realm of house building, a law was endorsed that gives Kāinga Ora, formerly known as Housing New Zealand, new developer powers to build more housing as part of the Kiwibuild programme.

A new crown water regulator was created to oversee more rigorous screening and testing of local water supplies to avoid contamination. The case of Havelock North, where the water system became contaminated in 2016 and a vast swathe of the town got sick, came up frequently when parliament was debating this.

Winston Peters saw that changes were made to the country’s war crimes rules to comply with the International Criminal Court. The permanent court increased the variety of crimes it’s willing to hear cases about. Poison gas, biological weapons and blinding laser weapons are now war crimes in New Zealand that get sent to the ICC.

Slightly less seriously, the government expanded the movie classification system to on-demand video. This means Neon and Netflix now need to use movie-style warnings to let you know when there’s sex or violence coming your way.

That all happened yesterday.

Don’t cry mate, the law is still all on your side (image: Tina Tiller)

OPINIONPoliticsAugust 7, 2020

Landlord’s paradise: Even after the law changes, NZ still sucks for renters

Justin Giovannetti

Contributing writer

Don’t cry mate, the law is still all on your side (image: Tina Tiller)

Jacinda Ardern was called an enemy of landlords and a threat to tenants after a series of changes to New Zealand’s rental law. Justin Giovannetti contrasts the law for renters here with that of his native Canada.

“Our national sport is real estate.” I’ve heard some version of that phrase over a dozen times since my arrival in New Zealand three months ago. If property is the sport, we learned this week that landlords are the reigning champions. And they are aggrieved.

Property commentator Ashley Church called Jacinda Ardern “the most anti-landlord government probably in the history of our nation.” National leader Judith Collins said the prime minister had turned landlords into the country’s “whipping boys”. Their fury was prompted by a number of small law changes this week, that fundamentally make little difference to the relationship between tenants and renters in New Zealand.

As a recent arrival to New Zealand’s shores, let me take a step back to assess what seems like hyperbole from the landlord lobby. Because while I can’t reliably compare Ardern’s treatment of landlords to that of her predecessors, I can compare it to the situation for renters in North America.

My first exposure to regular life in New Zealand, outside the confines of managed-isolation in Auckland, was my tenancy agreement in Wellington. This was one of the first clues that life here would be very different. A rental agreement is a contract. It’s a set of promises by a tenant and by a landlord. You pay your rent on time and I promise to fix things quickly. Around the world, there’s give and take in the document. The most extreme form of this is in the province of Quebec, where a lease is a standard government form that you pick up from any magazine rack at a corner store. There’s no openness to creative demands from landlords. Both sides can only follow the rules as strictly set out by the government.

Houses in Wellington, New Zealand (Photo: Getty / Ms Murphy / EyeEm)

In New Zealand, I found something very different. My tenancy agreement is seven pages long and accompanied by a further six pages of rules. Every single line is a demand on the tenant. The only thing in the document that is a commitment from the landlord is a promise to install insulation and heating by the end of April. It’s August and neither has been done yet.

Let’s contrast that with what is typical in Canada. In Quebec you can’t be asked for any form of deposit. There’s no moving inspection report. The landlord can ask for your first and last name, along with your current address, but little more personal information. In the neighbouring province of Ontario a landlord can’t stop you from bringing a pet to your new home.

Canada is by no means extreme in this regard. It’s New Zealand that is the global outlier. The relationship between a tenant and landlord in New Zealand is set by the residential tenancies act. That’s the law that was changed this week. One of the government’s tweaks is that a landlord can now only increase rent annually. The current norm in New Zealand is a volatility of rent, which can increase as frequently as every six months.

The majority of Canadian renters live under some form of rent control. Many Americans do as well. The government sets a maximum amount each year that rents can increase. In Ontario this year it’s 2.2%. In Quebec it’s around 1.3%. In the latter jurisdiction, renters need to agree to an increase. Over a decade in the province I only faced two rental increases. One I happily agreed to, the other I didn’t.

There is no rent control in New Zealand and the government isn’t proposing to introduce it. I can’t begin to imagine the reaction if the government proposed rent control and required landlords to get the consent of tenants before increasing rent. In my North American experience, rent only goes up when landlords earn it by improving the property in a meaningful way.

The websites of various property management firms in New Zealand preach a different idea about rent increase: that landlords should do it every year without fail. Increase the rent, even by $5 these property managers suggested. Why? “The tenant will just come to expect an increase around that time every year.”

Another unexpected element of New Zealand’s renting culture is inspections. A landlord can inspect a property every month. Two months after we moved into our Wellington-area flat, we were hit with an inspection notice. We were given a long list of things to do before the inspection: clean the oven, the cupboards, the walls, the fan blades and more.

This has never happened to me before. It felt like an intrusion. We left notes where the carpet had been poorly installed and on the black mould around the windows. If they were coming over, we figured they’d like to see the small repairs they need to do. The landlord came when we weren’t home. A month later we still haven’t heard back from them about the inspection, or our notes. I’m still not sure what it was all about.

Property management websites are explicit that these snap inspections should be carried out frequently, to ensure that family members haven’t moved in and all the rules are being followed closely. This just doesn’t happen in Canada.

Speaking in Lower Hutt this week, National’s Collins said the Labour-led government has “a very anti-landlord agenda”. Changes to the residential tenancies act would drive landlords out of the market, she said. They’d want to protect their investments from the possibility of misbehaving tenants by just leaving houses empty.

The message from Collins and other commentators this week is that in New Zealand a rental property isn’t a tenant’s home, but a landlord’s investment. The residential tenancies act is the law which makes that explicit. And even after these changes, this country remains a long way from achieving balancing in the relationship between and landlord and tenant.