Letting fees will no longer be passed on to tenants from December 12 this year following the passing of the Residential Tenancies (Prohibiting Letting Fees) Amendment Bill.
The Bill, in the name of Minister of Housing and Urban Development Phil Twyford, was introduced in March this year.
For its third reading, Associate Minister Jenny Salesa started the debate and outlined letting fees as covering services (like vetting potential tenants), which benefit the landlord.
"The contractual relationship is between the landlord and the letting agency, but somehow the existing law allows the fees for those services to be charged to a third party, the tenant," she said.
"Now, this is unfair, and in what other area of law are there two parties contracting with each other for an exchange of services being allowed to charge a third party? It is an anomaly in the law that is being addressed by this proposed legislation."
Bills go through many stages in the House and once they've reached a third reading it's unlikely they'll fail.
Technically a third reading debate is over whether or not a bill should be read; back in the day they used to read the entire bill out, now they only read out the title of a bill as a token of the whole.
In actuality, the debate is over whether to read out the title. It consists of 12 speeches, up to 10min in length each, in which (for the third reading) MPs are meant to focus on a bill's general principles and sum it up.
But this doesn't stop MPs from straying to other topics and it's the Speaker's role to keep them on task. For example National MP Judith Collins took the opportunity to raise the security of Housing New Zealand homes, and was cautioned by the Speaker.
With the passing of a bill at third reading pretty much a given, MPs sometimes also use the debate to throw some political jibes at the other side of the House.
For example Labour MP Paul Eagle said " the most pathetic effort was that in nine long years they did nothing—absolutely nothing—in housing" while National MP Dan Bidois said "Paul Eagle, right there, has convinced me that they do not in fact read the bills that are being debated, because, quite frankly, what a dribble of a speech that was from the member."
Full transcripts of this debate including the back and forth between parties can be read here. In fact Hansard has a serachable archive of all debates back to the beginnings of New Zealand's Parliament.
In the end the Bill passed with 63 votes in favour (Labour, New Zealand First and the Greens), and 56 against (National and ACT).
It now goes to the Clerk of the House who prepares it for Royal Assent from the Governor General, the last act needed to turn a bill into law.
