National MP Sam Uffindell told a meeting of retirees if the Government didn’t take action on reforming retirement villages legislation people would be disgruntled.
He said National hadn’t delivered while Labour was doing something about the issue.
Audio of the meeting was leaked to 1News, featuring Uffindell praising a private member’s bill from Labour MP Ingrid Leary.
If drawn out of the tin in Parliament and passed, the bill would require retirement villages to pay, within five days, 10% of what was owed to residents or their families if they moved to higher care levels or died — and the rest within two months.
When asked about reforming the current legislation, Uffindell told the meeting in Mosgiel: “Ingrid Leary… has quite cunningly put forward a member’s bill which would address some of this. And she’s savvy enough to have garnered up a lot of attention around retirement villages.
“And so that’s in the pipeline as well. We need to arrest or take the key parts out of that [which] are workable and make sure we build that into something.”
The Tauranga MP went on to say that he knew voters were concerned.
“But importantly, it needs to go through the House before the end of this term, because if it hasn’t, we’re going to have a whole bunch of disgruntled people and retirement villages who all vote and all talk to each other about it. Who will go, ‘oh, National hasn’t actually delivered and Labour was going to do this’.”
Uffindell also told the meeting that he raised the issue with the Prime Minister.
“Maybe every three months or so… the Prime Minister will invite eight to 10 backbenchers up to his office. We sit around and have pizza and Pepsi Max. PM standard diet drinks – a lot of that stuff. Anyway. Went up there. Sat around and he asked us a bunch of questions about a number of different things… One of them he brought up was the Retirement Villages Act. And what we thought about that and [National MP] Tom Rutherford and myself, obviously Bay of Plenty heavy in retirement villages, we said, ‘look, we need to do it this term. You know, this is a big issue for a lot of our folks’.”
He described Casey Costello, the Minister for Seniors and Tama Potaka, the Associate Minister of Housing as “very accessible”, saying they agreed with him that they wanted to bring the reforms forward.
When asked about his comments today, Uffindell said: “[The] Retirement Villages Act review is a really big concern. I go around to a lot of the retirement villages in Tauranga, and I know Tom does in the Bay of Plenty, and you hear a lot of the concern from those residents there.
“Ministers Potaka and Costello are looking at how we can improve the current arrangements. We’re open to all good ideas out there, and New Zealanders would expect nothing less. National’s determined to make sure that we get the legislation right for the retirement villages residents.”
Lose votes to Labour?
Asked if he believed that National would lose votes to Labour if they didn’t reform the Retirement Villages Act, Uffindell said: “Look, this is a big constituency out there, and they want this issue addressed, and they want us to get on, and that’s why our ministers are getting out there and looking at ways that we can improve the Retirement Villages Act so it delivers. And I’m committed to doing my part to delivering for the residents in retirement villages here in Tauranga.”
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said: “There was work underway under the previous government around retirement villages. What we said before the election is we’ll continue that work and we are. Tama Potaka and also Casey Costello, as the relevant ministers, are leading that work and we’ll have more to say about that in the coming months as well.”
He didn’t directly answer the question about whether National would lose votes to Labour if they didn’t reform the act.
“We’ve been committed since before the election to continue the work around retirement villages and I’m proud of the work the ministers are doing,” he said. “They’re very engaged on the issue. They’ve been talking a lot with people affected on all sides of the proposals and we’ll have more to say about that shortly.”
Leary: ‘Do it because it’s the right thing to do’
Responding to the leaked audio, Labour MP Ingrid Leary said: “It’s great to hear that National Party MPs are supporting my bill, that’s the right thing to do. But they should be supporting it because it’s the right thing to do, not just because it’s politically expedient.
“I think Christopher Luxon needs to show some leadership. We need a law that mandates fair repayments, nothing about incentivising because the only thing that will work in this case is actually requiring the operators to give the money back.”
She said the Prime Minister should listen to his backbenchers, acknowledging that Uffindell raised the matter in his office on level 9 of the Beehive.
Leary said she believed there was a lot of public support for her bill.
“I’ve spoken to numerous seniors and their families who are just really concerned and anxious about having access to their own money. They live with the uncertainty of not knowing when they’ll get repaid, if they’ll get repaid or if their families will be able to get the benefit of what is their own money,” she said.
“So I really want to see things move quickly. People have been waiting for decades for a change and currently there are people living in retirement villages who really want to see a change and are worried that they may not be around when the law change finally happens. We need to honour and respect them and make sure that we do the right thing by them.”
