Building Amendment Bill (No 3)

I will not take up much more of the Committee’s time. I just want to thank the Minister for Building and Construction for his clarification earlier and the history lesson about the deregulation of the building industry. We in the Green Party know that there was not much difference between National and Labour in those days, but we would still echo the point I made earlier that it is important for this House to learn from the lesson of the leaky homes example and the experience of the former deregulation of the building industry, no matter whose legislation it was.

To finally conclude the remarks I was making earlier, I was remarking that we recognise that there is another building amendment bill on the Order Paper—the Building Amendment Bill (No 4)—and acknowledge that that bill seeks to strengthen the consumer protections. We are tentatively encouraged by that and will be supporting that bill going to a select committee, because we believe that consumer protections are very important in this industry. But I would like to comment that while it is important to protect consumers when things go wrong, and to ensure that their rights are recognised if their builder does take off to Queensland and they are left with a faulty home, it is even better to make sure that the regulations are sufficient to begin with and that safe, long-lasting houses are built. For that reason, after hearing the submissions in the select committee, the Green Party found that we were unable to support this Building Amendment Bill (No 3)—Part 1 or any part. Thank you.

I too am grateful to the Minister for Building and Construction for traversing the history of the bill because, of course, he is absolutely correct. All of the preliminary work that led to the introduction of the Building Bill that passed as an Act in 1991, but which was a bill in 1990, was certainly done under a Labour Government. The reason that it came under the purview of the Minister of Internal Affairs was that in those days that was where our building industry regulatory framework sat. And that actually says a little bit about the history of where we came from and why we have got to the point we have got to today. I cannot find it in my heart of hearts to support this bill because it does not bring together some of the elements that others have talked about in terms of the need to take an overarching perspective on this legislation and not to regulate in this area in a piecemeal way because we have already paid a very, very big price for doing that.

I think what is also useful from the Minister’s comments is that he said that there were a number of people in this House who were not in the House when this bill had its first reading and was referred to the Local Government and Environment Committee, which means that there is a lack of knowledge and understanding. I believe that that is actually quite widespread in this House and I want to urge this House to think very carefully about passing legislation in this area at the moment while today we have sitting in Christchurch the royal commission of inquiry into building. Today one of my own constituents was pleading for certain matters to be inquired into. At the end of the day, I think it is really important that we learn the lessons that we are going to learn from that particular set of disasters and listen to some of the warnings that have been made year in, year out ever since we did go down this track, and we did go down this track together.

I picked up the February version of the North and South magazine, and I assume that the Minister has read the article on the leaky building crisis. Although I was not a Minister for Building and Construction, like everyone else on this side seems to have been, I was the Minister of Commerce at the time we decided to rewrite the Building Act 1991, and I in fact was the Minister of Commerce at the time that we put a discussion document out to get feedback from the industry. Despite what some members of the Government have said, we actually have respected the industry and worked with the industry in order to get a legislative framework that would actually meet the modern environment and the fact that a number of different products were coming on to the market without the adequate regulatory regime to support them. But where I disagree with the Minister is that it was not just the untreated timber that gave us the leaky building crisis, and any builder worth his salt who understood about flashings and understood about the cavity systems that are required when putting monolithic cladding systems over the top of frames that were untreated will know that that was never the intention of the standard that was implemented at that time, at the behest of the industry. And that is also a point that I think is worth noting—that the way standards have to essentially be paid for by the industry itself and that there is no public-good funding in order to get a standard established allowed a situation where monolithic cladding systems were able to be introduced into our country without an appropriate standard for their application. So there was a multiple layer of reasons that gave us this leaky building crisis, but it is not the only crisis that they have given us.

I just want to quote from an email that I got after an appearance on television a couple of weeks ago. He has been writing to Ministers year in, year out for a number of years around the non-performance by territorial authorities over building control and the negligence and incompetence of practitioners within the discipline of building control—not the builders themselves, but actually the supervision of the industry. He said: “The greatest of these tragedies has been the leaky house syndrome, and now the devastation wreaked by ongoing earthquakes in Christchurch. Much smaller, unreported, yet no less tragic, disasters are happening in people’s lives every day as a result of this culture that is endemic in our ‘she’ll be right’ nation. Every non-compliance that is left unrectified by a building inspector is a disaster waiting to happen in somebody’s life.” I think that is absolutely right. Every single non-compliance potentially can be the disaster that nobody expected to have.

As I say, I do not have the background in this that others have; I did not sit on the select committee. But when a bill says to me that we are shifting the responsibility a little bit away from the building consent authorities and a little bit towards the building owner, I start to fear a mismatch of knowledge and a mismatch in terms of the responsibility. The major problem back in 1991 was that the market would essentially look after everyone, but otherwise people would be able to look out for themselves. I do not know whether the Minister has read the North and South article from February, but it is an extremely worthwhile article, and I would really recommend that he reads it. In fact, I recommend that every member of this House reads this article because what it tells us is that we moved away from a more than adequate system of building regulation into something totally unknown. The fact that both National and Labour were guilty of moving into that unknown together does not make it any more right.

I will quote from the article because it refers to Peter Mumford’s 2010 PhD thesis. He was the guy who was working within the Ministry of Economic Development on the building legislation, the Building Act 2004, and he said: “Effectively New Zealand moved into an unknown future while burning its bridges to past practices.” And the article comments: “In other words, the 1991 Building Act was a massive, reckless, nationwide social and economic experiment, with a radically new and unproven building-control system for which the public will continue to pay dearly even though the public never asked for it.” We know that leaky buildings were still being built after the issues were exposed in the media and after we became the Government. It is actually only recently that some of the final issues have been closed off, so that those buildings are not being built today. They go on to say that if the building code had been a building, it would have been a leaker, it was that full of holes, and the biggest hole was the lack of accountability. That brings me directly, on all fours, to this bill—the shifting of accountability. If we are going to shift the accountability, what price is somebody else going to pay for that decision sometime in the future?

I actually am making a serious plea to the Minister that this bill ought to be deferred. There is time because there is another piece of legislation on the Order Paper that is going to go to a select committee, and we will be happy as a caucus to support the Building Amendment Bill (No 4) going to a select committee. We would be more than happy to have these issues addressed within the context of that particular bill, and I believe that as a result we would end up with stronger legislation. Because that royal commission is sitting in Christchurch right now and because we have paraded every day in our news media stories like that of an engineer breaking down in tears as he had to take responsibility for what he felt had led to the death of somebody, we owe it to our constituents from one end of this country to the other to get building regulation right, and that is why we are opposed to this bill. This bill is a piecemeal approach, and bringing it back into the framework of the whole of the building review will go some way to give some assurance to the people of New Zealand who are looking to us for some leadership in this particular area.

I do not like using the words “red tape” when I talk about this form of regulation. In fact, sometimes the language actually takes away the real purpose. This is about protecting people’s health and safety, and we have got to get it right.

I want to go from the general to the specific and point interested listeners in the direction of sections 14B to 14F of the Building Amendment Bill (No 3), in clause 10, which set out the guidelines, really. They are not “definitive and exhaustive” but “are for guidance only”. Nevertheless, they are among the most relevant parts of the bill to many of the contributions we have heard this afternoon so far.

I want to particularly draw attention to section 14F, which sets out the responsibilities of a building consent authority. As we have been discussing this afternoon, it is really the councils, the building consent authorities, that have carried the can for the giant lapses in responsibility and in quality that have afflicted the New Zealand building industry over the last couple of decades. What section 14F does is circumscribe the responsibilities of the building consent authorities. No longer are they directly and unambiguously responsible for code compliance. What the new provision does is set out a kind of two-step chain of responsibility. The building consent authorities will now be responsible for ensuring that “an application for a building consent complies with the building code”—so that the application complies—and, secondly, that the “building work has been carried out in accordance with the building consent …”. You could argue that there is indeed a chain of responsibility there, but many commentators, lawyers, and industry professionals have said that this amounts to a significant circumscribing of the responsibility of the building consent authorities, and will be seen that way by the courts as these cases are argued out.

I want to read into the record some of the comments that were made by, for example, the Registered Master Builders Federation, which on this question of the allocation of responsibilities told the select committee that other measures, including warranties, insurances, and liability reform, need to underpin the changes, but they are not yet available, or even certain to be available in future. It said the legislative push behind this bill “is getting too far ahead of the necessary regulations, making it impossible to assess the system as a whole and its effects.” This was the Registered Master Builders Federation. It supported “the review of the current joint and several liability regime to investigate the introduction of some form of proportional liability, accompanied by a warranty and surety scheme; this would ensure that any shift away from the council’s ‘deep pockets’ was balanced by the availability of recovery from the other liable parties.” That is the point we have been trying to make all afternoon expressed in a very persuasive way by the Registered Master Builders Federation. It also went on to say, about the piecemeal quality of this bill, that “Where one of the interdependent pieces, such as the balancing of responsibilities, is implemented without the others, such as a warranty and surety scheme or proportionate liability, the goals of the Building Act Review are, in our view, not likely to be achieved.”

I also want to quote Bob de Leur, who, for my money, is one of the wisest and most experienced guys around in this sector. He made what I thought was an excellent submission on behalf of the Auckland Council. He too expressed concern that this stage of the review does not include a move to a proportionate liability system. He said that “The continuation of a joint and several liability regime means that Councils will continue to be the ‘last man standing’ and carry the … risk …”, in spite of the efforts of the bill to reallocate responsibility. He advocated that “A mandatory warranty system backed by insurance would ensure that other parties to the development would be held accountable to fix any defects.”

Local Government New Zealand, which represents almost all of the building consent authorities, was strongly critical of the piecemeal nature of the reforms. It said that too much of the detail has been deferred for inclusion in regulation, and it referred to the practical ineffectiveness of the provisions in the bill intended to signal a reallocation of accountabilities due to duty of care and hence residual liability, across all consent categories, and the penalty regime for low risk consents in particular.

The last point I want to make is about the licensed building practitioner scheme, about which I do not think there is a lot of controversy in the House. People accept that it is the right way to go. But the question that I am left with—and, again, many submitters raised this issue—is whether or not we will have sufficient numbers of appropriately skilled and experienced licensed building practitioners to implement what is expected of them under this bill. There have been real doubts about the whole process of certification of the licensed building practitioners over the last year or so. I ask the Minister for Building and Construction to take a call on this and say whether he is confident that, given the demands on the New Zealand building industry and given the fact that the Christchurch rebuild is looming and everybody wants to get started on it, we do, in fact, have sufficient numbers of licensed building practitioners for them to do what is expected of them.

I want to finish by citing a letter from a builder, a constituent of one of my colleagues, who says that the wait time to process applications by people wanting to become licensed building practitioners is currently estimated at 9 weeks and increasing, and that last week—this is in mid-February—there were 500 applications in 1 week to be licensed building practitioners. So there is clearly a pent-up demand. People are rushing to get in before the deadline hits. This person cites cases of someone submitting some incomplete information, and ending up having to wait up to 3 months to have the application processed. So that is a question for the Minister. Have we got sufficient numbers of licensed building practitioners in the system to do what the industry needs them to do under this bill? Secondly, is he confident that the Department of Building and Housing has run the process properly to ensure we get what we need?

Let me deal with a couple of issues that Phil Twyford has raised, because I think they are good questions that need to be answered. He first of all referred to section 14F in clause 10, and he said the bill fails to deal with liability—it circumscribes the liability of building consent authorities—and no one is to step into the gap. What I want to say to Phil Twyford is that none of this comes into effect until the regulations bring it into effect, and I can give the member an absolute, watertight assurance there are a couple of preconditions before that will happen. One of those preconditions is the No. 4 bill, which has got all the consumer protection stuff in it that is needed—vitally needed—before we trigger this part.

Also, we do need to have a proper licensed building practitioner base, because we do need the numbers. I am happy to report, based on my officials’ report, as at 8 February we had 12,084 building practitioners through the licensing scheme already. That is just about exactly on track with the graph we had plotted. We thought we would need about 14,000 by 1 March, and we will be as near as damn it there with those numbers, if that was the number back on 8 February. There is now a little bit of a bottleneck, because, unfortunately, like a lot of people leaving their Christmas shopping until 24 December, a lot of skilled practitioners did not put their application in until right near 1 March. But we are doing what I think are some practical things around that.

Take, for example, a problem that has arisen with designers submitting their design, but not yet being licensed as of 1 March. What we have found is that some local authorities are saying: “You are not a licensed designer, so you cannot put a submission in for a consent.” What we are now asking the local authorities—and Auckland Council told me yesterday it was already doing it—to say is: “Look, as long as you prove that you lodged your application to become a licensed practitioner and it is in the process of being dealt with, then we will take your application for this consent. We will process it right through to the very end and issue it the moment you show that you have got your licence.” So it is actually going to get rid of that bottleneck.

But I think the member is right, and I think Shane Jones was right before: this scheme will not work until we have got a really good-sized pool of licensed practitioners. But what we will be able to then say to the consumer, as we do to members when you are all—and I see you all on a Thursday night—getting on board a 737 is that there is not one of you, not even Hone Harawira, brave though he may be, who would be getting on a 737 if you did not think that pilot up the front was licensed and it was shown that he was a skilled, capable practitioner. It must be shown that he is a skilled, capable practitioner, and that is what we want to bring in.

I want to refer to a couple of things that Andrew Williams raised, because I think there is a bit of a dilemma here that all members are facing. First of all, there seems to be a school of thought that while local authorities kept all the control and had all the powers they had previously, that kept the industry working well. All I can say is that under all those strict rules that were in place, we ended up with the leaky homes saga. So it was not the protection that people thought; in fact, it did not provide anywhere near that protection. I feel a great deal of sympathy for a lot of local authorities, because under a joint and several liability regime, they ended up being the last man standing. They ended up being the ones that had to carry the can for what might have been shoddy practices across the design, the construction, or whatever. I actually would love to get back to holding local authorities accountable for only the bit that they do. If they do approve something that is not up to code, they should be pinged, but if they actually do not do anything wrong, and it is the builder, or it is the roofer or the person doing the flashings where the water leaked in, the council should get away from that.

But what I want to say to Mr Twyford is that section 14F does not change the liabilities of the building consent authority. It simply describes the status quo, actually; exactly what is in the current Act—what building consent authorities are responsible for doing under the current Act. It says what they are responsible for—that is, that an application for a building consent complies with the building code, and then, in section 14F(a)(ii), that “building work has been carried out in accordance with” it.

I want to say that there is a good example for Lianne Dalziel to think about here. Back in 1987 the Christchurch City Council certified that the application seeking for the CTV Building to be built was up to code, and then, after it did its inspections, it claimed the building was built to code. We now know, after a very thorough and intensive investigation, that the plans put forward were not up to the code of the day, and that the building that was built was not up to code.

So I want members to be very careful if they think that local authorities gave that total level of protection; they did not. And the Act—

💬 Phil Twyford: No one is saying that.

OK, actually, I have heard some people say that we are taking away the protections that local authorities gave us, and they did not. [Interruption] I am sorry, Mr Twyford. I do get very grumpy at people saying local authorities have deep pockets. They have only ratepayers’ pockets to dip into. Local authorities do not have deep pockets at all. They do not even have pockets; they dip their hands into other people’s pockets. I want to give confirmation back to Mr Twyford that section 14F does not change the liabilities of the current Act.

The Minister in the chair, the Minister for Building and Construction, made a very constructive contribution, in particular, in his admission about licensed pilots and airlines. That has prompted me to ask a question: when did it become a luxury for us to ask an airline pilot just to fly his or her plane safely? The Building Act review is nothing more than to address, among other things, safety issues. Naturally, such legislation would concern three main parties: the consenting authorities, the building practitioners, and the end users, i.e., the consumers.

I pretty much enjoyed the contributions made by members on this side and the members opposite. I pretty much enjoyed, in particular, the contribution made by Ms Jacqui Dean. I would like to follow the good spirit of the Hon Shane Jones and do some uncharacteristic things, by reading an email addressed to Ms Jacqui Dean and others, and copied to me. That email was sent by one of the top structural engineers in this country, Mr John Scarry. I will read it out: “Dear Ms Wagner, Ms Barry, Ms Dean, and Mr Borrows, Yesterday you all spoke”—that is a direct quote, that is not you, Mr Chair. “Yesterday you all spoke in Parliament in support of the Building Amendment Bill (No 3). If you were aware of the true state of the construction industry in New Zealand, particularly with regard to structural accuracy as opposed to leaky buildings, you would not have done so.” As explained in my second reading contribution last week, I imagine that Mr John Scarry was responsible, along with the O’Sullivan brothers, for the redrafting of the building legislation, but, sadly, we are in a worse position than 10 years ago. That email went on to say “The opponents to this bill are right. It does nothing to improve productivity or accountability, it does not introduce compulsory contract insurance to cover long-term defects, and it reduces the already poor protection new house owners have at present.”

The Minister in the chair also mentioned the Building Amendment Bill (No 4). Even reading through the report of the Department of Building and Housing to the Local Government and Environment Committee, we find it is all over the place with reference to the Government not intending to cover this particular issue, and that issue will be likely covered in the Building Amendment Bill (No 4). According to the Order Paper, the Building Amendment Bill (No 4) will be introduced probably tomorrow or later this week. We will look forward to debating that particular bill.

Again, in reply to Ms Jacqui Dean’s questioning why Labour is opposed to this bill, the Hon Lianne Dalziel, and the last Labour speaker—a very good spokesperson for building and construction—Mr Phil Twyford, outlined our position very clearly, and other positions have been outlined very accurately in the Labour and Green minority reports. I reiterate, Labour did support the referral of this bill to the select committee, and although we are in broad agreement with the direction of the Building Act review, which began under the former Labour Government anyway, we will not support this bill further, because listening to submitters at the select committee and reflecting on this particular bill has led us to the view that it should not proceed. The aim of the Building Act review is to better allocate responsibility and accountability among regulatory authorities, building professionals, and end users, i.e., the consumers, but that will not be achieved by this bill, because it is a piecemeal approach. It includes only some parts of the reform agenda that has been widely discussed with the industry over the last few years. Thank you.

I want to respond to something the Minister for Building and Construction said, because I think he may have misunderstood my concern about the legislation. As I have said, I am not an expert on this particular bill, because, as he has pointed out, this bill went to the Local Government and Environment Committee, which I was not a part of. So I have not had the opportunity, like Phil Twyford has, to hear all the submissions. I think he has given quite a good enunciation of the concerns that have been raised at the select committee.

But nobody believes for one minute that the fact that the council has been overseeing the work that has been undertaken under a permit guarantees a particular outcome. In fact, I started my contribution by quoting from an email that I had received. This guy previously was in the building control section of one of the district councils. I am not going to mention which one it is, because I think it would be unfair to do so without, obviously, exciting some sort of response. What he reported is training sessions where they were taken out to see worksites that were in progress, so that they could learn how to be control inspectors, and their not pointing out to the person in charge of the building site that they were not complying with the code. This guy has obviously had a lot of experience—he has got a background in carpentry—and the people who were working with him in this particular district council had no previous experience in the building industry. They had no formal qualifications in the building industry.

This is going back a wee way, and things may have changed, obviously, since then. But the point that he was making was that he had no background in inspection, but he did at least have a carpentry background, and what he was finding out was that nobody was pointing out to people on the site obvious—obvious—breaches of the code, and he realised it was because these people did not know they were breaching the code. It was rotten to the core, just like our leaky buildings. He was making the point that, basically, he was seeing non-compliance being left unrectified by building inspectors on a day-by-day basis, and he said that this was a disaster waiting to happen in somebody’s life, no matter how small a disaster. That was that point that I was making.

It is not that the supervision is in itself a guarantee of a particular outcome. I too have read the Department of Building and Housing’s report into the CTV Building collapse, and I think that the inquiry, when it comes up—I think it starts in June, the CTV Building, at the royal commission—is going to expose a lot of things that were wrong, and perhaps may even go further than the Department of Building and Housing report, given some of the stuff that I have seen.

I should mention that I was the Minister of Commerce who received the original open letter from John Scarry, when he expressed to all of Parliament the concern that he had about the industry: around the structural engineering profession, and about the construction industry in New Zealand. I heard the Minister’s comments on television the other night, saying that nobody agrees with John Scarry. Can I just say that I have got a copy of the Institution of Professional Engineers New Zealand report in response to John Scarry’s concerns, and, also, I have a copy of the additional report that was done for the Department of Building and Housing at the time, and there were genuine concerns that he raised. It was believed that the Building Act itself in 2004 would actually address the problems that he raised, and what I am telling this Committee now is that it has not. The Building Act 2004 has not addressed the concerns that he raised in 2002, and there are some buildings in this city I would not walk into, because of the concerns that I believe he is justifiably raising in terms of earthquake risk and what would happen in those buildings.

I just want to make the point around the responsibilities of a designer and that is in section 14D in clause 10. It talks about a designer meaning “a person who prepares plans and specifications”, and they have to be “responsible for ensuring that the plans and specifications or the advice in question are sufficient to result in the building work complying with the building code,”. This was one of the issues that came up in the 2002 report—that is, often in the circumstances there is no continuing oversight given. I think if we look at the Institution of Professional Engineers New Zealand report in response to the John Scarry concerns, what it identifies is that there is a pushing down of the pricing to the extent that the real estate agent who sells the commercial building is likely to get, after it is sold, paid 20 times what the structural engineer will be paid. They are not paid to supervise. So the definition of the responsibilities of a designer is just to prepare the plans and specification to code and then ensure “that the plans and specifications … are sufficient to result in the building work complying with the building code, if the building work were properly completed in accordance with those plans and specifications or that advice.”

I think you will find that with the CTV Building and others, the issue is actually the lack of capacity to go back and keep an eye on what they are actually doing, because you can write the plans, and then you will find that what they will do is actually order a different product than the one that was specified in the design, and who is responsible for that? Actually, it is nobody here, as long as it is within the code. But it may well be that there are certain features that are not being complied with, and as a result you end up with extremely dangerous buildings. These issues were raised with the standard 500E wire, which I do not have the full details of, but it is just an example. There are plenty of other examples of situations where you can write the plans and specifications for building work, you can give advice on compliance of the building work with the building code, you can be responsible for ensuring that this plan is sufficient to result in building work complying with the building code, but you cannot actually know, in fact, what they do on the site and what they do off the site—because offsite inspections for some of the precast concrete solutions are not subject to the same supervision that an onsite arrangement would entail.

There are so many issues in here that I am just very fearful that we may pass legislation without taking into account the need to make sure that we get this right. So many people are going to be relying on us, and it is actually too late when the building collapses and people’s lives are lost. And then there are people, essentially, who have to front up to an inquiry to admit their culpability in that regard. I think the engineer who spoke at the building inquiry the other day and who broke down did much more for giving people confidence in the engineering profession than just about anyone else, because I think the public reacted to the humanity of his response. What I am saying is that we are responsible as politicians to get the legislative framework right, and we have all accepted that the 1991 framework was wrong. We have been told that there were problems before the 2004 Act came in, we have now most recently been told by the same person who warned us in 2002 that the 2004 Act was not delivering—we are warned by him again that this legislation is part of a piecemeal package that will not deliver. I am worried that we are not listening to the right people.

I want to end with this comment. There are lots of people out there who agree with John Scarry, but not all of them have got the ability to speak out, because some of their work is entirely dependent on their not speaking out. But I have spoken to engineers around this country who support what he says, and we treat him lightly, I believe, to the great detriment of ourselves, not only as representatives of the people but also as people with some responsibility for the quality of our buildings, and the health and safety of those who use them. So I want to reiterate my plea to the Minister to hold back from this bill.

I would like to rise again on behalf of New Zealand First to respond to some of the comments of the Minister for Building and Construction. He mentioned local authorities and councils and that the Building Amendment Bill (No 3) would move some of the responsibility off them and on to builders and the building industry and homeowners. He sort of implied that, basically, the councils and local authorities in a sense were not responsible and were not the ones that should oversee and make sure this was the case. Unfortunately, I do not necessarily agree with that, because we have had a situation here for the last 20-odd years in this country of ongoing systemic failure within the building industry. There has been a combination of a litany of errors over many, many years, which allowed, for instance, for the building code to be lowered. Standards New Zealand allowed a change of the standards of the building code. At the end of the day, this Parliament and this House oversees all legislation, all laws, within this country, so, in a sense, these bodies, which are quasi-Government organisations, still have to report back in terms of those standards in the building code and everything else. At the end of the day, it is this House that determines the final legislation that covers them.

Therefore, it is disappointing to hear from the Minister, who said that basically it was not the Government’s fault back in the 1990s or whatever; it was the fault of other bodies, other quangos, and other Government organisations. At the end of the day, it is the legislators who determine on behalf of the people of New Zealand, so I am very disappointed to hear that, because I feel that we in this House have to ensure that what we bring through in this House is in the best interests of the people of New Zealand and does deliver to them safe housing, housing and buildings that they can live in or work in, and commercial buildings that they can feel safe to be in.

We have heard some astonishing stories from the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Building Failure caused by the Canterbury Earthquakes in recent weeks, and more and more comment coming through, including from very learned expert witnesses saying that they had great concerns about some of the methods that had been undertaken in terms of some of the structures and buildings in Christchurch, resulting in catastrophic failures in many cases. We must ensure that what we follow through on with this No. 3 bill and then with the subsequent No. 4 bill continues to provide the adequate protections for the people of New Zealand and for all our citizens and residents.

The Minister mentioned that many of us would not get on a 737 and fly if we did not think there was a registered, licensed pilot flying it. Well, the same sort of people probably thought the same thing when they got on the Costa Concordia for their cruise in the Mediterranean. They thought the captain was licensed and able to steer them safely through the Mediterranean waters. Sadly, something like 20 to 30 people did not come back from that cruise. They worked on the basis that they thought that the regulators, the legislators, and the people controlling the waterways of the Mediterranean would be making sure that the standards were maintained and kept to, to ensure that they were safe. Likewise, we as a House and as a Parliament must ensure that what goes through this House ends up in very, very good legislation, to ensure that safety is the highest priority and that our building code is kept to the highest priority.

The Minister also mentioned local authorities not really being responsible for signing off and seeing the final end result and that that was the responsibility of the builders. At the end of the day, those local authorities were approving sign-off of buildings that were built in accordance with the building code. Those buildings were using air-dried, untreated timber; they were using monolithic cladding in an unvented situation; and they were using sealants around windows to seal windows—in the old days you would put in decent flashing and decent overhangs—that after 7 or 8 years with our ultraviolet light in this country simply just break down and start allowing the water in. Those local authorities were approving on the basis of the standards that were set that were allowed for in the building code. Therefore, although the local authorities were certainly mindful of approving building structures to that code, they were not mindful of what the results would be from many of those products. With time, with weather, with ageing, and with movement of the New Zealand types of soils—the hills, the clay, and all that sort of thing—they were not fully aware at that time of what the result would be from that.

In closing, I would just like to say that I think this is very much a shared responsibility. We cannot go from one extreme to another. We cannot go from the situation where it is only the council, as the last man standing, that has had to take the brunt of much of this to a situation where we are trying to put most of the onus on the building industry and the end consumer. If we go from one extreme to the other, we could end up in a situation where we ask why we did that. Why did we take away a lot of the responsibility from the regulators and the people who were ensuring that there were codes of compliance, and that the buildings did comply with the standards? Why did we put it on to an industry where, as we have heard today, there are a lot of concerns about how skilled some sections of our building industry are? Have they gone through the necessary licensing? Have they been approved? Are they still waiting in a queue to try to get a licence? And do we want to put so much pressure on that side of the industry that we could end up in a situation in years to come where we regret that we went too far, too soon, and too quickly?

I am a bit concerned that there is a piecemeal situation to this bill and that we seem to be adding on. This is the No. 3 bill, and the Minister has said that much of this will be addressed in the No. 4 bill. There seems to be a lot of legislation happening on the hoof here. We are seeing, increasingly, more and more of this coming through the House where we hear: “We’ll work on it with the next bill and we’ll get it right with the next bill.” Too often that is happening in this House. I think in this situation perhaps we need to take a breath. Having heard the results of the royal commission of inquiry from Christchurch, having heard what has gone on in the likes of Pike River, and having heard what has gone on in other disastrous situations around New Zealand, do we want to push this through at such haste and find that we regret it later, or do we just want to breathe the air and make sure we get it right?

The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 11 in the name of the Hon Maurice Williamson to Part 1 be agreed to.