Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Amendment Bill

Thank you very much for the call on this Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Amendment Bill. On the last day when Parliament was considering this matter we had an extraordinary tirade from the Minister for Building and Construction, Maurice Williamson, on this legislation and why it was so necessary. He talked particularly about the issue of health and safety and the need for us all to be sure that the tradespeople we engage—in this case, plumbers, gasfitters, and drainlayers—are properly qualified, properly accredited, properly monitored, and regularly updating their skills in order to ensure that public health and safety is paramount and that work could be trusted to be done. In this context he said that this fee that had been extracted, this disciplinary levy that had been extracted to fund enforcement action against non-registered tradespeople, needed to be legalised because that was basically its intent—to rid the trades, this industry, of cowboys. Although I have a lot of sympathy with that, I do not have sympathy with the Minister’s misinformed and inappropriate tirade and the precipitate nature of the consideration of this bill.

The Minister in his speech referred to an explosion in a Pizza Hut in Nelson. Can I just say that he has now caused Pizza Hut nationwide to go into a bit of a tailspin about the safety of its eating houses. Can I just quote an email I received that included an email from David Hill, who is the Regional Operations Manager of Pizza Hut. He said: “We definitely did not have any gas explosion ever in Nelson Pizza Hut, or any of our other stores either. The comments made by Mr Williamson are obviously incorrect. We have fully compliant maintenance and safety programmes in all our stores. You can assure all your friends who ask that we are a safe place to eat.” That was an email dated Monday, 15 April. I feel the need to raise that as a point because the Minister impugned the reputation of Pizza Hut, and in the course of that I seek to correct that on the record and in the public domain. But, more important, he was wrong, and if he is wrong about something like that, he can be wrong about the detail and the purpose of the retrospective legislation that is being put before the House now.

It was not a Pizza Hut. There was a gas explosion in my neighbourhood fish and chip shop. It was the Milton Street fish and chip shop, a couple of years ago. So it was nothing to do with Pizza Hut. The poor owner, Mr Clark, at the time—it has now been sold and is under different management, and is a perfectly successful and safe business once more—who had operated a fabulous fish and chip shop for a long time in that area was seriously injured. I visited him in the burns unit at Hutt Hospital when he was transferred there because of the extent of his injuries. But nobody has ever been held accountable for that malpractice, if in fact there was malpractice. It certainly seems something went wrong, because a gas cylinder exploded. We do not have reticulated gas in Nelson, and so it works off gas cylinders. So Mr Williamson, the Minister, was quite wrong.

There is a man who now has to work in Tākaka whose reputation has been destroyed because of the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board. There is something much more rotten in the State of Denmark in respect of the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board than there is with the poor man who was burnt in an explosion in Nelson in a fish and chip shop and the poor gasfitter and plumber who was blamed but never found culpable. I draw this to the House’s attention because a man’s reputation and business has been ruined because the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board, to my information, has been covering up people who are responsible for signing off safety certificates. They have been covering up members of their own board or close friends who have been operating in a way that one could only call corrupt. This is now a serious matter, and instead of bringing to this House legislation that retrospectively approves an illegal fee that the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board has been extracting from plumbers for the last few years, why does not the Minister, if he thinks there is a fault or was a fault with the original 2006 legislation, correct that fault, instead of retrospectively validating a levy that was incorrectly applied?

Mr Williamson interjected during the last debate when we were talking about this. He interjected “Oh, members of Parliament only hear from a very few people—only hear from the same people, the same plumbers and gasfitters complaining about this, and we could all name them.” But they represent others. I think the Minister needs to get out more. I have had plumbers coming up to me at the Nelson market on a Saturday morning. They cannot get in to see Nick Smith, because he requires them all to make an appointment. So they come down to the market and they see me, and they complain. In fact, one sat with a sign outside Nick Smith’s caravan last Saturday morning, complaining about this bill. He was an ordinary plumber and gasfitter. He knows his trade. He has been doing it for decades. This bill, instead of correcting any fault with the 2006 legislation—and that is, actually, disputable; whether there was a fault with that legislation. It has taken a long time for the Government to work out that there was a problem with it, if indeed there was one. But if there is a problem with it, why does not the Minister fix it, instead of validating an illegal levy that has been imposed by a board that has behaved with less than stellar performance and less than exemplary conduct? This is not good enough.

The Minister told the House that the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board will be bankrupt if it has to pay back the money it has taken from ordinary tradesmen. If that is the case, then it will have to work from the ground up, again, to re-establish its funding base. The board has an ongoing process of demanding legitimate levies from plumbers, gasfitters, and drainlayers. It will never be bankrupt. It will always have levies coming in from the tens of thousands of tradesmen who pay to be certificated adequately and approved by the board. I am all for health and safety, but I am not for retrospective legislation validating an illegal levy by a dubious board governing these tradespeople. Thank you.

It is interesting. I never imagined when I entered Parliament that I would be so engaged by an amendment bill dealing with the regulation of the plumbing, gasfitting, and drainlaying industry. But I guess that is one of the strange and wonderful things about this place: you never know quite what direction you will be taken in. This bill, the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Amendment Bill, has in fact been one of the more complex, more controversial, more challenging, and more constitutionally interesting bills that I have worked on so far in my time in Parliament. It is certainly the first time I have experienced a hung select committee. So it has been a very interesting experience indeed.

When this bill was first mooted by the Minister for Building and Construction and he wrote to parties seeking our support, the Green Party indicated that we could tentatively support the legislation. We, like the Minister and other parties in the House, recognised that there probably was a problem with the 2006 Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Act, which, as has been demonstrated by a series of complaints to the Regulations Review Committee, to the Ombudsman, to the Auditor-General, and then again to the Regulations Review Committee, did not allow the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board to collect the levies and fees, as it had been doing, from its members for the purposes of prosecuting unlicensed practitioners. As the Minister has pointed out, it is clear—well, perhaps it is not clear but there is some indication—that it was the intent of Parliament in 2006, when enacting the legislation, that the board should be able to prosecute unlicensed practitioners. The Green Party agrees in principle that this should be the case.

The board should be able to prosecute unlicensed practitioners. Indeed, it is in the interests of the many law-abiding plumbers and gasfitters that there is the capacity to prosecute unlicensed practitioners, because these so-called cowboys—to use the Minister’s terminology—do give their industry a bad name. There is something to be gained for those registered, law-abiding plumbers, gasfitters, and drainlayers by ensuring that those who are not are being prosecuted and dealt with effectively. So the Green Party certainly could support legislation to make it clear that the board has the lawful ability to collect from its members levies and fees for the purposes of discipline and prosecution of licensed and unlicensed practitioners in the future. That we could support, and that we have communicated to the Minister.

I know that there are many in the industry who have grievances with the board and who would not support going even that far—allowing the board to collect these levies in the future. There is, as we have heard from previous speakers, a lot of bad blood in this industry and a lot of mistrust of the board, which is unfortunate but which is not unfounded, historically speaking, based on the actions of the board over a number of years at certain times. However, I do believe that these grievances are largely historical and they could be addressed, as the Hon Ruth Dyson pointed out last week in her contribution to this second reading debate, if the board showed a greater commitment and a greater degree of transparency in how it spends the offences fee, to reassure those with concerns that the fee is actually spent on the purpose for which it is collected, on the prosecution of unlicensed practitioners.

As an advocate of transparency and open governance, I certainly did sympathise with submitters from the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Federation who showed the Government Administration Committee the efforts that they have been to under the Official Information Act to obtain from the board information about how the levies are spent. They have had no end of difficulty and long delays in getting hold of that information. I think proactive disclosure from the board would go a long way towards addressing some of these concerns. With that caveat—that greater transparency on how the levies are spent is needed—the Green Party could, as I have said, support legislation that gave the board the ability to collect offences fees in the future.

Our concern with the amendment bill currently before the House is its retrospective nature. As a number of speakers have remarked, retrospective legislation is not something that this House should ever take lightly, and we are certainly not persuaded that it is justified in this case. The fact is that the board, whether it thought it was doing it legally or not, has for a number of years been charging illegal fees and levies. People have taken perfectly legitimate complaints about this to every available adjudicator—as I said before, to the Regulations Review Committee, the Ombudsman, the Auditor-General, and again this year the Regulations Review Committee. Every one of those complaints has been upheld, and at each stage the complainants have been vindicated that they have a legitimate complaint. What message do we send from this House about natural justice and due process if at the end of all of those complaints and all of that process we say: “Yes, you’re right, actually—we’ve figured out it is illegal. Thanks for bringing that to our attention. We’ll just change the law now, thank you very much.”?

You can understand why the complainants are upset that this House is considering the retrospective validation of those illegal levies. In fact, it reminds me of the legislation that the Prime Minister has signalled we should expect soon in this House about the Government Communications Security Bureau to validate years of illegal spying on New Zealand citizens and permanent residents. That is a higher-profile example than the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board, but the retrospective nature of this Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Amendment Bill is no less distasteful than that example. The fact that people thought it was legal at the time is no excuse for illegal conduct, and people have taken legitimate complaints about the collection of this levy.

The solution, in the view of the Green Party, is to change the legislation for the future but not for the past. We recognise that if we were to take this course of action, it might require the board to refund some or all of the fees and levies that it has collected since 2006. That, indeed, was the recommendation in the findings of the complaint to the Ombudsman. We think it is probably fair enough that it does refund some of those levies and fees that it has collected illegally. However, as the Minister has pointed out, this could potentially put the board under some financial strain and possibly bankrupt it. Well, if that is the case, I would like to ask the Minister what is so bad about going to the Minister of Finance and asking for some Government support to allow the board to refund the illegal levies without going under. After all, it was a Government error in the drafting of the original legislation in the first place that allowed all of this to happen. Yes, admittedly, it was a different Government, but the Crown is the Crown. In this case I think that there is a case for the Crown to take some responsibility and contribute some financial assistance if it is needed.

The best estimate that I could work out, based on the information that was available to us as members of the select committee, was this might mean a liability of something like $1 million. I know $1 million is not an insignificant amount of money, to be sure, but it is certainly an amount that I think the Minister of Finance and the Crown are capable of finding in the Budget and absorbing. That is a solution that the Green Party could have supported—fixing the legislation going forward into the future, but allowing due process to take its course for the collection of the illegal levies and for the existing legitimate complaints.

We do acknowledge that the industry needs a fix, but retrospective validation is not justifiable, and the rushed process at the select committee has not helped. Yes, I acknowledge that the time was extended from 1 week to 3 weeks, but that is still an extremely short time, and there were a large number of people who wished to submit in person who did not have the opportunity to do so. This is a divided, conflicted industry and, unfortunately, it seems absolutely certain to remain so with the passage of this legislation. The Green Party will continue to oppose this bill.

I stand to support the second reading of the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Amendment Bill. The quality of our plumbing and gasfitting shapes our health and safety. This means we need qualified and skilled people to do this work, and we also need to prevent unqualified and unskilled people from putting the public at risk.

This bill addresses irregularities of funding largely. Most boards have been funded by fees and levies. It is important to ensure that boards have funding for all their functions. Primarily, the role of the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board is to prosecute people who carry out illegal sanitary plumbing or gasfitting work.

In fact, this bill tidies up any anomaly around the funding of the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board so it can effectively carry out its job of prosecuting for people’s safety. The board can also fund the investigation and prosecution of people within the trade who are found to be in contravention of best practice or who are practising without the appropriate skill or qualification.

This bill is one part of the work the Government is doing across the building sector to help those in the sector improve their skills and the capability to build right the first time. I support this bill.

I take a call on behalf of New Zealand First on the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Amendment Bill. In this respect, can I just state firstly that New Zealand First will not be supporting this bill. We are of a mind that, once again, this Government is trying to retrofit legislation, and this should not have been brought to this House in this position some 5 or 6 years later. This Government has been in power for 5-odd years, and, quite frankly, it is too often that retrospective legislation is being put in place to sort out problems of this nature.

In this particular instance there have obviously been some errors made, but it would be now wrong that so many plumbers and gasfitters and others in the industry should be penalised for something that was not of their doing, because people have made a huge error in terms of the officials, in terms of the legal advice in the original legislation, and then, indeed, the oversight of that legislation. Therefore, innocent parties and people who are going about their business should not now be hounded retrospectively for money, in many cases where they simply do not have those funds to pay the retrospective fees that are trying to be charged. In some cases where they are being hounded unnecessarily, we feel it is very onerous on many of those tradespeople, and it is not something we would condone.

In this respect, Minister Maurice Williamson, we believe, again is trying to sort something out, which he should have done perhaps in a more collegial way with the industry. In this situation I am sitting on, many, many, many emails have come in from all parts of the industry that are most incensed about how this is being handled, and it is very disappointing that it has really driven a wedge between many elements within this particular industry and that you have people fighting each other over this whole issue.

This Government seems to be getting into a habit of, if something is not quite working, changing the law or rewriting the law or changing the legislation. Today we heard from the Prime Minister, who said that because illegal spying has gone on for something like a decade, and because it had been caught out with conducting illegal observation of New Zealand citizens, let us just change the law, let us just rewrite the law, and let us suddenly make all that legal. This is the sort of thing that is going on too often. These things need to be picked up a lot earlier. These things should not just fester year after year, and then suddenly somebody says: “Oh, we made a mistake there. Let’s just rewrite history. Let’s rewrite the law, and let’s put all that right.” We had that in the Tasman District Council (Validation and Recovery of Certain Rates) Bill a few weeks ago, where, again, rates had been struck in Tasman that had not been correctly done—again, let us rewrite history, let us rewrite legislation, to get it off the hook. Unfortunately, we cannot go through life all the time where you just rewrite history to try to let people off the hook. Sometimes people have to just stand up and say: “We made an error and we’ll take it on the chin.” In this case, the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board has made some grave errors in this, and, quite rightly, many of those involved with that should be taking full responsibility, not trying to put it on Parliament to sort the problem out.

We are also concerned that the Minister has tried to suddenly rush this bill through the House, and ram this through in desperation, but that seems to be a habit of that particular Minister, in terms of other bills such as the Building Amendment Bill (No 4) and other aspects of building and construction. A lot of it is all about sorting out problems of the past. We had the leaky homes situation, which, again, could be tied back to the same Minister from a decade or so ago, where legislation changed and the building code was changed to allow for kiln-dried timber and to allow for monolithic cladding to be applied directly to kiln-dried timber - framed houses. All these sorts of things seem to have the same stamp on them, and the stamp is one Minister Maurice Williamson. It seems to be that Minister Williamson spends more of his time sorting out errors and problems and retrospective mistakes, much of which he has had some involvement in, than actually doing things for a proactive improvement in the building industry. Much of it is very negative in terms of dumbing down the building industry and taking away from it.

It is somewhat ironic that under the Building Amendment Bill (No 4), which is going through the House, there are proposals to have a lot more self-regulation, to have a lot more checking by the tradesmen, to have a lot more of a hands-off approach—to have less council and local authority involvement—in the oversight of inspections, and all that sort of thing. So, on the one hand, this Minister is saying let us remove a lot of the legislation around controls and compliance by local authorities, and let the building industry have a lot more of its own say on these things, in what is very much a hands-off approach from this Minister. But then he turns around and comes to the House with this particular bill, where he suddenly wants to impose the legislation to tighten up the restrictions on plumbers, gasfitters, and drainlayers. It is almost as if he cannot decide quite what he wants as a Minister. Does he want hands off or does he want hands on? He seems to want to back two horses, in this respect, and he is in two minds as to which way he is going. In this respect there are elements of this industry that are very aggrieved by this. They feel that they have been hard-done-by, and, quite frankly, the ministry and others involved in building and construction, and the Minister himself, should have addressed this a long time ago, so that it was not the situation of many, many years ago—going back to 2006 or 2007—when these levies were incorrectly charged, or the board was incorrectly going after people whom it could not lawfully go after, for the levies. In this respect, New Zealand First has great difficulty with this. We think, again, that you could drive a bus through this bill, in terms of the message it is sending, in terms of this legislative Chamber and the way that Parliament works, and New Zealand First will not be supporting it.

Despite the disagreement in the House, I do not think that anybody would disagree that the quality of plumbing and gasfitting impacts directly on all our health and safety. There was a very poignant contribution before from my colleague the Hon Maryan Street from across the House.

This bill, the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Amendment Bill, validates the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board’s disciplinary levy, so that it enables the board to discipline unregistered operators.

It is very interesting to hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Opposition benches about this process of validation. A cursory request to the Parliamentary Library revealed that when in Government between 1999 and 2008, on one of just a few of the times when the then Labour Government used the technique of validating unlawful use of parliamentary funding by political parties, Michael Cullen was quoted as saying, in 2006, that “Parliament regularly passed validating legislation”. Of course, one of my favourites was “Harry’s law”, which was passed to keep one of the Labour MPs in power. He was quite well-loved—Harry Duynhoven, who is now the Mayor of New Plymouth. He was in breach of—

💬 Jami-Lee Ross: Labour, was it?

—yes, this was Labour—citizenship laws as an MP because he held two passports. According to the law, he should have been immediately forced to resign from Parliament. Ignorance of the law is not an excuse, as the Minister of Justice would tell us. Neither should it have been for Harry. But, no, the Labour Government then decided instead to change the law, so that what he had done was no longer illegal.

You know, we have heard some riveting contributions thus far on this debate, including a bravura performance from the Minister for Building and Construction. I have been warned that I will get myself into hot water if I speak too long. It has been a varied debate so far. Some speakers have put forward what they thought was a watertight argument. However, I believe that some of the contributions have leaked around the edges of irrelevancy. I have been asked to keep this a short call today, so I shall, therefore, turn off the metaphorical and rhetorical tap.

That was a sad performance from a member, Dr Cam Calder, who normally does a little better than that. Occasionally, one just hopes that when one gets to the second reading of a bill, we might find a National Party member who has read it and refers to it. Maybe I am hoping for too much when it comes to the mid-ranked and, in fact, some of the brighter MPs from the National Party, like the one who has just spoken.

To make it clear, the Labour Party is opposing the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Amendment Bill. I say this more in sadness than in anger. I did some work with Maurice Williamson in order to facilitate getting the bill into the House and to move it quickly through the select committee process. It is fair to say, at this point, that I regret the cooperation that occurred on that occasion. I was gullible—I think that is the right word—enough to take the Minister for Building and Construction at his word that this was a relatively minor matter and that it would get the unanimous support of Parliament. Clearly that was wrong, and, as the Government Administration Committee has sat and people have looked more carefully at the legislation, what we are seeing here is, in fact, a case of retrospective taxation without representation. It is a combination of two of the worst sins that a democracy and a Parliament can do, wrapped up in one tiny little validation bill.

I say to the Minister that it is pretty sad that he is trying to ram this through in the way that he is, in the dead of night—in the dead of night—as he is wont to do with his legislation. What we know, of course, with this Minister and a number of his colleagues is that it is a case of legislate in haste and repent over a long period of time. What we are—

💬 Hon Maurice Williamson: Who cocked up the original bill?

The Minister says that he voted for a bill that was cocked up to start with. It may or may not be the case that there was an error in the earlier legislation. Certainly there was an error—well, I hope there was an error—in the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board’s understanding of the legislation. There is no doubt that the board has committed some acts; it has taken money off people in a way that it was not entitled to do. Authorities have looked at it. The Ombudsman has looked at it, the Auditor-General has looked at it, the Regulations Review Committee has looked at it, and all of them have found that the board acted in an ultra vires manner in the way that it collected this funding. The Regulations Review Committee as far back as 2011 concluded that the board appeared to have made an unusual or unexpected use of its levy power.

What is clear is that the bill makes actions that were previously unlawful lawful. It is just a question of whether we should be doing that. I mean, what would people say if this was a general taxation matter, and people had to pay hundreds of dollars each in additional taxation as a result of this sort of retrospective legislation? The Labour Party is not comfortable with the retrospective validation if this is done. In fact, the rule of law and the supremacy of Parliament is something that is very important. When a law is passed and boards are given authority—a levy-making authority, as is the case in this case with this Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board—then there is a requirement on the boards to act according to that law and to not go outside the vires that has been established for them. Retrospective legislation is something that should be used in very limited circumstances, and one should be very careful not to disadvantage individuals or groups of individuals when one is involved in retrospective legislation.

Normally with validation it is a validation of a right, not the validation of taking money away from individuals that, it has been established, should be repaid to the individuals. What is more, these people have spent a not unreasonable amount of money in establishing their rights. It is not cheap to build cases to the Auditor-General, to the Ombudsman, and to the Regulations Review Committee. They put in a lot of time and energy and got a lot of advice, and they won. What we have now is Maurice Williamson coming to this House and saying “Too bad that you won with the Ombudsman, too bad that you won with the Auditor-General, too bad that you won with the Regulations Review Committee. We are now going to change the rules of the game and confiscate the wins that have rightfully accrued to this group.”

It may well be that it is appropriate, going forward, for there to be a right to levy in order to ensure that cowboys are properly regulated. I think if that is what the bill did, we would be happy to support it, and to support it quickly through the House. If the Minister wants, at the Committee stage, to make an amendment to the bill in order to make it consistent in that way with proper process, then I am sure he will get Labour’s support and, unless the Green Party is going to sleep—I think I am getting a nod from Holly Walker, as well—we will get support from the other parties, and we will—

💬 Hon Maurice Williamson: If you guys stump up with the money, I’ll do that.

The Minister says “What about the money?”. Well, I say to that Minister: is it the right of Parliament to confiscate money from individuals who are rightfully entitled to it, on a retrospective basis? Is it right to retrospectively tax individuals when they have won their case, effectively, with three different authorities? My view is that that is not an appropriate thing to do. The Labour Party has prepared Supplementary Order Paper 204. Whether the Supplementary Order Paper goes far enough, I am not sure; there has been a bit of debate about this within the Labour caucus. It is a Supplementary Order Paper that attempts to get a point of balance and to force an agreement between the warring parties in this area, and, in the absence of an agreement, to get the Chief Ombudsman to make a ruling that would be binding as far as the level of payment is concerned. We think that that is a proper approach, because the Labour Party’s view is that if one is to be taxed, it should be prospectively and not retrospectively, and that validating legislation should be used to benefit or to protect individuals, not to punish them.

I am struggling to know quite what to make of that previous comment and contribution to the House by Mr Mallard—

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: The Hon Mr Mallard.

The Hon Mr Mallard. I am not aware that we are in the dead of the night at the moment, but we certainly were riding high on our high horse talking about the rule of law and lofty sentiments about the rule of law and the grave care that should be taken before any validation legislation is passed. It does not sort of fit naturally with the historical record, which my good friend and colleague referred to before, in relation to the use of validation legislation by the Labour Party only a few years ago to retrospectively validate unlawful use of parliamentary funds by political parties during the 2005 election. We recall that election, which the National Party should indeed have won, were it not for incorrect spending at the last moment. It was an amazing amount of spending, in the last few days of an election campaign, which was suddenly retrospectively fixed.

This legislation here is all about clearing up what was always the Government’s intention—that the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board’s prosecution function would be funded by the industry, because all its statutory functions are funded through fees and levies charged under the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Act 2006. It is appropriate for the industry to pay for this activity because it is the industry that benefits from maintaining high standards and from preventing unqualified people from taking work from skilled tradesmen. We all want to know that our plumbing and our drains are done effectively and properly, and this industry does need to be policed. It had not operated effectively, and this legislation retrospectively sorts that out.

Passing retrospective legislation is not something that you do lightly, but there is a long and healthy tradition of doing this where it is required for the best interests. If members on the other side want to hear some more examples of previous cases of it, we could refer to the parliamentary committee under Labour that proposed the validating of the collection of fisheries levies, which were worth at least $240 million in 2002. Also, Labour rushed through in September 2001 validating legislation for recently invalidated unions. The list could go on and on.

What I think we have here tonight is a practical piece of legislation that is fixing a problem that has come up. We do not need to stand and wail and gnash our teeth as members are doing on the other side of the House as if this is the first time this has ever happened in Parliament. We only have to look back to see that from time to time this has been done in an appropriate way. So, on that basis, I commend this bill to the House.

I understand the next call is a split call. Brendan Horan, 5 minutes.

I am just absolutely amazed that that side would stand there and tell New Zealand that black is white and white is black when our plumbers, gasfitters, and drainlayers know what is right is right and what is wrong is wrong. They can certainly see bovine excrement and know what to do with it.

What the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Amendment Bill does is vindicate the actions of the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Federation, an incorporated society with over 1,000 members whose purpose is to ensure that the industry gets treated in a fair and equitable manner. It has been lobbying against the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board, a board that is simply not listening to them. It is not listening to the industry that it supposedly regulates. This bill is proof that the federation has been right and it shows that the board, its chief executive officer, its four legal staff, and the Minister for Building and Construction got the interpretation of the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Act wrong and the actions taken by them were contrary to the guidelines issued by Treasury and the Office of the Auditor-General.

It is vital that the board use its statutory powers properly to gain the trust and respect of the industry, but currently this is not the case. The industry is full of suspicion and discontent. The competence of the board and the Minister who appointed its members is questioned by the industry. Given that the industry funds the board through fees, many plumbers, gasfitters, and drainlayers are becoming increasingly disaffected, which has led to the establishment of the federation, which is now the largest industry organisation in this sector. It was organised just less than 2 years ago. So it should question the competence and actions of the board, as the industry has faced a tenfold increase in discipline levies and offence fees in less than 6 years, and it is now at the level where the industry—and, ultimately, the consumer—pays around $1.8 million annually for these functions. That is over $36,000 per week for discipline and prosecutions.

We do not see other boards that are 100 percent funded by the industry that also pay 100 percent for the prosecution of non-registered people. Is this bill seeking a precedent for other industries? Are people in other regulated industries going to be levied in a similar manner? The cost of housing is very topical at the moment. What will these levies do to the price of housing if others in the construction sector are treated in the same manner as the plumbers, gasfitters, and drainlayers?

Members of this House will be aware that the legislation already provides the board with an inexpensive method of dealing with unregistered persons who may breach the Act, by instituting a range of infringement fees. But, to date, the board has failed to implement this option. Many in the industry challenge the fees they are required to pay and have asked the board for a breakdown of what constitutes the fees. This is the same board that is spending tens of thousands of dollars appealing its deregulation as a registered charity. That is right. It tried to set itself up as a registered charity and got kicked out, but with the Minister in its back pocket, it is above the law. It wants to charge the industry over $1,000 to search for fees information. This is information that should be readily available to all who ask.

This bill is a cover for incompetence. The board did not listen to the industry and ended up before the Regulations Review Committee, requiring the Government to bail it out. The Ombudsman in a recent report stated the board was wrong with regard to the offence fee and suggested it return over $600,000 to the industry. The board is again before the Regulations Review Committee regarding the fees, and this bill will again bail the board out of a position it should never have got itself into. You see, to quote a famous politician, Winston—and, of course, I am talking about Winston Churchill—this board and its relationship with the Minister seems to be odious in the highest degree. I cannot and will not support this bill.

I rise to speak on the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Amendment Bill. The Green Party has reflected on this bill. As the bill has progressed through submissions, we have seen that the retrospective aspect of this bill is not acceptable, and we will continue to oppose this bill. We are not going to vote for sorting out this illegal collection of funds to make a legal right, and that is something that some of the submitters have put to us through this period of time.

I heard a lot from the member Mr Goldsmith that when it is in the best interests it is the right thing to use retrospective legislation, but you would have to ask in whose best interests this is being done—a shonky board or the actual gasfitters, plumbers, and tradesmen who have paid through the nose significantly for a board that did not function very well at all? The communication we have had with tradespeople—and a number of people in the House here tonight have had some of that communication—convinces me that, besides this principal issue behind the bill, which is the retrospective aspect of the funding, we are talking about a dysfunctional board in the past. It was a board that was conflicted and ineffectual in part. Significant fees were amassed unnecessarily through unduly bureaucratic behaviour, and then it did not follow through with what it was responsible for. There was the talk of the cowboys, and the fish and chip shop / pizza place—

💬 Hon Maryan Street: No, it wasn’t Pizza Hut; don’t say it again.

I know it is not a pizza place, and I am not going to talk about or give an ad for Pizza Hut, but I know that place too, because I also come from the top of the South Island and I was a customer at that place. As was mentioned earlier, there are people there who were hurt and who have been skittled professionally, and there are other ones who have walked through totally free because this board could not even do its job. And yet it has spent something like $200,000 of disciplinary fees on the investigation, with no result. I think it is a very, very important time to hit the refresh button for that organisation.

Talking of refresh buttons, we can talk about some other retrospective-type behaviour that we are getting from this Government. We can look at the Government Communications Security Bureau, for example, and what it has done. We can think back to some retrospective stuff in terms of Aziz Choudry, when the SIS in that instance went and busted illegally into his house. Then what did the Government have to do? The Government of the day had to turn round and pay him a settlement, and then it changed the law again. Why? To look after Aziz Choudry? The law change was made to carry on and to cover their butts for the illegal activities that they had done on many other people, and here we go again for some more—maybe retrospective? We will wait and see—when Mr Key covers up his shenanigans with the Government Communications Security Bureau. That is past history. It is not just him; it is others as well, but it is a long history. And what are we doing now? We are looking to do something by using that illegal behaviour and then turning round and ultimately penalising the community in another way.

Going back to plumbers and retrospective stuff, it is interesting—and a very important example was given to us—in terms of how different boards, professional boards, handle complaints. It was mentioned by one of the submitters to the Government Administration Committee about the Institution of Professional Engineers New Zealand, and it is a very, very sad indictment. We have already had the one with the fish and chip shop, but this one was the Institution of Professional Engineers New Zealand and was to do with the building in Christchurch that ultimately led to the death of 115 people. And what has happened there? That professional body was not even able to go through and carry out a decent disciplinary action for the people responsible there. The Green Party will be opposing this bill. Thank you.

The question was put that the amendments recommended by the Government Administration Committee by majority be agreed to.