Building Amendment Bill (No 3)

I move, That the Building Amendment Bill (No 3) be now read a third time. I moved the original bill back in, I think it was, November of 2010, and I am pleased to see it, having gone through its various gestations through to the Local Government and Environment Committee—which did quite a bit of work, and I thank it for that—finally here on the floor of the House for its final reading.

I want to stress that this bill is the first element in a package of reforms that the Government intends to bring through to achieve improvements overall in the building and construction sector. So I know there will be comments from the Opposition when it speaks that this bill is piecemeal, but I want those members to know that this is only one piece of a very large jigsaw. I think it was Lianne Dalziel who said you could not build a house without having all the blocks. Well, actually, you can. You can build the foundations without having the walls, you can then put the walls up without having the roof, and you can put the roof on at the end.

💬 Hon Lianne Dalziel: I didn’t say that.

Oh, all right, then it was not—then it was not.

💬 Hon Lianne Dalziel: It was Annette.

Oh, it was Annette King. It was Annette King—I apologise.

💬 Hon Lianne Dalziel: She was always much more intelligent than me.

Well, I was going to say, the more—no, I will get myself into trouble whichever way I go.

So we have embarked on the reforms, and I would have loved to do it as one whole bill. But the fact is that some things need to be done almost immediately, some can be done in the medium term, and there are some things, like the liability stuff, that we have put off to the Law Commission for some work—moving from joint and several liability to a different form of liability. It might be to do with proportion or it might be something else, but it is going to happen. I say to the members of the Opposition, you can use the word “piecemeal” as you like; I am happy to say that this is one building block.

A productive building and construction sector is indeed critical to the building of this nation, and, in fact, to the rebuild of Christchurch. I think one thing members need to know in this House is that the building and construction sector contributes just about as much to our GDP—in fact, almost identical—as agriculture does, so it is important. Let me state what the Government’s goal is: it is to have a more efficient and productive sector that stands behind the quality of its work. That is pretty much motherhood and apple pie, but how would you do that?

Well, first of all, we need a sector with the necessary skills and capability to build it right first time, and one that takes pride in its work. Too often I have been to building sites and heard people say: “Oh, she’ll be right. If there’s anything wrong with it, we will come back and fix it.”, and, frankly, getting it right the first time and taking a pride in your work will be a vital part of the new reforms.

We need a sector that delivers good quality, affordable homes and buildings and contributes to the prosperity of the economy, not buildings that need to be rebuilt, as we have had for many years now; a well-informed sector that shares information and quickly identifies and corrects problems; a sector where everyone involved in the building work knows what they are responsible for and what they can rely on others for—and those accountabilities and responsibilities being laid out are a vitally important part of this reforms package—and, finally, consumers in the sector making informed decisions and understanding the risks and consequences of those decisions, because there is an element of consumer responsibility.

I went to a house that some builders showed me that was leaking badly, and then they showed me that the spoutings were blocked, locked, and stocked full of leaves. The homeowner had done nothing in terms of clearing them, and the water had nowhere to go but pour back inside the house. So there is an element of homeowner responsibility as part of the overall package, as well.

The current system is not broken—I admit that—but it is badly dented and it does need some quite good fix-ups. So it is about creating the right incentives to improve productivity by making sure that the people who build it, as I said, build it right the first time. The Government is going to ensure that as much red tape as necessary can be removed from the sector, but actually it is adding some new red tape. I hear Labour going on about: “Oh, Maurice Williamson is into the free market, deregulation.”, but I am actually adding some new regulations and some new rules—for example, the licensed building practitioner scheme, where carpenters and designers will actually have to have qualifications, and you will not just be able to have a cellphone, a dog, and a ute and go out and start building houses.

The Government has no interest in deregulating at the cost of health and safety standards, or at the cost of building shoddy buildings. Quality of building work must come first, and all of the reforms that we are embarking on—including this bill; the Building Amendment Bill (No 4), which has already been introduced in this House; and another piece of legislation later on this year—are vitally important building blocks for getting this sector right.

The Building Act of 2004 will be amended to make it clearer that the buck stops with the people doing the work. The bill will also change the current building consent process to allow for risk-based consenting. I say to members that I think this is common sense. I would hope that everybody agrees with this—that there is a range of risks from building a very simple timber-framed, maybe two-bedroomed gottage up to building a multi-storeyed, multiple materials, unbelievable design with all sorts of weird and wacky bits. There is a different level of risk associated with it, and yet under the current building regime—and it has been there for a long time—we have had a one-size-fits-all approach. The same level of consenting scrutiny goes on when the application is made, and the same number of inspections are made at the site for those buildings, regardless of their risk.

Moving to that risk-based consenting, I say that it will reduce compliance costs. As for those simple little projects, my hope is eventually, once we have got enough of a licensed building practitioner pool of resources working, there may be even quite a bit of work at the very, very low end of the risk curve that will not need consenting at all. It will also provide incentives for builders and designers to ensure that they have the necessary skills, because if they do not, they will—actually, as of 6 days ago—not be legally allowed to do it, because the licensed building practitioner regime became mandatory.

The new risk-based consenting system will allow owners to apply for different types of building consents based on the risk of the work done rather than the current one-size-fits-all approach, as I have said. The risk-based consent system will not, however, come into force immediately. It will not actually come into force until we have some confidence about the quality of building work that can be maintained out there, so a lot of this stuff will be triggered by a regulation and it will be triggered by that regulation only once there is some confidence about the industry.

The Government has identified a number of preconditions that will tell us whether we are on the right track, and we will activate the new types of risk-based building consent only once those preconditions are met. On 1 March it did become mandatory to use a licensed building practitioner to carry out restricted building work. Some of the provisions in this bill relate to the licensed building practitioner scheme. The bill will amend the Act to be explicit about the standard of behaviour expected from people working in the sector. Good standards of behaviour will help to restore confidence of the public back in the sector. A code of ethics will be developed as part of the licensed building practitioner scheme, and licensed building practitioners will be able to be disciplined for breaches of that code or other behaviour that brings the scheme into disrepute to the point of actually losing their licence—to the point of actually losing their licence.

The final key change included in this bill is an exemption from that restricted building work for the do-it-yourselfer. We have always believed, on this side of the House, that we should allow people who want to build their home to do so, but it will be recorded against the property so that anyone buying in the future will know it. Do-it-yourselfers will be allowed to do only one every 3 years, because as I said in the Committee of the whole House, in South Australia it was found they would just build then sell, build then sell, and some were doing six to eight a year and making out it was do-it-yourself. Genuine do-it-yourselfers will have nothing to fear. Further, we need to prevent unlicensed builders from flying under the radar by making out that they are do-it-yourselfers, and that will happen.

During its consideration of the bill, the Local Government and Environment Committee heard a lot of submissions, and I want to make a comment about that because I know that Raymond Huo has gone on about how a lot of those making submissions were opposed to the bill. Well, I will tell you that people who said they made submissions with some concerns, such as that the bill is piecemeal, are fully supportive of this legislation. I would like Raymond Huo to tell us who it is who now opposes it.

The Registered Master Builders Federation supports this. The Certified Builders Association supports this. The Building Industry Federation supports this. The Construction Industry Council supports this. All of the major suppliers of product and material from Fletcher’s to Carters support it. So when Raymond Huo says they came to the select committee opposing it, I say that, yes, they came saying they had some concerns about it not all being done as one package, but I want Mr Huo to name just one major operation today—one—that is opposed to this legislation. If he can do that, I will be really interested to hear the name of it, of one—just one, Mr Huo—that is opposed to it.

I think this is great legislation. It is a good step in the right direction. It is a building block to getting our building industry back in some public confidence. I commend the bill to the House.

Ni hao. I would seek to table that report by way of a point of order, but that is out of the scope of my contribution. But in light of what the Minister for Building and Construction just said defining this Building Amendment Bill (No 3) as one piece, or the very first piece, of a package, I would like to quote what the Hon Lianne Dalziel quoted in her contribution in the Committee stage last night.

Mr Peter Mumford said that “Effectively New Zealand moved into an unknown future while burning its bridges to past practices.” Mr Peter Mumford was involved in the 2004 building legislation, and his 2010 PhD thesis was referred to in an article that the Hon Lianne Dalziel mentioned in her speech last night. The article commented again: “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.”

It is really more in sorrow than in anger that we have no other choice but to oppose this particular bill. We did support this bill to the Local Government and Environment Committee, and we are in broad agreement with the direction of the Building Act review, which was initiated under the last Labour Government. The aim of the Building Act review was to better allocate responsibility, accountability, and liability between regulatory authorities, building practitioners, and consumers, but this bill, which has been rushed through to meet the Government’s time frame, has misplaced this responsibility, liability, and accountability.

We listened to the submitters and agreed that this bill shall not proceed. Having said that, I do echo what the Minister for Building and Construction has acknowledged in his speeches—that there has been a high degree of cross-party commitment to the Building Act review process going back to the mid-2000s. I want to, therefore, acknowledge the work and efforts of the current Minister, the wonderful Hon Maurice Williamson, and also the former Ministers the Hon Shane Jones and Clayton Cosgrove, and also former Minister of Commerce the Hon Lianne Dalziel.

I acknowledge the Hon Lianne Dalziel because I learnt from some of our top structural engineers in this country that she was such a hard-working Minister, who, like other Ministers or members of Parliament, received but read the open letter by Mr John Scarry in 2002. I did not hear Minister Williamson’s comments on television saying that nobody agreed with Mr Scarry, but I do agree with my colleague the Hon Lianne Dalziel that there are at least two reports to confirm that there are genuine concerns that Mr John Scarry had raised. I also read the report by IPENZ, the Institution of Professional Engineers New Zealand, and also a report prepared for the Department of Building and Housing.

Shortly after the second reading debate, Mr John Scarry sent emails around to members, particularly to the members opposite who supported this bill. Mr John Scarry said in his email to those members that had they been aware of the state of the construction industry in New Zealand, particularly with regard to structure adequacy as opposed to leaky buildings, those members would not have supported this bill. This bill does nothing to improve productivity and accountability, and it reduces the already poor protection new homeowners have at present.

We all heard the news or read the report that the main contributing factors towards the collapse of the CTV Building in Christchurch were poor standards of construction and deficient building materials. Specifically, hollow core, slender concrete walls, brittle wire mesh, and deficient floor diaphragms are the main issues, which apply to other at-risk buildings, I believe. It is appalling to read in the New Zealand Herald that deregulation of the industry had allowed manufacturers to pay for the development of standards to justify their own products. I am not quite sure whether the Minister agreed to that report in the New Zealand Herald, otherwise I would seek leave to table that report for his reference.

Even according to the Minister himself leaky homes are still being built, and still being built in his own electorate. I would like to salute the Minister, who was quoted in the media as saying that therefore “a ‘dramatic overhaul’ of the Building Act is needed desperately to end the crisis”. However, this bill fails to address those issues; rather, it is nothing but partial instalments.

We also heard comments from Minister Williamson that the defining feature of the construction industry in liability issues through the leaky buildings saga has been that of the councils. The building consent authorities are the only ones that have been left as the last man standing, simply because they are the ones who have deep pockets—courtesy of the ratepayers. But if the Minister’s answer in the bill is to scale back the liability of the building consent authorities through new sections—I believe in clause 10—there is no equivalent reallocation or reapportionment of responsibility, accountability, and reliability. So simply shifting the accountability and responsibility to the other parties, no matter whether they are the building practitioners or the consumers, is not the answer.

I do look forward to the progress of the Building Amendment Bill (No 4). In particular, I would like to hear more from the Minister in respect of measures such as implied warranty, surety, and enhanced supervision funded via, for instance, building levies.

To summarise, under this bill the role of the building consenting authorities is being reduced, but until there is a more genuine reallocation of accountability, this bill risks exposing the consumer to greater risk. It is our view that it is risky and unwise to legislate such a piecemeal set of measures at a time when the industry is facing a surge in demand from the rebuilding of Christchurch, leaky building remediation work, and a huge skills deficit.

I would like to conclude by quoting a PricewaterhouseCoopers report that found that homes constructed after 2005 have a low failure rate of 0.2 percent, implying that less than 150 homes built between 2006 and 2008 are likely to be leaky. Does that tell us anything? It tells us that the Building Act 2004, enacted by the Labour Government, has worked and has worked to that particular extent. That demonstrated leadership—the leadership that we desperately need now. We need leadership because we are not talking about statistics, we are talking about safety and we are talking about human lives.

I rise to support the Building Amendment Bill (No 3) at its third reading. As has been discussed in the House previously, this bill is part of a larger suite of legislation for the building industry. The Building Amendment Bill (No 4) is ready to have its first reading in Parliament very soon.

If you think about the construction sector, it is a very important part of our industry. It employs over 170,000 people, which is about one in 12 New Zealanders. If you think of the future in Christchurch, with a $20 billion to $30 billion rebuild in the next decade or so, this number can only increase.

The development of this bill has been a long time coming. Originally, work was undertaken by the Labour Government, and the new Minister, Maurice Williamson, and his department have consulted widely. They have talked to everybody in the industry—everybody from the Registered Master Builders Federation, the Certified Builders Association, the Building Industry Federation, the Construction Industry Council, and even retailers like PlaceMakers, Mitre 10, and Bunnings have had their say. There is a high degree of support for these changes. Even in the Local Government and Environment Committee we continued that process and we managed to iron out some of the finer details at the time.

I think this bill is both important and necessary. It is absolutely true that our building industry needs to improve. In comparison with what the previous speaker, Raymond Huo, was speaking about, I think this is just the right time—when there is a lot of work to do to repair leaky homes and a huge amount of work to be done in Christchurch. There is a real issue about accessibility and affordability of homes in New Zealand. The demands for the new homes in Christchurch after the earthquakes mean that we must reform our building legislation. We must cut red tape, we must cut bureaucracy, and, at the same time, we must increase productivity and improve the quality of all our buildings. This bill is part of the Government’s Better Building Blueprint, and that is our plan for a better future for New Zealanders by making it easier and cheaper to build good quality homes and buildings.

Just to recap the four major points of this legislation, the first is to give clearer accountability for building practitioners, building consent authorities, and the consumer to make sure that the work complies with the building code. By making each contributor individually responsible for meeting those building code standards, there is an inherent quality-checking system that will improve the quality of work.

Secondly, the bill creates a new building consent system that is risk based. That means that the amount of checking and inspection is related to the risk and the complexity of the work and the skills and the capability of the people doing the work. It is just a common-sense approach that recognises that not all buildings are equal. There is an enormous difference between the amount of skill and the amount of monitoring required on a simple domestic structure in comparison with a multilevel commercial building. The new consent process will tailor the monitoring and inspecting to the requirements of the project. We need enough monitoring and inspections to ensure good quality buildings without excessive demands that deliver no value and just waste time and money.

Thirdly, the bill introduces a code of ethics for licensed building practitioners to encourage professional behaviour. The construction industry is so important to our economy that it is right to expect a high standard of professionalism and that this legislation has disciplinary teeth. The public want and need to be able to respect and trust building practitioners.

Finally, to respect the great Kiwi tradition of DIY, there is an owner-builder do-it-yourself exemption from restricted building work rules. It is the Kiwi way to be able to work on your house and add value to your property. However, the exemption is carefully structured to avoid it being used as a back-door way for unlicensed practitioners to obtain work.

This bill addresses the need for increased productivity, better quality, and more cost-effective building in New Zealand. I believe that all members in the House support the need for a building sector that is more productive and more effective, and that all members understand the urgent need for New Zealand to have a building sector that can deliver good quality and affordability for their homes and buildings. Labour has voiced its general support for risk-based consenting, but has raised the issue of the need for a more comprehensive bill. But on this side of the House, because this is a part of a comprehensive suite of legislation that is on the way, and because we believe that we need to make progress now, we support this as a good first step in the right direction. I commend the bill to the House.

That repeats the consistent message that we have heard from the Government in respect of our concern about the Building Amendment Bill (No 3) being a piecemeal approach. I think the Minister for Building and Construction said that it was one in a series of measures and it was not piecemeal, because it was one piece, or one building block. He then suggested that I had raised a concern about needing to have all the blocks together—

💬 Hon Maurice Williamson: I withdrew that.

—but he has now reneged on that and understands that it was the Hon Annette King who said it. And Annette King said it for a very good reason, and that is that it is true that the foundation needs to be built first. But actually the foundation needs to be built first in the legislative sense as well. This is not the full framework of the legislation, and it is not the foundation; it is a component of the framework. And without a foundation to secure it to, I believe that many of the risks that currently exist in our regulatory framework will continue to exist.

When I spoke during the Committee stage I made a point on more than one occasion, and I want to repeat it here and now. I heard the Minister chipping our spokesperson in this area, Raymond Huo, with his comments about the 1991 legislation and making the point that it was a Labour Government that introduced that bill. Yes, it was. The point that I am making, and have continued to make throughout this debate, is that the fact that both of us were culpable in terms of the deregulation of the building industry does not make it right. And the fact that we introduced legislation and National saw it through into its legislative form does not make either one of us any better than the other. In fact, it exposes the risk that we have when we pass legislation without recognising what the impact will be.

This is more than an unintended consequence. I mean, we have all brought bills back to the House shortly after something has been enacted, and the Supreme Court or the Court of Appeal have told us that it means something different from what we intended. We have all had to bring legislation to the House to resolve interpretive matters where there have been unintended consequences. This is not an unintended consequence; it is a consequence that arose directly because of a number of decisions that all combined, and the legislative framework was just one element of it. I heard the previous comments from the member who has just resumed her seat, Nicky Wagner, talking about the need to deregulate, get rid of red tape, and reduce compliance costs. It is all very well and good to be speaking about those things when there are no risks, but there are significant risks, and I do not believe that we are talking about just health and safety when we talk about risks. I know people, and obviously people in this House know constituents, who face financial ruin because of the leaky building syndrome. I hate calling it a syndrome, as well, because it is actually a failure of the regulatory framework to provide protections that ought to have been there.

This is why I have been making this plea on behalf of the people whom I have certainly been privileged to represent for a number of years—that is, to make sure that we get this right. That is why I really think that this legislation should have been delayed until we had all of the foundation prepared. I do not believe that the foundation is secure at the moment. I was the Minister, as I said in the House yesterday, that was responsible for the discussion document going out, which ultimately led to the introduction and passage of the 2004 Building Act. But I also made the point that I was the Minister who was in charge of this area when John Scarry wrote his open letter to the Institution of Professional Engineers. He actually wrote his letter to the institution at the request or suggestion of the vice-president of the institution at the time, after he had disclosed to him the level of concern that he had around a number of buildings in respect of both Auckland and Wellington, which were, I think, the primary focus of his concern at the time. Rather than raise it as a complaint to the institution, the suggestion was that it come in the form of a letter. He wanted to write it as an article for the institution magazine, and they said that, no, he should write them a letter. Well, the letter became quite a substantial document in its own right, at some 100-odd pages long; I have a copy of it here. It is a major, major document.

This is the point that I think my colleague Raymond Huo has been trying to make in this House: when this individual made his stand, as it were, in order to bring the politicians’ attention and the professionals’ attention to the parlous state of some practices within structural engineering in this country, he was doing so knowing that there were some risks around speaking out. And actually, some of the risks have been met, in the sense that there is a sense that people who speak out in this area are at risk of being denigrated, publicly put down, and then told that actually they do not have the backing of the profession. An organisation like the Institution of Professional Engineers has 10,000 members; obviously, not one of them agrees with him! Well, that is simply unfair.

I think it is a concern when I have a copy of the report that was done for the institution, and also the report that was done for the Building Industry Authority, as it was in those days, and I read that both organisations acknowledged that he had major and very real concerns about the state of some of the buildings. He would not tell me at the time which buildings he was particularly concerned about, but because I know what I know, I actually know what some of those buildings are. It is very difficult to have that knowledge and know—with Wellington being the seismic risk that it is—that if something happens, then you would obviously be carrying that weight if the consequences were as severe as they might well be.

I guess that is what I took with me when I received this open letter. I could not sleep, because it was essentially a warning, and once it was in the hands of a decision maker, there was an obligation to do something. And so we did do something. We referred it on for advice, and the advice indicated to us that the changes that we were to implement in the Building Act 2004 would address the concerns that had been raised. I was comforted by that. We were going down the right track to correct the problem. The problem had been correctly identified; the solution was there waiting for introduction.

But now, having spoken to John Scarry since, and having heard him in the media in recent times, I hear that the Building Act 2004 did not address all of the concerns that he raised. And that is what worries me. He was right when he wrote in 2002 warning of these issues, and what I am worried about, Minister, is that he might be right again. I do not know, because I am not a technical expert in this area, and that is why his work needs to be referred for independent analysis so that it can be checked for the concerns that have been raised. As I have said in the House over the last couple of days as well, I have spoken to other engineers who totally agree with and support his concerns, and they too want to have these matters opened up. I think that we owe it not just to Mr Scarry, whose reputation has been tarnished yet again, but actually to the people who live and work in those buildings to know that we are taking those claims seriously. I believe that proceeding with changes to our building regulation without getting it right first time is just as bad as building the building and not getting it right first time.

Kia ora, Mr Assistant Speaker Robertson. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. I rise to oppose this bill, the Building Amendment Bill (No 4), on behalf of our housing spokesperson, new MP Holly Walker.

💬 Maggie Barry: No. 3.

You are right, Maggie Barry, it is the Building Amendment Bill (No 3)—got to get it right. This is the problem; this is one of the reasons why the Greens, along with Labour, are opposing it, because we have got a proliferation of bills. We have got No. 3; we have got No. 4. My question to the Minister for Building and Construction is what is the rush? Why did we not focus on digging good foundations, getting those foundations ready, getting the package all together, and making sure it was weathertight before we went down this path of passing two separate bills? The Minister himself acknowledged that we are seeing a piecemeal approach in the drafting of legislation, and this is not what the sector needs. It is not what the sector wants. Over hours of debate in this House we have seen to-ing and fro-ing between the red side and the blue side, saying who is responsible for the leaky buildings crisis, and who is responsible for cutting all that red tape that led to all those problems. After hours and hours of debate all we found out was that they were both responsible. The ideologies that captured both parties at that time were responsible for the housing crisis and were responsible for the leaky buildings and the billions of dollars of bills facing our councils, our households, and the Government. They were both responsible. So I would like to acknowledge the changes we saw in 2004 when the Hon Shane Jones amended the Building Act. What we needed to find was a balanced approach, a solid approach, and that is not what we have with this bill. It is a piecemeal approach—and that is what the Minister and Nicky Wagner said.

The key change we are seeing under the Building Amendment Bill (No 3) is the shift in responsibility from councils, the consenting authorities, towards builders and consumers. The focus is on accountability, but the questions arise around liability and responsibility. When you have a $100 fly-by-night building company that is responsible, it does not really mean anything to the householder facing the bill. What I think people wanted was a balanced approach, where they knew they were going to be covered. If we were going to see problems in the future there was a long-term body, like a consenting authority, like a council, who would be there to support them. We saw in the Local Government and Environment Committee that the Government refused to have the genuine debate around proportional liability or the mandatory warranties.

A key part of this bill is section 90D, in clause 25, which deals with the owner-builder exemption. The Green Party supports this in particular. We like the DIY tradition of Kiwis being able to build their own house. But a note of caution, because in the Building Amendment Bill (No 4) what we see is that original owner-builder responsible, maybe six or more sales down the line, for the original house they built. I do not think we are going to see that many owner-builders building their own homes when they know that six times down the line when the house is sold they are still liable for what has happened to that house. We support accountability but we have some big questions around the owner-builder clause in the Building Amendment Bill (No 4).

Ultimately, though, what we see—and I think Nicky Wagner put the hammer on the nail—is that the bill is all about cutting red tape and cutting bureaucracy. It is the slogans we love to hear from that side of the House, and I guess the analogy about building is that when you do all those things it is like building a house out of straw. I have a 4-year-old, so I am used to reading about the three little pigs, and I know what happens when you build a house out of straw and you do not have the solid foundations of a holistic, solid build. What you get is your house being blown over. So I would like to thank all the officials who worked on the bill. I would like to thank all the submitters. It is real pity we cannot get consensus in the House—

💬 Hon Maurice Williamson: It was the wooden house that survived in Christchurch, not the brick building. So your little pig story’s got to be rewritten.

I will have to update the story, as the Hon Maurice Williamson says, for the New Zealand context.

Just on a final note, it is a pity we could not get consensus. I am sure the Minister would have liked to see the whole House pass this bill with all parties in support. It is disappointing that we could not get there, but in the future I think what we will need is a solid approach to building. We will be opposing this bill. Kia ora.

It is a matter of great pleasure for me to be able to stand and speak to the third reading of the Building Amendment Bill (No 3). I will tell you why. It is because I applaud a Minister and a Government that provide for clearer accountability for building practitioners, building consent authorities, and consumers—the ones who seem to have been forgotten in much of the debate—in making sure that building work complies with the building code. I applaud a Minister and a Government that put in the building code a new regime with a new building consent system that is risk based. This means that the amount of checking and inspection is related to the risk and the complexity of the work, and to the skills and capability of the people doing the work. I do not believe that that is at all acknowledged by any members of the Opposition.

I applaud a Minister and I applaud a Government that will bring to the House a bill that contains a code of ethics for licensed building practitioners to encourage professional behaviour. After all, is that not what this is all about? Finally, I applaud a Minister and I applaud a Government that have the foresight and the courage to bring in provisions in a building amendment bill that acknowledge that we are a nation of do-it-yourselfers but that, at the same time, we need to protect the rights of consumers. I commend this bill to the House.

I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak to the Building Amendment Bill (No 3) for the third time. We have already covered a lot of material on this, and New Zealand First opposes this bill. We have already heard all the comments in relation to how the leaky homes national disaster came about—because of inadequate building codes and inadequate building practices—and that has ended up with this country and our nation carrying the bill for something like $20 billion in remedial works to sort that building disaster out.

We heard from the Minister for Building and Construction today as to why this amendment bill is necessary. It is to reduce the red tape, reduce the costs of building, and reduce the compliance costs around building, and to put more responsibility on to the building industry—the builders themselves—and, indeed, the end consumer so that there is less “buyer beware” and more “buyer aware”.

However, I would like to draw the House’s attention to a situation at Cave Creek in 1995, on 28 April, where 14 people died while standing on a viewing platform, which collapsed. The inquiry that followed from that particular very sad tragedy at Cave Creek found that the platform collapsed as a result of inadequate building practices. It was shown that because the platform had been constructed poorly, with inadequate supports, inadequate bracing, and inadequate substructure supports for the beams, the weight of the people was too great and it collapsed.

This bill in a sense is going down the same path. It is taking the building industry into areas of self-regulation, in a sense—into an area where the building industry will be policing itself on the final construction of properties, homes, decks, and other structures. Leading into the Building Amendment Bill (No 4)—and I have just been reading that bill—there are so many open-ended situations where the building practices will certainly be in, perhaps, a suspect situation, leaving, I believe, consumers and New Zealanders open to great risk. Although we support reduction in costs, as anyone does—trying to find cost-savings across the board to try to lower the cost of housing in New Zealand—at the same time we do not think that should go hand in hand with reducing what should be a very controlled regulatory environment that ensures safety at all times for the property owner.

We have heard that licensed building practitioners will be required, as of 1 March this year, to build all structures unless there is an exemption for a DIY person building their property. However, there has been great comment about the varying standards and levels of expertise of elements within the building workforce. This country has not been a great one in recent years for apprenticeships. It has not been a great one for training our younger people coming through in these trades. This has been a situation where for more than two decades now we have had a declining number of tradespeople moving into some of these areas, and where the skill levels are perhaps not the same as those of the good old builders of days gone by.

I built my first home myself. It is still standing, it is as dry as a bone, and it will never leak, but I spent the best part of 2 or 3 years of my weekends building that home, making sure it was a good home, and making sure that I absolutely went over the top in terms of the safety aspects of building that home. I look at the houses some 25 or 30 years later, and I look at what is now being constructed, and there are still questions about the products going into many of these properties. There are still questions about the method of construction, and there are, particularly, questions about design aspects such as overhangs and making sure there are sufficient safeguards. Too often these days we are seeing things just being bogged up with varying silicones, sealants, and anything that comes out of a tube, with the thought that that will be good and that will keep the property safe, warm, and dry, only to find a number of years later that the sealants have dried and cracked and the water is getting in. We are seeing often inadequate materials being used. We are seeing a cheapening of materials being used. We are seeing short cuts being taken on building materials to try to get an end product as cheap as possible.

In many respects this is a “back to the future” bill, because we have not learnt from the past, it would seem. In the 1990s we had the onset of the leaky home situation, we had the lowering of the building code, and we had the lowering of building standards. Standards New Zealand allowed new, inferior materials to be used, such as monolithic cladding directly applied to untreated, air-dried timber in an unvented situation. Once the silicones, the sealants, and everything else started to crack and much of that cladding started to crack, then the leaky homes, the leaky schools, the leaky hospitals, and the leaky commercial buildings problem commenced.

In a sense, we are going back to that. This country at the moment faces a $20 billion bill for that disaster from the 1990s from previous Governments, who should have learnt from that. This Government is now going down the track of basically giving carte blanche, open treatment to the building industry to start a whole new potential leaky building situation all over again. New Zealand First is very worried about this bill.

We are also worried about the next part, the Building Amendment Bill (No 4). When I look at that bill I see that it is so open and so open to interpretation of what could be built by varying people within the building industry, with next to no compliance requirements, and so many different structures that will be permitted to be built without consents in the future. We could see a whole new national leaky homes situation all over again in the next decade or two as a result of the Building Amendment Bill (No 3) and the Building Amendment Bill (No 4) coming before this House.

New Zealand First will continue to oppose this bill and we will continue to highlight many of the negative aspects of it that really do put us at risk, not only from a safety point of view but also from a major financial point of view. This country, I think, cannot afford once again to be looking down the barrel of a major, major problem with our housing, with our schools, and with our buildings. This Government talks about, for instance, putting money back into the education system and says that by selling the State assets it is going to put money into the schools. I know, for example, of one school on the North Shore that is having to spend $20 million to $30 million rebuilding many of its leaky buildings and many of its structures, because they have failed. Through this Building Amendment Bill (No 3) and the Building Amendment Bill (No 4), potentially—who knows—we could have this happening all over again. This nation could be up for a very, very large bill in the future.

I am very pleased to speak on the Building Amendment Bill (No 3). One of my first jobs was working at Parliament, and I was here when the first issues were raised around leaky homes. One of the saddest moments that I had when I was working in these parliamentary precincts was when the last Labour Government initially denied the leaky homes situation. I think members across the House now realise the extent of the leaky—and I would say rotting—homes situation, but there was initially a denial. I want to say to some of the members who have made comments about the leaky homes situation that I am very proud of our Government’s commitment in this area. We have put in over a billion dollars to help those families, and most of us have constituents who have been in terrible situations.

I think the point that I would make this evening about this legislation is that what we are saying as a Government is that we do have a comprehensive package of reforms, but we differentiate between what is a comprehensive package and actually staging it in pieces of legislation, because there are certain pieces that we need to get through now.

There are a couple of points that I want to make in relation to this bill about why it is really important that we pass it now and we do not wait—I know there is a piece of work going to the Law Commission around contracts—because there are several key parts to this legislation. We heard Gareth Hughes, the Green Party member, talk about why he opposed it. He mentioned a phrase. He said members on this side use slogans like “cutting red tape and bureaucracy”. What I want to say to that member is that he often talks about housing affordability, and there is a direct correlation between reducing red tape, reducing bureaucracy, and the cost of a house. So if we want to get more young New Zealanders into houses, then we have to have more pieces of legislation like this.

A core part of this bill that will lead to more affordable houses is risk-based consenting. I think there is an estimate here that for a simple home it would reduce planning and consenting time by about a third, and reduce the number of inspections by about two-thirds. So the point that I make to members this evening is that cutting red tape and cutting bureaucracy have a direct correlation to housing affordability, which is good for New Zealanders.

The second point that I would just like to make briefly is about the fact that it is a great evening for the do-it-yourselfers in New Zealand, because there are many New Zealanders who do not have a lot of money but who enjoy doing a little bit of work on their property. What is great is that previously they would have had to employ licensed building practitioners. Now, as a result of this bill, they will not have to do that, and we on this side of the House are very proud to say we are not going to wait a year for that to happen; we want that to go through tonight.

The final point that I would make has been a theme that we have had earlier in the general debate speeches, and that is around the contribution to the economy. There are 170,000 people employed around New Zealand in the construction sector, and we know that the construction sector is worth about $20 billion. I acknowledge that, I think, 5 percent of our economy is around construction-related jobs. I acknowledge all those people around the country who contribute, and I say that this side of the House does have a comprehensive piece of reform in terms of the building industry. We are not afraid to say that some things need to happen now, and that is what this legislation is doing. Tonight is a great night for those do-it-yourself Kiwis. Thank you.

I will begin my speech by saying taringa whakarongo! Please listen. No. 1, it is with some disappointment, but some joy, that we stand and speak on this Building Amendment Bill (No 3) because, as I said earlier, a number of the elements were started with us. So I do not want to focus, during this third reading speech, on the elements that cause us to be in different camps. I want to draw on a figure that the New Zealand First member put out into the House, and I understand it is sourced from the PricewaterhouseCoopers consultation document about the costs of the leaky buildings. I have checked with an august source of information, who shall remain nameless, that the actual $20 billion figure associated with the leaky homes is verifiable. The figure that I was a tad more familiar with was $11.5 billion, which is frightening enough as it is.

When you add that figure to the $7 billion or $8 billion that the garden-variety Kiwis lost in the debacle of the finance companies, and then you add the Reserve Bank figure of $30 billion - odd, which is the rebuild costs of Christchurch, then you are getting up to a figure arguably well in excess of $50 billion. Then you divide that into $190 billion, which is about the size of our GDP, and it gives you an indication of how important the construction sector is, not only from a carpentry, design, and architecture point of view but in how we fund that activity. A lot of the funds that were squandered in the debacle of the moms and pops, etc., who put their dough into the Mark Hotchin schemes, etc., did find their way into property developments, some of which are the subject of this bill in the sense that had we had a better level of stewardship, a better quality of oversight, and better skills, the overall costs might have been smaller.

So this is very serious business. To quote Mr Williams’ figure—and I am told that it can be attested to by looking at the consultants’ report—of $20 billion - odd, the $30 billion that we are talking about coming out of the Reserve Bank, and the $7 billion or $8 billion associated with the debacle of the finance industry, we are at a figure that is nigh on 25 percent to 30 percent of the value of our GDP, and that is an enormous challenge to us as parliamentarians. There are aspects to this legislation that were started in our time, but this is not about authorship. This is about showing how grey the experience has been that we have all lived through, irrespective of whether we were in Government. Much to our chagrin, you are in Government, but it is a reminder about the level of pain and burden that has been shouldered by far too many New Zealanders.

Of course, there is another problem that we have yet to get our heads around, and that problem is local government’s ability to insure itself. Part of the reason that local government is shy—and Mr Williams will know this—about who ought to stand up and bear the costs of the leaky buildings lies with its own insurance liability. Local government has its own insurance company, and that company has sought, even in the short but eventful time when I was the Minister, to secure reinsurance from one of the large behemoths of that particular obscure industry—i.e., lawyers. It is struggling to do that, and that actually drives the behaviour of a lot of the consent authorities and the officers working in those consent authorities. So if we do not get, I say to the Minister, the actual balance right, you can understand how its fears about its own inability to get insurance for consent authorities is driving that kind of behaviour.

I have no doubt that in short order, associated with the role of a consent authority, is going to be the challenge that we as a Parliament—and, naturally, as a first line of defence, the Government—are going to have to deal with: can local government building consent authorities ensure that their decisions related to building work are themselves insurable? Rest assured that when, in the future, problems arise, they are going to go for the builders, the designers, and the architects, and they are going to struggle to find suitable insurance as well, because insurance is emerging as a new taniwha with long fangs about to create all sorts of problems for the garden-variety Kiwi—make no mistake about that—in this particular sector.

We need to ensure that the work—

💬 Hon Maurice Williamson: There’s nothing about taniwha in this bill.

Well, there was one taniwha that did annoy me, and it was the one that was stopping the inner-city rail loop, which you do not agree with but we kind of like, because it is our signature policy. The only thing I said about that taniwha was to ask whether or not it was GST-registered, but that is another matter. I am told that that actually cost me votes with my relations in Ngāti Whātua, but that is another matter; that has come and gone.

Naturally, we will not agree to vote for the bill, because of, I guess, the piecemeal approach. But a lot of the content—we do not want to be too churlish about it—does resonate well with us. We look forward to entering into the debate and hearing the submissions about the Building Amendment Bill (No 4) contribution, and we hope that there is a level of coherence when all these things come together.

The other thing I would suggest is that the references to housing affordability are partly related, in our view, to the length of time it might take for a council inspection, or to the costs associated with the council actually processing the application. But it also depends on the structure of the industry: whether or not there is enough competitive tension, and whether or not the mountainous corporate entity known as Fletcher’s, with all its tentacles going into concrete, construction, and building, in itself represents an absence of competitiveness. In addition to that, the cost of land has got to such an extent in key parts of New Zealand—and I am not talking about the blighted areas of Christchurch; I am really talking about our largest urban area, Tāmaki-makau-rau. So it is fair not just to look at the building construction costs; it is also important that we look at land. That is a debate that this House, at some point in time, is going to have to revisit. To what extent do we go up, and if we go up, as opposed to out, in terms of dealing with housing quandaries, how comforted can we be with the quality of the work, the quality of the engineering, the quality of design, and how affordable it is? These things are interconnected, and whoever has got the responsibility on that side of the House to deal with these things one day might be surprised to learn that we have a great deal of interest, and we might have some shared interests in that regard.

It is disappointing that the bill does not capture our vote, but we look forward to working on future contributions to the building sector. I would restate that that is the size of the liability. That is the size of the financial penalty that garden-variety Kiwis have faced, and, dare I say it, also us as taxpayers, because we have ended up being the insurer of last resort in this instance. I say that about us not only as taxpayers but also as ratepayers.

The point I would round up on is that local government reform is obviously not over. In that reform agenda, whichever direction the Ministers intend to take it in, it is going to be a challenge for each local government authority to maintain a level of confidence and a level of efficiency that gets the investors, the property developers—the people who are actually going to have to spend money to redevelop those areas—either to meet the housing needs of Auckland, or to redevelop the capital assets of Christchurch. We need to be confident when they implement the regulations—because that is where the power is going to come from—and that the mahi, the actual deeds, are done after the regulations are passed through this piece of legislation. What types of building activity can be excluded from the process of a building consent, and how onerous will the regulations be? I would make a plea to the current Minister that there is a genuine case here for having a balance between those who do not want to repeat this $50 billion experience, and, at the same time, the pendulum not swinging so far that we thwart and we suffocate those who are prepared to take the risk to ensure that the capital assets in the property sector of New Zealand are continually rebuilt. Kia ora tātou katoa.

I speak in support of the Building Amendment Bill (No 3). I think this is another piece of good legislation, and it is a small part of the overall package into getting more productive, affordable, and better-quality housing stock in New Zealand. I just want to touch on those three areas.

Productivity, I think, is one of the biggest issues facing New Zealand generally. How we grow wealth is we become more productive. The construction area is a very large part of the economy, and productivity has actually fallen since 1996. When you are dealing with about one in 12 workers working in the construction industry, that is a very significant drag on the country. This bill will go some small way to improving productivity in our building area, mainly through the risk-based consents system that is being employed, which means that the amount of checking and inspection is related to the risk and complexity of the work. That makes absolute sense. If you are just doing a relatively small piece of work on the house, it is probably not necessary to have quite so many visits by the inspector.

The second area is affordability, and we hear no end of concerns from people on all sides of the House and throughout the country about housing affordability. It always strikes me as strange that, particularly, members on the other side worry about housing affordability, but when it comes to local councils there is a tendency to do everything they can to drive up the cost of land, which is an important part of housing affordability, through restrictive district plans. We see that at the moment in Auckland, where it is a very large part of the problem. Rates are also an important part of housing affordability, and again in Auckland we are looking at potentially more than 30 percent rate increases in some parts of the city over the next 3 years. So affordability is a broad issue. When it comes to the housing construction side of that, this bill again makes a small improvement in that area, around reducing the costs of housing through this risk-based system.

Finally, in quality, we all know the horrors of the leaky building systemic failure that we had over a long time. This bill, again, is a part of the response to that, particularly in giving clearer accountability for building practitioners and giving a clearer description of where accountability lies between building practitioners, building consent authorities, and consumers in making sure that a new house complies with the building code. I think that clearer accountability will lead to a better result in the long term.

So I commend this bill to the House and that it be read a third time. Thank you.

It is actually with great disappointment that I have to stand to speak against the Building Amendment Bill (No 3), because, of course, this work started under the previous Labour Government. With the greatest of respect to the member who just took his seat, Paul Goldsmith, who said that we have learnt from the experience of the leaky buildings saga, I say to him that I do not think National has. That is one of the core reasons that Labour is opposing this piece of legislation. It is because those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Once again, we see the kind of ideological, knee-jerk reaction to regulating this area that actually led us into this territory in the first place.

I want to make some general comments first about this pattern that is emerging under this National Government, which is to push as much as possible into regulation. That means that when we are passing primary legislation we cannot really ascertain the full impact of it, because it is going to be in the regulations, and that is where the rubber hits the road. It has become common practice under this National Government. I spent the last 3 years on the Regulations Review Committee, and we saw it time and time again, particularly in areas where there was any controversy. Everything was pushed to regulation, because that meant you did not have to get votes for it in the House, it did not go through a select committee process, and it did not come to this House to be debated and amended. The only protection is the Regulations Review Committee, but even the Regulations Review Committee—as important and as wonderful as it is—is limited in its ability to change regulations. It can review regulations in terms of process, it can hear from people who are unhappy about certain regulations, and it can hear from people who think they are unfair, but it is limited in its powers to change them, which is something we saw on many issues—like folic acid, for example. It seems to me that, more and more, the more controversial the issue, the more likely it is to be dealt with by regulation rather than primary legislation. That is a bad precedent that is being set in this Parliament. It is not good parliamentary practice, and it is something that should be reversed. And here we see it again with an issue that is undoubtedly controversial, and that is the Building Amendment Bill (No 3), which is trying to address some of the structural issues that led to the leaky building crisis. Again, everything is being pushed into regulations.

The second pattern we are seeing emerging—and I saw this again today when I sat on the Health Committee—is also limiting people’s ability to challenge decisions, limiting people’s ability to question and to challenge when something has gone wrong. I want to come back to issues of liability in this legislation later on, but that is certainly another thing that we seeing. When you move towards putting the onus on the builders themselves and on the consumers, and away from putting it on the building consenters, you are removing an entire level of appeal and those processes that are available to consumers and to those who have been affected. Again, we are seeing this more and more often. We are seeing it in the exclusive economic zone legislation right now, which is removing appeals to the Environment Court and heading them straight to the High Court, and they can only be on points of law, not on points of substance. I subbed on to the Health Committee this morning and we were talking about the Natural Health Products Bill. Again, appeals are allowed to go to the High Court only on points of law, not substance. Again, all the guts of it is in regulation, as with the exclusive economic zone legislation, as with this legislation, and as with the Food Bill. A pattern is emerging that is actually reducing the power of this Parliament to pass good legislation, reducing the power of this Parliament to stop bad legislation, and shifting it all into regulations, which can be changed by a Government with very little notification. They are just gazetted, with no public input. And unless someone happens to catch it—

💬 Hon Maurice Williamson: Shock and awe.

—and speak up on it, then it is shonky lawmaking—shonky lawmaking, Mr Williamson. He called it shonky law, maybe.

💬 Hon Maurice Williamson: Shock and awe.

Oh, shock and awe—shock and awe. Well, I do not know whether I would go so far as to call it shock and awe, but it is bad parliamentary process.

The third pattern we are seeing emerging is this constant reliance on future legislation. Again, this is like shifting everything into regulations. If you are constantly saying “Trust us because the next piece of legislation is going to fix it.”, that is not good lawmaking process. What Labour members throughout this entire debate have been asking is why are we doing it in such a piecemeal fashion. This is too important for us to get it wrong. Work is ongoing at the moment on other areas around liability. The Law Commission is doing some work. Let us slow this down, let us get some idea about what the draft regulations are going to look like, let us get some idea about what the next building amendment bill is going to look like, and let us make sure that we have all the ducks lined up, so that we do not end up in the same situation we were in before.

You often hear when people talk about what went wrong with the leaky buildings issue that it was the Swiss cheese approach. Just enough holes were lined up for homeowners to fall through that gap. It was not that any one particular piece of legislation was to blame for what happened; it was that there were enough holes that, unfortunately, when they lined up the consumers fell through the gap. We are in danger of that happening again if we continue to pass law in this fashion, where we do not know what the regulations are going to do, where we do not know what the future legislation we are being told to rely on is going to do, and where, once again, we are restricting people’s access to appeals.

The issue of liability is incredibly important, as you can see if you look at the case of Pepperwood Mews in Auckland and the ongoing fight those people have about the role that the Waitakere City Council played when it issued the certificate of compliance for Pepperwood Mews.

💬 Hon Maurice Williamson: I want it changed.

But this is why it is so important to get it right. This shift away, saying that the councils are going to have less liability, makes it even more—

💬 Hon Maurice Williamson: No, it doesn’t.

Well, no one knows. I mean, this is the problem. We have not addressed the issue of liability. It is no clearer now than it was under the previous regime. The Minister for Building and Construction might not like it, but he or the Minister of Housing should have bothered to spend some time with those people, to talk through from their point of view what happened. When someone from the council says “This is code compliant. This is code compliant. We signed off on it.”, as a consumer you do not have the level of knowledge to be able to know whether they are right or wrong; you just hope that your elected officials and the people who are paid from ratepayers’ money to make those decisions and provide advice are doing so in a proper fashion. When it all goes pear-shaped, the consumers come back and say “Well, surely the council had a role to play in it, because it is the one that said it was all OK.”

Those people also say that surely the Housing New Zealand Corporation had a role to play in it, because it promoted the mews as a really good investment because it was going to tenant it for 10 or 15 years. So there was going to be guaranteed income, but the Housing New Zealand Corporation bailed the minute it all went pear-shaped. It got out as quickly as it could. The Pepperwood Mews owners—these are 32 mum and dad investors; we love talking about mum and dad investors—have lost just about everything they had in this investment. They say that they were not told about problems with the building before the unit titles were signed off, and that had they been told, they might have reconsidered their decision. Issues of liability go to the very heart of when things go wrong, so it is important that we get them right and do not do them in the piecemeal fashion we have been seeing happen today.

A lot has been made of housing affordability and how we need to do this legislation to reduce the cost of homes. I suspect that Government members are over-egging the impact of this legislation on housing affordability. There are so many aspects to housing affordability, none of which the Government is really doing anything about. The issue that my colleague Shane Jones raised I think is a very interesting one and one that has been relatively unexplored in New Zealand, and that is the cost of building materials here relative to other countries—the cost of actually building the home. I do know that, for example, before the Auckland super-city was formed, when you talked to developers up in Auckland about building houses you found that their one complaint was that all the different local authorities had different rules. They said that actually some local authorities were very, very good, but some were not so good. I am not going to say which local authorities were which, but developers said that if, for example, they had a development of 60 houses, some councils would put all of them through in one process, but others would make them file for each individual house. There were different practices from different councils, and that could have been dealt with without our completely removing levels of protection for consumers—the kind that we are seeing removed here.

The Government really needs to play a much more active role in housing affordability across the board, rather than picking and choosing, rather than using housing affordability as an argument when it is useful to it to use it but then doing other things that completely undermine what it is doing about housing affordability—like, for example, the fact that it has done nothing about the community housing sector trusts losing charitable status under the Charities Act. That is something that is costing the Queenstown Lakes Community Housing Trust millions of dollars a year that it could be spending on building affordable houses. The Government sat on its hands and did nothing. Phil Heatley was told about it miles in advance of it happening. It went through the courts. The Government could have made a simple amendment to the Charities Act that would have meant that those organisations would be able to keep money earmarked for affordable housing and spend it on affordable housing, but it has done absolutely nothing. So to say that this bill is going to be a panacea for affordable housing when there are so many other things out there that the Government could be doing, such as properly investing in community housing organisations, advertising the products that are available—unlike what it did with shared equity, which was refuse to advertise it, then complain—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. Her time has expired.

I spoke in the second reading of the Building Amendment Bill (No 3), when I signalled my support in particular around the measures changing the law relating to DIY projects—something close to my heart. After 12 years on the garden show I can say that DIY does not need to be stifled. It does need to have some controls around it and to be done to standards, but we do not need to hold back a great New Zealand pastime. I think the bill has got that balance very correct, and I am happy to speak today at the third reading of this bill.

Already the Minister for Building and Construction, Maurice Williamson, has eloquently signalled that there has been wide support from the sector, from the industry, for this. All the major players have been consulted. The Local Government and Environment Committee heard submissions. The bill has been very widely looked at, consulted on, and thought through. I commend this bill. I think it is the result of a very comprehensive review of the Building Act 2004, and it does form part of a package of changes that have been aimed at lifting the overall performance and productivity of the building and construction sector, which is something that I would think everyone in this House approves of.

The changes are intended to encourage those working in the sector to improve their skills and their capability and to build right first time, and that is the essence of it. Building it right first time is the key. We need to increase efficiency and productivity, but it has to be done correctly. The changes that have been put forward in this bill have, of course, not been taken lightly, because although there has been gradual improvement in the building industry since that Building Act was introduced in 2004, the Building Act review did find that the current system is more costly than it needs to be, that it is less efficient than it could be, and, very important, that it does not provide incentives to improve productivity. So the review that was conducted by the Department of Building and Housing, which also consulted widely with the industry, combines with the process that Parliament has applied to it.

Other members, the honourable Nicky Wagner and Nikki Kaye, have detailed the four main key changes in this. I have spoken before with great approval of the DIY aspects, and I like the fact that they are exempted from the restricted building work rules that have now come into effect. Risk-based consents are not going to be introduced until we are entirely confident that there is a very strong base of licensed building practitioners, strengthened contracting requirements, and greater consumer protection measures, so that we can all ensure that building quality and public safety are maintained. So we are not doing this in haste and we are not doing it lightly.

This is a Government that prides itself on its record of cutting red tape and improving efficiencies and productivity. I think this bill is a very good estimate of it, and it does that very well. But it is important to note that we are going to achieve the savings only once we activate the risk-based consenting system, and, as I said, that is going to happen later when we have confidence. We are not doing this in haste; it has been done with due consideration, almost exhaustive consultation, and a great deal of thought and deliberation. Therefore, I commend the Building Amendment Bill (No 3) to the House.