Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Amendment Bill

I move, That the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Amendment Bill be now read a second time. Can I say how enormously disappointed I am in the Labour Party for having opposed this at the Government Administration Committee and, I assume, for voting against it now. I want to give members of the public a little bit of background about this bill so they understand why it is here. Raymond Huo, the Labour Party spokesman, is saying Maurice Williamson is cleaning up one of the messes he has made. Well, let us get some facts on the table.

This bill is about industry regulation. There are a number of industry regulators out there in the building and construction sector, like the Electrical Workers Registration Board and like the Registered Architects Board, and there are a number of regulators out there that are not in the building sector—for example, the Civil Aviation Authority, which regulates pilots and so on, and the Medical Council, which regulates the performance of doctors. So New Zealanders fully expect there to be a regulator that controls behaviour in every one of the industries that are out there. Those bodies that I have just mentioned—the Electrical Workers Registration Board, the Registered Architects Board, the Civil Aviation Authority, and so on—have the right to go after both licensed practitioners and non-licensed practitioners. Imagine if the Civil Aviation Authority could discipline someone who had a pilot’s licence but it could not touch someone who was flying a Boeing 747 every day who did not have a licence. It would just be nonsensical. Imagine if, for example, the Medical Council could deal to you if you were a licensed doctor, but if you were just doing some do-it-yourself brain surgery in your backyard as a friend, it could not touch you.

Well, guess what? The Labour Government passed some legislation in 2006—it was the Labour Government that did it. I am sorry I have to get into the attack here. I was hoping to work genteelly through this. I was quite keen on trying to take this calmly. I even sent this bill off to a select committee that we did not have a majority on, hoping that Ruth Dyson, who is normally a very good chair, would shepherd this through quite calmly and we would get it through. The Labour Government cocked up. In 2006 it passed a bill that did not allow the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board to take action against non-licensed practitioners. So the Act that is currently in effect says you can go after those who are licensed and registered, but if somebody arrives from overseas and says: “Oh, I don’t have any qualifications but I’ll do some gasfitting.”, and gets out there with his little Bunsen burner, and starts wiring up some gas tubing, the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board, according to the current legislation, cannot touch that person—cannot touch them. And I do not think there is a single New Zealander who thinks that makes sense.

I had a look at the drafting instructions for the bill of 2006. I even had a look at the explanatory note. The Government—the Labour Government—of the day actually did intend for this legislation to cover both licensed and unlicensed practitioners. In other words, the Act was supposed to allow the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board the power to go after anyone practising in the plumbing, gasfitting, and drainlaying sector. But there was a mistake in the wording, and no one picked it up. I have to say I became the Minister for Building and Construction in 2008 and blissfully went about my life, not worrying about the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Act 2006 until this issue was discovered. It went to the Regulations Review Committee, and there has been a complaint to the Ombudsman, the Auditor-General, and so on. It turns out that there is a mistake in the wording and it is not legal for the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board to charge levies and fees to their licensed practitioners but use that money to go after ratbags who are not licensed. It can go after only those who are.

So, yes, these five little clauses—three of which are just basically about the title and what Act it applies to, so really there are only two clauses that are going through here—are retrospective. I am one of the people most ardently opposed to retrospective legislation, except if it is validating what everyone had always thought was the case. Everybody thought the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board had the right to go after cowboys. There was an explosion in the Pizza Hut in Nelson that nearly killed people. It was appalling work, and I am hoping the Labour Opposition is in favour of public safety and does not want practitioners like that to get away scot-free. So why am I bringing this little piece of tidy-up, clean-up? To fix up the former Labour Government’s Act of 2006 because it forgot to put in the wording about non-licensed practitioners as well.

Raymond Huo, that Mensa genius on the Labour Party side, is now claiming that this is Williamson cleaning up his mess. Well, no, it is not. This is cleaning up the former Labour Government’s legislation of 2006. Now Mr Huo has fallen foul of a little group out there called the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Federation. What is being portrayed here—and I am sure members from the other side will claim it—is that there are two large organisations out there representing the plumbers. One is called Master Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers and the other is called the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Federation. Well, the federation, this little group of people—how do you get to be a member of it? You sign up to its email. You just subscribe to its email. Several of the officials in the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment already are members of this little federation simply because they got a copy of its email. These people are out there.

And Raymond Huo—listen to this; this is where it gets really good—is going to move an amendment when we get to the Committee stage that the fees that are collected now do not go to the board but go off to this little group.

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: Tony dressed him this morning.

Trevor Mallard has got no credibility left if he supports Raymond Huo’s amendment that this money collected would go off to the federation. He wants to pay it to this handful of malcontents. I want to hear from David Parker and David Shearer. David Parker is supposedly the keeper of the purse for the Labour Party, and what Raymond Huo is advocating is that we should not make it retrospective, which would then make the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board insolvent, but that we should take it out of general taxation. How fiscally irresponsible is that! There is not another industry regulator that does not collect fees from its members to pay for enforcement. And somehow we are going to say to this one: “No, that’s all right, the Minister of Finance can dig into the revenue somehow and pay for it—and, by the way, he won’t actually pay it to the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board, which does the regulating; he’ll pay it off to a handful of people who are the malcontents who come to every meeting and complain about things.” Well, ask Master Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers what it thinks. It represents about 70 percent of all plumbers. It thinks that this is a legitimate thing to do, because it means we can actually take some control over the behaviour of those cowboys out there. Unless this is passed, the fees that have been collected in the past would be invalid and have to be refunded, so that is why the law is retrospective.

The second clause that is really relevant in this is that it says, going forward from here, that the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board can use those fees to go after cowboys. That is as simple as it can be in a nutshell. If any one person out there decides “Well, I don’t know. I’m out of work. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I might go and do some gasfitting. I haven’t got any qualifications. I don’t know about leaks. I don’t know about explosions. We’ll have a crack at it.”, well, under the current law, the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board could not go after them. It cannot touch them. I do not think that there is a single member of this House who thinks that that is acceptable, and I am disappointed even in the Greens. During the first reading, Holly Walker said: “Well, we support in principle what the Minister’s doing here, but he is doing it too quickly.” So I immediately gave the Government Administration Committee more time. I said that, OK, a week is too tough, I understand that. Let us go to a 3-week period where you can hear all the submissions, because this has to be done.

It has to be done, otherwise you are advocating having the rule of the jungle out there in the gasfitting area and, believe me, even in the plumbing area, where a lot of public safety can be put at risk, especially in some high-rise buildings. I want to know that people who are practitioners in that field are actually legitimate and are skilled and competent at a certain level, and that, if they are not, they can be gone after. As I said earlier on, there is not another industry in this country where we would not have that. That is what I want to have in this area, and I am really disappointed. I am hopeful that the Labour Party will actually see some light, have a chat to Raymond Huo out in the back room, and say: “Actually, I think you’ve got this one wrong, old son.” I do not know quite why he has got it wrong. He has somehow listened to the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Federation. This is a bill that has to be passed. It is Labour’s mess from 2006 that we are cleaning up. I hope that this Parliament will support it.

I want first of all to acknowledge and thank the Minister for Building and Construction for his contribution. I know that he feels really strongly about it, but I feel slightly resentful at the insinuation he made that Labour does not support a safe regulatory regime for plumbers, gasfitters, and drainlayers, because he knows that is not true. He knows that is not correct and that we support safety regulation. Had he read the report of the Government Administration Committee, perhaps he would have some inkling of the solutions that we saw going forward. It is a very divided sector, and that, in itself, is pretty unhealthy. Frankly, I do not think that the Minister’s contribution has assisted towards any other way than it remaining divided. I do not think that that is the only leadership position that might have been taken, but, obviously, the Minister decided to barrel ahead with it.

I want to also acknowledge and thank the Minister for giving the select committee more time than he originally did. It took just one request and he immediately granted it, and that was really helpful for us. The original proposal was that we have our briefing, although we were not able to get advisers, because you cannot request advisers until you meet, so we had to, first of all, meet, then ask for advisers, which was immediately granted, then we got our briefing, then we would hear submissions from a small range of individuals, and then we would deliberate—all at one meeting. We were a bit concerned about that, given that even though it is a pretty straightforward issue in terms of what is being addressed, it is not straightforward, because of the complexity within the sector. We were trying to get it right, not add to the mistakes that had been made in the past.

The Minister is also correct in saying that when this legislation, the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Amendment Bill, was originally introduced it was the intention to have the offences and disciplinary fee funded in the way that the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board continued, but he is incorrect in saying that everyone thought that was the case. If they had, there would not have been an issue raised with the Regulations Review Committee and then subsequently with the Ombudsman. So we have had quite a lot of time actually realising that these actions are not within the scope of the legislation. The board understood from the Regulations Review Committee report and then the subsequent Ombudsman’s report that this was outside its jurisdiction.

What the Minister is asking us to do in this legislation is, basically, leave aside that finding from both the Ombudsman and the Regulations Review Committee and say: “Well, that was the intention, therefore we should validate it.” Well, from the perspective of the people who took the complaint, they feel justifiably grumpy about that. They followed proper process. They went to the Regulations Review Committee and they went to the Ombudsman and said “We don’t think the law allows this.”, and both the Regulations Review Committee and the Ombudsman came back and said “That’s correct. It doesn’t.” So this is the way to fix it, but it does not acknowledge the unfairness that those people felt. Nor does it engage with the proper process that they went through. They went to those two organisations, the Regulations Review Committee and the Ombudsman, and I think it is quite a big step to ask Parliament to just ignore the fact that for this considerable length of time that fee and levy have been imposed outside what the scope of the legislation was known to be.

It may be a little group. If it is so little, then it is surprising that it is going to bankrupt the board, as the Minister has indicated. It is also a little surprising that the Minister says that even though it was outside the law, we could not possibly go to the Minister of Finance and ask for a one-off appropriation so that the fees that were collected illegally could either in part or in full be paid back to the members who paid that levy and fee.

So the proposal that the Minister has asked us to think about—I do not know that I am happy to do that actually, but what I would propose to the Minister is that he think about a better engagement with the sector. This is not a group of people whom we want to be disengaged from the legislative process. They should be supportive of it. They clearly are not supportive of the board, and I would not advise changing the board, because we have tried that a couple of times. That clearly did not work.

But I do think that the board could be more accountable and transparent. Actually, the select committee members made that point directly to it, and it took that on the chin. My reading of what it said back to us was that it would do that. It understood that part of the frustration that is felt in the sector is over the lack of accountability and transparency in regard to the board’s actions. So it collects money and the people whom it collects it from do not really feel confident about what it is using it for. Better transparency, I think, would improve the situation.

This matter should be better resolved going forward. The legislation is a bit of a blunt object, really. It is a bit of a sledgehammer approach. It does not offer any possibility of a fairer way of setting the levies and fees in the future, and that is another one of the concerns that the many plumbers, gasfitters, and drainlayers who have communicated with us have expressed. There have been other examples in other industries that they say would be a fairer way of collecting the money. I do think that the Minister could again over the weekend—I presume we are going to have this bill back before the House early next week—look a bit more broadly at other ways of collecting that money.

As the Minister alluded to, my colleague Raymond Huo has proposed an amendment. It is that a percentage of the moneys be repaid to the affected parties. It does allow for an opportunity for agreement to be reached between the various parties in this discussion and it then offers the opportunity that if agreement cannot be reached on the level for repayment—you know, it is somewhere between zero and 100 percent—then the Chief Ombudsman should make a determination.

That seems to me to be a pretty sensible way forward. It would recognise that the aggrieved parties who took the complaint in the first place have had some recognition of that, that they have not just had Parliament trample over their victory, if you like, which is what they saw it as. They saw that they had taken their complaint through a proper process and it had been agreed to, actually. Both the Regulations Review Committee and the Ombudsman said “Yes, you’re right.” and then recommended a way forward. So they feel as if, having achieved this victory in terms of having the illegality of the fee and levy recognised, they are now just being ignored. Well, that is not a good way to treat people who have gone through a proper parliamentary process, so the suggestion that has been made in Supplementary Order Paper 204 is that an alternative approach be made. The end outcome would be the same in terms of the safety of the industry, which, from what I heard from the Hon Maurice Williamson, is his primary concern.

That would be unanimously supported in this House. Nobody wants cowboys operating in such a critical sector, and there must be some method for the board to call cowboys to account. What Labour is saying is that this way is not the only way and, certainly, may not be the fairest way. The industry does not support it wholeheartedly. We have had, as I am sure all members of the House have, a lot of correspondence on this matter. Some—

💬 Hon Maurice Williamson: From a handful of people.

No, actually, from a wide range of people, and my constituency colleagues will attest to the fact that their electorate offices have had a lot of visits as well. I am sure that in the Pakuranga electorate there would have been one or two plumbers who tried to get an appointment with the Minister, but perhaps he was pretty overloaded in his timetable; I am sure he is a busy electorate member of Parliament.

So this has been a rushed process, but I think we have had the goodwill of every committee member. For example, we decided not to call for additional submissions, but we considered the correspondence that we had received in the select committee on this matter. We treated that as submissions, so all members not only read it but discussed it rigorously as well.

The advisers on this legislation have been very hard-working and very attentive to the concerns that have been raised. They may have been a little frustrated that sometimes we wanted to try to get a better resolution. They had a clear mandate to progress this bill, but I think they gave us considered and rigorous advice, and all members of the select committee have put quite a lot of effort into it.

It is a pretty unhappy situation, though, when you have such an important issue being the cause of such controversy and lack of agreement within Parliament. Who knows? We may well decide that over the next few days, before the House next considers this, we will be able to get a fairer resolution and a resolution that the sector buys into. That would be my preferred outcome, and I certainly hope we can achieve that over the coming few days.

I rise to speak in favour of the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Amendment Bill, which is sponsored by the building and construction Minister, the Hon Maurice Williamson. This particular aspect of this legislation has been pursuing, certainly, my career in Parliament since 2005. This particular bill tidies up legislation around the funding of the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board. We have just heard from the Minister and from the Government Administration Committee chair, the Hon Ruth Dyson, and I would like to compliment her on the introduction of this bill and the fact that she sought additional time. It made it more comfortable business to deal with.

In fact, it is a straightforward amendment bill and it is an important one. Although it might not capture many headlines, that should not take away from the importance of the field or the intent of this particular bill, its field being plumbers, gasfitters, and drainlayers, but more broadly the safety and structure of our homes. Let us remember, plumbers probably do more for longevity—or, certainly, as much for longevity—as do the health services that we enjoy under this Government. This bill is one part of the work that we are doing across the building sector to improve the presentation of services and the capability of the industry.

It was disappointing not to reach agreement at the select committee on the bill, but I would note positively that the select committee unanimously recommended a useful technical drafting amendment. There was certainly no great disruptive argument; there were just different points of view. I honestly find it hard to follow the logic of the Opposition approach, because basically this validates everything that was wanted at the time the initial Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Act came into power. So—

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: Awful retrospective legislation.

Well, it did. This was what was wanted. If it had—

Order! Sorry to interrupt the member, but this debate is interrupted and is set down for resumption next sitting day. The House will stand adjourned until 2 p.m. on Tuesday, 16 April 2013. Good evening, everybody.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 6 p.m.