Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill

I was talking on this Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill when we rose last time. I was just commenting on the fact that this is an extremely important bill, that the populace of New Zealand has raised its consciousness since the earthquakes of Christchurch, and that there is a lot of concern nationwide now as to the quality of our building stock and the safety of the people who live and work in that building stock. Just getting back to the bill, this bill requires that territorial authorities undertake a seismic assessment of the existing non-residential buildings and multi-storeyed and multi-unit residential buildings in their districts, and they must do this within 5 years of the commencement of this bill. Then the building owners must do earthquake strengthening within 20 years.

When we were last debating this bill, the member Shane Jones was highlighting the issue of costs—the issue of costs to upgrade this large number of buildings across the country. We think it is somewhere between 15,000 and 25,000 buildings. He was also talking about the costs of upgrading heritage buildings and also buildings in some of our smaller provincial areas that do not demand the rent increases that might support the upgrades. I think this is a real problem. We just need to look at some of our South Island cities, such as Ōāmaru, that have large numbers of stone buildings, which are magnificent but certainly earthquake prone, and we need to understand the sorts of costs that this bill may impose on both the owners of the buildings and whoever else may want to contribute to that.

The bill makes comment about what must be done during the upgrading, and it means that upgrading for strengthening the building is the prime target. There has been some debate about whether, as is normal when you get an upgrade of a building, you have to bring in new building standards, in terms of access and in terms of environmental issues such as double glazing and things like that, and that is an important issue. I think the debate will wander around in this area—do we want to save some of these heritage buildings, can we put them back to what they were before but strengthened, or do we have to spend extra to upgrade them in terms of amenity? I think that is going to be the nub of this bill. I actually think that this bill strikes a good balance. It means that those heritage buildings can be upgraded so that they are safe but perhaps not upgraded as we would like them to be, if we had more funds at our disposal.

So I think that it is really important that this bill comes to the House. Certainly, the consciousness of New Zealanders has been raised as to the quality of the buildings across the country. We do want to be sure that these buildings are safe for living and working in, and I do commend this bill to the House.

I wish to start by acknowledging the people who died in the Canterbury earthquakes. The loss of life is significant—over 185 people died, most due to the collapse of just two buildings, and a further 164 people were seriously injured. My family was very fortunate to escape direct loss or injury, but like many Cantabrians we were profoundly affected by the Canterbury earthquakes and experienced some very close calls. My daughters and I lost our first home in the September quake. We ended up as refugees at my mother’s house, camping in her living room. The second quake struck the day before my youngest daughter turned 15, when she was on a bus with her school friends to go shopping. When she dismounted, a large aftershock brought down a multi-storeyed brick building right in front of her. My second-eldest daughter was inside the Avonside Girls’ High School drama room, rehearsing for a play with other students. When the quake struck, the room was plunged into darkness and the terrified girls were left scrambling to get out. That building was red-stickered and has since been demolished. So, personally, I have every motivation to see buildings that are at risk of failure in an earthquake identified and a national strategy developed to ensure that they are strengthened.

Safe buildings are essential. There is no dispute about that and the Green Party strongly supports that outcome. But—and this is the big one—we are strongly opposed to the provision in the Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill that enables buildings to be exempted from current building requirements to upgrade disability access and fire access when undergoing earthquake strengthening. We see the removal of the current access provisions as a serious breach of New Zealand’s obligation to eliminate barriers to accessibility under article 9 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The Minister for Building and Construction says that he wants building owners to be exempt from upgrading disability access because he considered it just too hard an ask of a building owner. That is what he said. My question is: has he considered just how hard it is on wheelchair users to access services and go about their daily lives in an inaccessible environment? I would suggest to the Minister that the two situations are simply not comparable, and if he doubts that, then he should try spending a week or more in a wheelchair. He might just reconsider.

The fact of the matter is that access to buildings is a human right, not an optional extra like a “nice-to-have”. Accessibility affects everyone at some point in time, sometimes temporarily due to illness or injury or parenthood, but, often, especially as we get older, we face permanent limited mobility. With an ageing population, failing to upgrade disability access represents a missed opportunity to futureproof our buildings. Providing disability access at the same time as strengthening work is undertaken saves building owners money and is cheaper in the long run.

At present there are between 15,000 and 24,000 older non-residential and multi-storied residential earthquake-prone buildings in New Zealand that lack disability access. At the moment the earthquake-strengthening work is one of the very few provisions triggered in the Building Act that requires these older buildings to upgrade disability-impaired access. What this has meant is that the accessibility of public buildings has been progressively improved over time, although for many the pace of the upgrade has been frustratingly slow. It is worth reminding ourselves that the requirement to upgrade access to buildings when undertaking strengthening has been around for a long time now and was established after a hard fight by the disability sector—initially in the 1975 Disabled Persons Community Welfare Act and then in the 1991 Building Act.

The Green Party believes that the removal of these hard-won provisions from the Act is a backwards move that could potentially see thousands of buildings remain inaccessible to disabled people for the indefinite future, keeping people with limited mobility locked out of buildings as diverse as art galleries, universities, and sports venues. Building owners have already been given plenty of time to plan for when they will upgrade disability access, and it is our view that they should not be given an exemption at this point in time. They should not be rewarded for poor planning and ducking their responsibilities.

Lack of access to the built environment is a major concerning factor for many disabled people and their families, greatly restricting our ability to access core services, obtain employment, and participate in social activities. The frustrations experienced by many people about inadequate access to buildings is reflected in the many complaints that have been made to the Human Rights Commission about lack of physical access to buildings, ranging from movie theatres, museums, educational establishments, and hotel accommodation through to bars, sports venues, and art galleries. These are the kinds of buildings we are talking about exempting from upgrading disability access.

We agree with the Minister for Disability Issues when she said in her letter to the Prime Minister last year that removing current access provisions from the Act sends the wrong message to disabled people and older people. We agree with Minister Turia when she points out that it says that this Government does not value all of its citizens equally and that it says that those who are already missing out, those who cannot access many of our buildings, do not matter. We agree with her that the proposed new provision says to building owners, developers, and designers that this Government is not serious about wanting a fully accessible built environment where everyone can participate and contribute. We also agree with her that this move is inconsistent with our disability strategy and with our compliance with international standards. In fact, we agree with all of the points that Minister Turia has raised with both the Prime Minister and the Minister for Building and Construction in repeated letters last year.

In our view, it is shameful that this Government is prepared to ignore the pleas of their own Minister for Disability Issues in this way. For us it speaks volumes of this Government’s real attitude towards disabled people. The message its action sends is that it is OK for disabled people to remain out in the cold, locked out of full participation in society, locked out of employment opportunities, locked out of social and cultural events, and locked out of thousands of public buildings. We say that it is not OK. Society expects buildings to be both accessible and safe, and we believe that it is both reasonable and practical to aim for that outcome. We should not sacrifice access for the most vulnerable people in our society, just to save building owners 1 percent of the cost of earthquake strengthening work.

I would like to wrap it up by saying that we do recognise that in a small number of cases it may be simply impossible or impractical to make certain buildings accessible. In our view, however, that situation is already covered in the existing bill by the exemption ground of reasonable practicality. So, although we are not voting for the bill at present, we would very much like to be able to support it in subsequent stages if the select committee can adequately address the concerns of the disability community around this. Thank you.

It is a great pleasure to take a call on the Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill. Once again, I draw the short straw in getting to start my speech at 2 minutes to 6. This seems to have become a regular occurrence in this House. It is almost like I need to have some sort of other little act to do or a song or some other thing I can do, because when you have only 1½ minutes, you do not have time at all to even get into the gist of it.

Anyway, having now used up 30 seconds, I would just like to say that it is interesting sitting on the Local Government and Environment Committee, because we have been looking at all sorts of things in relation to local government and also buildings and building requirements. Sometimes we are very confused as to where this Government is coming from. In this particular instance, the Government is saying that it is going to tighten up around earthquake-prone buildings and do all it can to ensure the safety of New Zealanders—the safety of our citizens—but on the other hand we have discussed bills in the last year, building amendment bills and things, where this Government wanted to reduce compliance in terms of what the local authorities’ involvement will be with oversight of consents and to have far more self-regulation from the building industry and far more situations where the local authorities are less involved in ensuring that the buildings are built to a certain standard. So you almost have a sort of Jekyll and Hyde situation with this Government half the time, because on the one hand it wants to—

Order! I am sorry to interrupt the member but the debate is interrupted.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 6 p.m.