Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill be now read a second time. After the further quake in Christchurch on Valentine’s Day last Sunday, we have had a harsh reminder of the vulnerability of both Christchurch and our country to the risks of earthquakes. It is entirely appropriate, as we approach the fifth anniversary of the Christchurch earthquakes next Monday, for us to be debating this bill and to be taking very seriously the risks to life and the risk of injury from our system of regulation for buildings.

I think every member in this House will have etched in their memories the experience of 22 February—when, for most of us, it was actually the worst tragedy for New Zealand, with the loss of 185 people and the injuries of 164—and the very serious responsibility this Parliament has to learn from that experience and to have good building law in this area.

I want to acknowledge the considerable effort that has been made by the Local Government and Environment Committee, particularly by the chair, Scott Simpson. But I also want to acknowledge the Opposition members, who have played a very constructive role in the refinement of this complex bill, and for it being reported back to Parliament with unanimous support. This broad support is important because the laws we pass in the area of requiring the upgrade of buildings are going to span many Governments. I think it gives a level of security for both building owners and for councils that work in its implementation if there is some consistency of public policy in this area.

The bill seeks to balance the risk posed by earthquake-prone buildings with the very significant costs associated with their upgrading and the impacts on heritage. The select committee listened very intently to the large number of submissions that were made on the bill, and in this second reading speech I want to comment on some of the significant improvements that have been made to this proposed new law.

I want to acknowledge the quality of the submissions that were made to the select committee—121 were received on the original bill, a further 51 were made in response to the committee’s interim report—and a number of members of the House have commented to me that they have been some of the highest-quality submissions that they have ever seen before a select committee, which is entirely appropriate for a bill that is so important to our country.

Although many of those submitters supported the intent of the bill, especially having a national framework, compared with the previous law, which said each council takes its own approach, there was also a perception that a one-size-fits-all approach, as recommended by the Canterbury Earthquakes Royal Commission, needed to be refined, and that we need to take a more risk-based approach. In May last year I announced a revised approach to that policy, and the bill, as reported back, includes many of those changes, as well as some other important improvements and clarifications.

As introduced, the bill required territorial authorities to undertake assessments on earthquake-prone buildings within 5 years, and for building owners to strengthen those within 15 years of assessment. The bill now varies the time frames relative to the level of seismic risk. New Zealand is to be categorised into areas of low risk, of medium risk, and of high risk. I have to say, even though I have a background in civil engineering, I was quite surprised by the GNS evidence about the degree of variability in the level of earthquake risk across New Zealand and the fact that, even within relatively small distances, it varies significantly.

If you take a council like the Southland district, actually there is very low earthquake risk on the coast in areas like Balclutha, medium levels of risk around Invercargill and, actually, very high levels of risk in a community like Te Ānau. That reinforces the importance of taking this risk-based approach.

The time frames of identification relative to those low, medium, and high levels will be varied from 5 years to 10 and to 15, and then the time frames for strengthening those buildings will be varied from 15 to 25 and out to 35 years for those low-risk areas. Those variations in time frames have a huge impact on the costs for communities to be able to strengthen the buildings. I do not think people necessarily appreciate that there is actually a constant upgrade of buildings for other reasons, and there is also a significant number of our older buildings that are being continuously replaced. So as a consequence of varying those time frames, for a community like Auckland, where it is now 50 years for an upgrade, and if it is a heritage building a further 10 years, that has a huge impact on the cost-benefit analysis, and actually makes it far less costly for those areas.

A second change in the bill is that it now prioritises the identification and strengthening of earthquake-prone education and emergency buildings. Schools, universities, and hospitals in those medium and high-risk areas will have to be identified and upgraded within half the time frame of other buildings.

The first reason for that, associated with education buildings, is actually that those buildings have a far greater density of people in them, and I think we all look tragically at that CTV Building and whether it was indeed appropriate for a building that has high earthquake risk to have had very high densities of people who are associated with classrooms, or, for that matter, a facility that hosted overseas education students. The reason for the prioritisation of buildings like hospitals or emergency facilities is somewhat obvious in that we think that there is a real need to make sure that those sorts of buildings are functioning post-earthquake, and so they have half the time frame.

The select committee received very strong submissions from Canterbury earthquake survivor Ann Brower, and the bill particularly prioritises those areas of an unreinforced masonry building like a parapet, a façade, or veranda that could fall on to a public road, a footpath, or other thoroughfare that has been identified by a council as having sufficient vehicle or pedestrian traffic to warrant prioritisation.

A third significant change is that a large number of buildings have been exempted from the legislation because they pose low risk, or because it would be impractical. I dealt with issues like statues, like fences, like wharves, like bridges, like tunnels, and storage tanks that would not necessarily meet the common-sense definition of a building, but were included in the original bill. I also note that the changes, in respect of giving a longer period for category 1 heritage buildings, is because, through this process, we do want to be able to retain some of our heritage, and there is also an exemption for low-risk builds.

Again, I want to pay tribute to the select committee and to the officials who have worked closely with its members in getting this bill into better shape. I think it is appropriate that this Parliament gets on and gets law in this area clear. I look forward to working with other members of this House as we take this bill through the Committee stage and ensure that New Zealand building stock is safer for whenever nature chooses that next earthquake that may strike one of our communities.

It is my pleasure to take a call on this piece of legislation and to make it very clear, as the Minister for Building and Housing indicated, that Labour supports the passage of this bill through the House. I would like to acknowledge the words that the Minister just said, and I would also like to acknowledge the work of the Local Government and Environment Committee. But, most important, as the Minister has alluded to, I think it is incredibly fitting that we are debating this legislation 5 days out from the fifth anniversary of the Canterbury earthquakes. I would, most of all, like to pay tribute to the 185 people who lost their lives in those earthquakes, and their families and their friends who are still living with that loss 5 years on. I would also like to pay tribute to the 35 people who were killed by unreinforced masonry, and the four people who were killed in the street in Christchurch, and I will come back to those reasons throughout this speech.

I think that what we saw 5 years ago in our country—in Canterbury—probably changed many of our views of what we needed to do around making sure that our buildings were, above all, safe and that they were not going to put people at risk. The other person I would like to pay tribute to here, where the Minister also finished his speech, is to Ann Brower and her incredibly tireless efficacy in making this a better piece of legislation that we are seeing in the House tonight. Ann Brower was the only survivor of a bus on Colombo Street that was crushed by unreinforced masonry. The 12 other people on the bus that she was on were killed. Ann suffered horrific injuries, and she came and spoke to us, incredibly movingly, about how it is that we could avoid the fate that she had been through, and what she had witnessed. Ann never gave up on her quest to improve the piece of legislation that first went to select committee, so I commend her for that effort that she put in and I am very pleased to see that her efforts have paid dividends in our having a much stronger piece of legislation that we are here debating in this House tonight.

The piece of legislation that was first referred to the select committee is vastly different from the bill that we have before us here. If I can speak personally for a moment, this has probably been one of the most productive exercises that I have been on as a parliamentarian, in terms of working in a very non-partisan way to genuinely improve a piece of legislation and work for a good outcome at the select committee. So I would like to acknowledge the way in which our committee worked and to acknowledge the chairmanship of Scott Simpson and the willingness for us to be flexible and to listen and to be responsive to what people were telling us.

I think that what we have before us is an incredibly sensible piece of legislation. Instead of saying that we should treat the whole of this long land of ours as one risk zone, we have divided this up, and this is a piece of legislation that is about the evidence. First and foremost, it is based on the science. It is based on the advice of GNS Science scientists telling us what the actual seismic risks in actual parts of New Zealand are. Once we know that risk, we can make assessments as to the risk that is posed to people by buildings and dwellings in that area. As Minister Nick Smith has described, the country is divided into three bands, with time lines that are commensurate with the band depending on whether they are at low, medium, or high risk of seismic activity, and the time frames around that are different for different places. So if you are an owner of an earthquake-prone building in Auckland, your time frame for fixing that and getting it up to the code standard is entirely different from if you are a building owner in Christchurch—although I would hazard a guess that most buildings in Christchurch are now above, well above, code because they have either been repaired or rebuilt to that standard—and other parts of the country that are identified as areas of high seismic risk.

But the contribution that Ann Brower made was that we needed to look beyond just the seismic risk in taking this very pragmatic approach to how it is that we carved up the country and that we really did need to reach right across the country for the lowest-hanging fruit—that lowest-hanging fruit being unreinforced masonry in verandahs, and the risks that this posed to people. As I alluded to in my opening, of the 185 people who lost their lives in Christchurch 5 years ago, 35 people lost their lives either in the street or inside a building, and I think this is incredibly important for us to remember. Ann, as I said, has been a tireless campaigner for this and I would like to just enter into the Hansard some of the words that she said that I think are incredibly important and that we should always take into account as regulators. She said: “There was nothing natural about the disaster”—that being the Canterbury earthquakes—“that befell the 13 of us. It wasn’t the earthquake. It was the building, decisions made about the building, and the failure to enforce those decisions.”

We as regulators have a responsibility. We have a responsibility to ensure that we put in place laws and regulations that are going to keep people safe. That is why we are elected to positions of responsibility. All too often we hear shrieks in this House about cutting through red tape. We hear shrieks about what a burden regulation is, and how it is that we have to be more pragmatic and more sensible about these things. But I think that this piece of legislation stands as a very poignant reminder of why it is that regulation matters and why it is that when we actually take off the ideological blinkers about the role of regulation we can come up with very sensible, very pragmatic, and very bipartisan or cross-partisan solutions. As the Minister identified, in this kind of area we have to give regulatory certainty to the building owners. People need to know that the repairs they are going to embark on with their building are not going to change with a changing Government. This is a piece of legislation that is going to span a wide of period of time, and we have to give people that certainty. So I would like us to remember that.

A further comment from Ann was: “Regulatory failure at its most murderous made Colombo St run red that day.” I think that is a sentence that we should always remember: that it was regulatory failure that cost people their lives—the failure to put in place standards that would have kept people safe. This legislation is doing that. This legislation is taking a very sensible approach; it is balancing out the risks in the real sense that they are risks, and measured risks, and putting in place solutions to address those. This is the kind of model of legislation that I think that we can all take heed of, because the piece of legislation that was first introduced into this House—not by the Minister who has just given the second reading speech, Nick Smith, but by his predecessor, the Hon Maurice Williamson—was a piece of legislation that did not take heed of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Building Failure Caused by the Canterbury Earthquakes.

A royal commission was rightly set up to find out why it was that people died as a result of building failure in an earthquake. A royal commission made recommendations, and there was a Minister who did not heed those recommendations. There were some quotes where the Minister was saying things that were, essentially, that the Government’s decisions were “broadly in line with the recommendations in Volume 4 of the [Canterbury earthquakes] Royal Commission’s report”. When it comes to putting people’s lives in the hands of regulation and making sure people are safe, “broadly in line with” is not good enough. So I commend the current Minister for realising that the piece of legislation was not strong enough—the legislation that was referred to the Local Government and Environment Committee—and for giving the committee the latitude to fix the legislation and to bring back to this House a much stronger bill that we can be discussing here tonight.

Debate seems too strong a word, because I get the feeling there is going to be a lot of congratulating each other for the good work done; because there was a tremendous amount of work. The changes that were made were the result of a collaboration, really, between the submitters and the committee members. We have come up with a piece of legislation that not only balances the risks—and that is the kind of rhetoric we often hear—but also takes the safety of people first, and for that, I am happy to commend this bill to the House.

As chairman of the Local Government and Environment Committee, which considered this piece of legislation, it gives me enormous pride to be speaking in the second reading debate.

The Minister for Building and Housing and the previous Labour speaker, Dr Megan Woods, have both alluded to the fact that we are coming up to the fifth anniversary of the Canterbury earthquakes. Really, a greater tragedy than the earthquakes themselves 5 years ago would be for us as a Parliament, and for us as New Zealanders, not to take heed of the lessons learnt and not to act upon the knowledge gained as a result of those tragedies. That would be utterly remiss of us as a Parliament, utterly remiss of us as a society, and utterly remiss of us as New Zealanders. This process of getting this bill back for second reading has been an example of the Parliament of New Zealand working, I think, at its very best.

The bill as first introduced caused a lot of angst and concern, across the whole country, in fact, but we were able—through a process of consultation, of listening, of taking advice, of working with each other, of going back to work with the Minister and his advisers—to come to what I think now is a very good, satisfactory solution. It will not ever guarantee that risk from future earthquakes will not occur, but a much diminished risk for New Zealanders in the future will be the case as a result of this legislation passing its way through the House.

Our report back was a bit unique in that it had the unanimous support of the committee, but we went through a process of seeking submissions early on, on the first iteration of the bill as it was first presented. We received 121 submissions and then, as a result of work done with the Minister and advisers and listening to the very good submissions, we significantly redrafted the bill.

We felt that it was necessary to give submitters an opportunity to come back to us again with their views on our significant proposed changes to the legislation. I am pleased to report to the House that 51 of those submitters did that, and almost all of them were congratulatory of the work that had been done because we actually had listened and taken note of their submissions.

I too want to refer to the very passionate, very compelling, and committed submission from Ann Brower, who was, as other speakers have already mentioned, the sole survivor on the bus on that day. She gave remarkably confronting evidence to the committee that made us sit up, take notice, and really get to grips with the risks that were prevalent in terms of unreinforced masonry.

I think we have got to a very good spot in terms of addressing those issues, and so the balance of public policy versus risk versus time versus cost across the country will now be spread, I think, quite evenly and quite equitably in a way that reflects the seismic risk to the geography of the nation.

We all know that in different parts of the country there are different elements of risk. We know, for instance, that—well, I was always taught that in Auckland the great risk was of volcanic activity, and I was always taught as a kid that the great risk of earthquakes would actually be in Wellington. But it turns out that Christchurch, which actually was not mentioned as an earthquake risk when I was going to school, was actually where the problem was.

But we have much better information now than we had in those days, and we are able to get sensible, intelligent, scientific information about the risk to the nation. We overlay that with a sensible, pragmatic approach in terms of the time frames involved, then we spread those out, determined by the risk and by the seismic information that we have, and then we overlay that further again by acknowledging that some buildings, some public facilities, and some infrastructure is more important in terms of sustaining services after an earthquake and also in terms of the likely impacts if an earthquake was to occur—for instance, in educational facilities. So all those layers have, I think, been very neatly and satisfactorily addressed in this redrafted bill.

I too want to thank members of the committee for their work. I particularly want to thank the advisers, I want to thank the Minister, and I particularly also want to acknowledge the incredible amount of work done by submitters—not once but in many cases twice—in giving of their valuable time and resource to the committee in both appearing and preparing written material for us.

As I said, in my view this was an excellent example of the select committee process working, as it often does. For many people who watch the proceedings of this House, they often see us just barracking at each other across the Chamber and, sadly, they do not necessarily get to see the work that is often done in select committees, where good, constructive, bipartisan work is done with the intention of creating good legislation and good outcomes for the citizens of New Zealand. It is a great pleasure, as the chair of the committee, to endorse with enthusiasm the second reading of this bill, and I commend it utterly to the House.

I did not serve on the Local Government and Environment Committee as it considered all the submissions on this bill, but I have been briefed on it, and I have read it and taken a real interest in it. You know, we have been highly critical of many aspects of this Government’s handling of the aftermath of the Canterbury quakes. We have been critical of the wasted opportunity for the rebuilding of an urban form that would be good for the future of Canterbury; we have been critical of the painfully slow residential rebuild—you name it, we could go on for a long time—but we are not critical of this essential piece of the puzzle in the Government’s responding to the aftermath of the Canterbury quakes.

It became pretty clear after Maurice Williamson brought the bill in its early form to the House that all around the country small communities, businesses—particularly the Whanganuis and the Ōāmarus—were horrified at what that bill would have meant for them. Whole areas of heritage buildings might have been lost. It would have imposed a huge cost, potentially, on businesses around the country. And the view that it had embodied a one-size-fits-all approach, I think, came to be shared by a wide range of people. So a lot of credit is due to the select committee and to the Minister for the way the whole job of going about reviewing what is a complex piece of legislation—

It is tragic to interrupt the member, but the time has come for me to leave the Chair.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 10 p.m.