Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill

I call David Seymour—5 minutes.

I rise on behalf of the ACT Party in opposition to the Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill. This debate has been characterised by overflowing wells of empathy from members around the House—and it is difficult not to when we recall the tragic losses in Canterbury and when that city, Christchurch, is still shaking anew, even in the past few days. However, the warmth in some members’ hearts appears to have drifted up to their heads into policy making because, when you make public policy, real empathy is about making it for people.

The first mistake in this policy process was not to base the policy making on the risks faced by New Zealanders but to apply an arbitrary standard of 34 percent of new building code across the country. What that did, from the point of view of individual New Zealanders, was it meant that the costs and benefits of applying this policy were vastly different for the risks that New Zealanders face as individuals, and also vastly different in terms of cost-benefit analysis between different regions of New Zealand. In fact, some analysis of the initial bill said that the Auckland population would be spending 3,000 times more to save a life than people in Wellington. Minister Nick Smith made a very revealing comment in his speech to this second reading. He said that even as an engineer, he was surprised at how much variability there is to earthquake risk across New Zealand. With respect, only a member from the South Island could say that. We Aucklanders know that although, for our excesses and sins, we may well one day drown in runs of lava from our many volcanoes, the risk of an earthquake in our part of the country is practically nil.

The Minister got pushed back hard, and he introduced a differential level of strengthening for different parts of the country. He said: “It’s OK. We’ll exclude some buildings and some structures.”, and that was admirable. He said that we would have more time—up to 50 years—to strengthen in low-risk areas. But it raises the question: if it is not important to do this for the next 50 years, then how urgent and how important is this strengthening overall? The bill was somewhat improved, but according to the regulatory impact statement for the bill in its new state, the net present value for this particular piece of legislation is negative three-quarters of a billion dollars. In Auckland, even just to find out whether a particular building complies with the requirements of the legislation is estimated to cost $10,000 to $20,000 per building.

If we were making empathic public policy, we would be highly focused on ensuring that the amount of money spent and the resources that go into earthquake-strengthening are commensurate with the price that we are prepared to pay to avoid and mitigate other risks. And yet, in Auckland we will be spending money on earthquake strengthening when the risks that we face by being in those buildings are hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of times lower than the risks that we face every day in the course of riding bikes, driving cars, and flying planes. GNS Science was commissioned by the Auckland Council, and it suggested that in Auckland this legislation might reduce deaths over 10,000 years by three lives. It would save only three lives.

There is a very simple way that this bill could be enhanced and could be passed, and that would simply be to exempt the low-risk areas that have already been identified in the enhanced bill. Take away those $10,000 and $20,000 costs that the Minister has admitted are not addressing any urgent concern—because he says he has got 50 years to do it—and that would be a bill that the ACT Party could support. But right now it is an unempathic bill, which does not deal with the risks faced by New Zealanders but seeks to preserve an arbitrary standard at all costs. Thank you.

I stand to take a very short call on this piece of legislation, but before I do I just want to pay tribute to the late and great Dr Ranginui Walker—moe mai, moe mai, moe mai e koro.

As I said, I stand to take a very short call on this piece of legislation. It has some key changes in it that we have heard before, but I just want to reiterate those. One of the key changes is to do with national time frames. It implements a national time frame. That actually identifies the risk level of buildings—low risk, medium risk, and high risk—with high risk giving councils 5 years to do the assessment on these buildings and 15 years to strengthen them; medium-risk buildings having 10 years for identification and assessment of these buildings, with a 25-year strengthening period; and for low-risk buildings it is 15 years for identification and assessment and 35 years to strengthen the buildings.

This bill also addresses areas around unreinforced masonry. Those are things like facades, parapets, and verandahs. It makes sure that, once that assessment has been made, those areas are reinforced as quickly as possible. Those are the areas that fell in the earthquake in 2011, and up to 35 people died because of that. We need to address those areas very quickly.

The bill also identifies key buildings like schools and universities and hospitals, and makes sure that those that have been assessed as medium to high risk are upgraded in half the time that other buildings in the area would be.

This legislation also identifies category 1 historic buildings and allows them to have a longer period for strengthening, just because of their character and the types of buildings that they are, and their historic significance to the region.

This is a good bill. It is a bill that addresses a lot of the issues around the earthquake-prone area that exists in this country, within the Ring of Fire. So, along with all my colleagues here in National and across the House, I support the bill at its second reading. Thank you.

Firstly, I just want to pull up the member from ACT, David Seymour, on a matter of geology. He does not realise that in a volcanic region like Auckland, when the volcanoes explode, it will have an impact on the land. I would recommend to the member from ACT that what he should do is go to where the children of Auckland go to find out about geology and volcanology, and that is the museum at the Auckland Domain. They have a very good exhibit there—

💬 Carmel Sepuloni: Isn’t Mount Eden—isn’t that in his electorate?

Yes. They have a very good exhibit there that actually shows you the impact on buildings of a volcano exploding. There are lots of buildings in Auckland that will be impacted if one of the many volcanoes—and, let us face it, there are, what, seven, nine volcanoes in Auckland—happened to explode.

However, we are here to talk about the Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill. As the previous speaker, Joanne Hayes, discussed, it is around amending the Building Act to ensure that we deal with earthquake-prone buildings as a result of what has happened, the earthquake sequence, in Canterbury. There are some time frames in which to put that in place, and also there are some definitions around risk and what types of buildings will be covered. This bill will have a huge impact on the territorial authorities; there is no doubt about that. But there are some specific issues I want to deal with.

We know that it is impracticable to deal with all the buildings. However, this bill actually excludes particular buildings, such as farm buildings, retaining walls, and other such structures that will not pose a risk to human life should they come down in an earthquake. We know, also, that there are some things that are not covered in this bill that, actually, were impacted in the Canterbury earthquake sequence.

One of the things that I really hope does get covered off is poor engineering. We know that with the CTV Building, for example, no one has really taken responsibility for the poor engineering that caused the deaths of all those people in that particular building. That was, really, a failure of engineering, and I do not believe that we can really continue without actually having some way of determining whom to hold responsible for that. I would hope that this bill actually takes account of that.

There are some priority buildings that are included in this bill: hospital and emergency facilities, of course; certainly educational facilities; and parts of buildings that are reinforced—such as parapets—and that could fall in an earthquake. Actually, some of these did fall, and some of these did cause deaths in the earthquake sequence, particularly in the 22 February quake. There are some issues that are not addressed in here that we are fully cognisant of in Canterbury, and those are things such as the risks that become apparent from building materials once buildings either come down or are demolished—and I am speaking specifically about the risk of asbestos, which is quite a risk when we are demolishing buildings.

But what I want to do, particularly, is I want to honour a particular person for whom, if this bill was in place and if our territorial authority had enacted what it should have done and assessed buildings—and assessed this particular building—as being risky, then she would not have died. That is Mrs Maureen Valerie Fletcher. Mrs Fletcher is the mother and mother-in-law of very dear friends of mine, and she was 74 when she passed away, when a verandah of a cafe that she was having a cup of tea at collapsed on top of her during the earthquakes. What is particularly sad about Mrs Fletcher’s case is that she was unidentified for a couple of weeks. There were 2 weeks in which her family had not heard from her and they had no idea that she had actually perished. What had happened was her body was taken out of the building where she died, but it was misidentified.

There was a family in Christchurch who thought their mother had passed away, and there was a family—my friends—in Auckland who had no idea that their mother had passed away. So for 2 weeks my friends were perplexed about what had happened to their mother. They travelled to Christchurch, spent a lot of time on the ground, and spent a lot of time with the emergency services trying to identify what had happened. When the mistaken identification did actually come to light, of course it meant that another family realised that their loved one was safe and, actually, in a rest home in Auckland; and my friends, of course, realised that their mother had passed away.

Why I bring this up is that this bill is about saving lives. If this bill had been in place, if the Christchurch City Council had been able to assess its buildings and assess that building with the verandah as unsafe, Mrs Maureen Valerie Fletcher might not have died. That is what this bill is about, Mr Seymour. It is about ensuring that no one else is put at risk, because we can do something about that. It is about ensuring—do not shake your head, Mr Seymour—that there are no further families that have to go through the ordeal that the Fletchers had to go through while they waited to see where their mother was. It is not something to shake your head about, Mr Seymour.

This impacted 187 families directly, who lost people in Canterbury, but it also impacted the whole country. Even as recently as a couple of hours ago, we are still experiencing aftershocks in Canterbury. Every time we have an aftershock or a major quake—we had a 5.7 on Valentine’s Day—what does that do to the structures that are already weakened by the severe force that has been impacted upon them? This is not a laughing matter, Mr Seymour, and it is an absolute responsibility of this Government and of the territorial authorities, the councils around this country, to make sure they get it right so that people in Auckland and Wellington and Tauranga do not have to go through the same kinds of dreadful, dreadful things that have happened to the people of Canterbury.

💬 David Seymour: What, with volcano-strengthened buildings?

We do not wish that upon anyone, especially the people in Epsom, if they are represented by someone who is as uncaring as you.

We can do something about this, and we should. I am getting quite emotional about this, because people did lose their lives. This is a bill that will actually impact on the lives of people and ensure that they do not have to suffer the way 187 families have had to. Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker.

Kia ora e Te Mana Whakawā. I stand to take a short call on the Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill, and agree with the previous speaker, Poto Williams.

In Christchurch we have just had the fifth anniversary. The latest earthquake was on Monday morning, early, about 3 o’clock, and it was right under my house, because that is where the epicentre was, in Cashmere View Street. What we are seeing here is that there is a continuous flow of aftershocks, even after 5 years. So I want to congratulate the Minister for Building and Housing because at least we are being very, very considered here in this bill. It is not just in Christchurch. New Zealand is a young country; there is a lot of seismic risk right across Aotearoa. This bill does address something that people from Christchurch—those who are here now from Christchurch would never want to see anything like what happened in our city. So this bill really is a catalyst, in a lot of ways, to address the whole situation of earthquake-prone buildings across New Zealand.

During the submissions process we heard from a lot of submitters, a lot of local bodies, and a lot of councils. We even heard from people like Ann Brower, who was injured during the earthquakes. Listening to these submissions explains why there were a number of changes that were made. I think one of the main changes is actually about the varying timetables for strengthening the relative earthquake-risk buildings, from high to medium to low. The reason for that is that we heard from councils right across New Zealand during the submissions process the fact that we needed to categorise these high-risk areas, medium, and low. It is in all fairness, because there are obviously huge costs that are related to identifying these buildings. We had to do it and put a system in place that was really related to the various risk factors right across the country. So that was the first one.

The next change was that looking at the bill before, we then came up with a situation, again from listening to the submissions, about the prioritisation of public buildings, particularly buildings used for education, hospitals, and emergency services. The one thing, too, that came out of this—and this was particularly from Ann Brower’s submission—is that there are those buildings that had facades and parapets that were dangerous and that did cause a lot of injury, and in some cases death. So it was during that prioritisation part of the bill that we thought it was important to make that change. The other change was the fact that we needed to categorise, also, other buildings right across, particularly by reducing the number of buildings covered—farms, retaining walls, monuments, walls, and all of that.

Looking at this bill, I say it is very timely. It is a bill that I and all my colleagues, particularly on this side of the House, recommend and support. Hopefully this bill can go through and become legislation. Kia ora.