Building (Earthquake-prone Building Deadlines and Other Matters) Amendment Bill

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I present a legislative statement on the Building (Earthquake-prone Building Deadlines and Other Matters) Amendment Bill.

💬 SPEAKER: That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the parliamentary website.

I move, That the Building (Earthquake-prone Building Deadlines and Other Matters) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Transport and Infrastructure Committee to consider the bill. At the appropriate time, I intend to move that the bill be reported to the House by 31 October 2024 and that the committee have the authority to meet at any time while the House is sitting (except during oral questions), during any evening on a day on which there has been a sitting of the House, on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House, and outside the Wellington area, despite Standing Orders 193, 195, and 196.

I would now like to outline the key changes contained in the bill. They cover three areas: earthquake-prone buildings, most obviously, as the name suggests; the building warrant of fitness scheme; and changes that could be characterised as minor or technical in nature.

The first is extending earthquake-prone building deadlines. I am delighted that today the Government is taking steps to provide more certainty and clarity to New Zealanders about the earthquake-prone building system. This is an issue that affects New Zealanders up and down the country in large cities and small regional towns alike. Collectively, there are approximately 5,000 earthquake-prone buildings in New Zealand and, unfortunately, in many cases, these are sitting empty and derelict, sometimes for up to years at a time. Empty, derelict buildings can be dangerous, but they are also a handbrake on growth and development and can suck the life out of a town or city.

The Government is focused on reinvigorating our cities and regions to support economic growth. To do this, we need an earthquake system that balances the safety of life with the real-world costs and barriers of remediating earthquake-prone buildings. That is why we have commenced a review into the earthquake-prone building system. The review aims to provide building owners with more certainty and better incentivisation to remediate or demolish their earthquake-prone buildings so that Kiwis can safely live, work, and play in vibrant towns and cities. I do want to acknowledge the history of the legislation that is being amended and, most particularly, to acknowledge the tragedy of the lives lost in the Canterbury earthquakes. Of course, earthquakes in this country prior to that time and, of course, those that have happened since, no doubt will continue to afflict our shaky isles.

These are not easy matters and, of course, we need to take a balanced, nuanced approach. I acknowledge all those in this House who, in previous capacities and those in the communities who have worked hard to provide as much assurance and comfort and, of course, worked diligently in good faith to provide the best possible system that we could have in this regard. I acknowledge those who already have constructively engaged on the subject, be it in central government, including across the aisle, and local government too, and, of course, building owners and other players, key players, in civil society throughout this land.

Having said all that, the current system attempts to manage risk and, in some cases, successfully does manage risk by requiring earthquake-prone buildings to be remediated before set deadlines. However, in some cases, the system is not working as well as it had been hoped, and the reality then is that many buildings are not able to be remediated. Around 150 buildings have already failed to meet their remediation deadlines and many more are unlikely to be remediated, I’m told, due to high seismic strengthening costs and other barriers. The Government’s review into managing seismic risk will take a fresh look at the system, but, in the meantime, there are nearly 500 buildings with deadlines rapidly approaching. While this review is under way, it seems to me sure only fair that we extend the remediation deadline for these buildings.

I’d like to provide clarity and certainty to building owners and territorial authorities about the obligations—local councils themselves often being owners of such buildings, of course—while the review and any subsequent changes take place. Of course we don’t prejudge the result of that review, but we hope, of course, that we will receive many sensible suggestions for change that might be made as a result of the review.

To achieve this, in the meantime, the bill, once it is passed into law, I hasten to add, will extend by four years all earthquake-prone building remediation deadlines that had not lapsed before 2 April 2024, being the date at which the Cabinet decision was made that this measure should be brought to the House. The extension will provide temporary relief from legal compliance and the threat of enforcement while we work through the review. That being said, of course, building owners who are able to carry out remediation work are encouraged to get on and do this. Of course, we acknowledge there are motivations that outside the remit of Government, be it insurance requirements or the obligations on a landlord in relation to tenants, and of course the health and safety legislation and so on that would encourage people to get on and do work that they are able to do. The bill also introduces a one-off power to extend deadlines by up to two years, a further two years, by Order in Council. However, there are some controls around the use of this power.

I acknowledge that the extension means that it is theoretically possible that life-safety risk in some buildings won’t be addressed as quickly as originally intended. However, I do think it is very important to stress in the same breath that in many cases these buildings are not being remediated anyway. The simple fact is that building owners face difficulties that for some are so great that even under the existing time frames, building users would likely have been exposed to some of those exact same risks in any case. Once the amendment Act comes into effect, the extension will apply automatically to eligible buildings. I should qualify that point around automatic status, by adding that territorial authorities will be required to reissue earthquake-prone building notices to all eligible buildings and to update the register of earthquake-prone buildings.

Passing to the other matters in the bill, for the remainder of my time: strengthening the building warrant of fitness system or scheme. Following last year’s devastating fatal Loafers Lodge fire—again, acknowledging the human tragedy of those lives lost—the previous Cabinet agreed to a set of no regrets actions to improve fire safety in buildings. This means that some changes that could be agreed relatively readily would be made, but, of course, without suggesting that there should not be other changes contemplated as well, and I’ll touch on those briefly if I may within the time available.

In the meantime, though, this bill will implement sensible changes to help protect the safety of building occupants, including in an emergency. Some of these occupants will be vulnerable people living in temporary or low-cost boarding house - type accommodation. A building warrant of fitness (BWOF) must include a certificate issued by an independent qualified person—I’ll just say IQP, going forward—known as a form 12A.

There are many good people working hard and diligently in the space, and I want to acknowledge the Association of Building Compliance, which gathers together many such people, and the work that they are doing to help educate, advocate, and ensure certainty and consistency for that system. I commit to working closely with all those who share the aims of ensuring we have good, robust qualifications and recognition of people who have that level of expertise, important as it is.

People within the building industry, therefore, have raised concerns about instances where forms were issued without the procedures in the building compliance schedule being fully complied with. This may mean that issues with specified systems such as fire and smoke control systems go undetected, which could place building occupants at risk and historically that is exactly what we have found, sadly not only with Loafers Lodge itself but, of course, in the subsequent investigation known as Operation Magazine.

The Building Act does not currently state the duties of independently qualified persons and there are no specific offences for wrongly issued certificates. This bill fills that gap and introduces an offence for breaching the duty with a fine of up to $50,000 for an individual and up to $150,000 for a body corporate. This is a strict liability offence, but nevertheless, I think I’m right in saying that there are defences available—in any case, I’m not able to go into that today. The new offence will also provide territorial authorities with tools to discipline and deter this misconduct. It will also help to ensure that IQPs are fulfilling their obligations under the BWOF scheme. The bill also increases the infringement fees to promote compliance with these obligations and better protect the safety of building users.

Some minor and technical changes now. Finally, there are some changes along the lines that stand-alone building consent authorities, currently just the one being Consentium, which does the work for Kāinga Ora, do not need to pay their fee directly to the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment at the moment; indeed they can’t. They have to go through their relevant territorial authority. We are removing that anomaly. We’ll also remove the obligation for dam owners—that is, owners of water storage facilities—to display a copy of the compliance certificate in a prominent place on the dam, which is physically impracticable to do in many cases, but instead must simply forward the relevant certificate to the regional authority.

Then finally, to clarify or meet the intent of the Building (Pools) Amendment Act 2016, we will exempt small heated pools, such as a spa, from the requirement for periodic inspection if they have a safety cover that complies with the building code. Finally—finally, finally; my second “finally”—a certificate of acceptance for building work that’s issued by territorial authority need not also attract a building consent to regularise that retrospectively. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. This will be a brief call from me, as the spokesperson for the Labour Party on building and construction, to set out the Labour Party’s position on this. It will also give the House a sense of how eager we are to get into the detail of this bill in the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, chaired by the very able Andy Foster, and joined by representatives of all parties around this House, because this should be something that all parties have an interest in, and this should be something that submitters get to have a say on and that we get to work through some of these details, because it is of interest to all New Zealanders.

The starting points and the principles that I will be considering when we look at this in more detail at select committee level is that no one should be put at undue risk due to the building that they are in. We have to be mindful that these rules were set up in the wake of the Christchurch earthquake and in the context of things like the Kaikōura earthquake, which represent real tragedies for New Zealand, and we need to make sure that these very real events, which happened in New Zealand and which caused loss of life, huge loss of property, and a huge cost to our national infrastructure, are provided for in our legislation and that we have these settings right.

At the same time, I think everyone in this House is incredibly sympathetic to the plight of those people who find themselves owners or responsible for buildings that are earthquake-prone, particularly in the context of residential homeowners and apartment owners in places like Wellington who are now faced with bills they simply cannot pay. So we need to be able to work our way through and find solutions which recognise the role of Government here in supporting people through this and the huge financial costs to them in a way that is safe and recognises that not everyone has access to information about the kind of buildings that they’re in, especially when they’re commercial premises.

The Labour Party is in opposition to this bill, but we are really keen to work through, at the select committee, some of the questions that we have. So I’ll outline what they are, briefly, now. The first is that absolutely key to this whole regime is the idea that someone will need to pay for strengthening. Is that the Government? Is that private owners? Is that retrospectively the Government paying for private owners to enjoy the support of Government and not requiring them to bear any risk, or is there a role for local government here as well? All of those questions do not get answered if central government is unable to fulfil the role of holding to the remediation time frames that it sets, and so there is a question there about whether extending the time frames, essentially, rewards procrastination.

That was a point made in media commentary by one of the Christchurch earthquake survivors, who commented and asked whether we are rewarding procrastination here if Government continues to kick the can down the road, and that is a question we have on our minds because we must send clear signals, not only to those homeowners and not only to the people affected but also to the local councils. There is a question of certainty around things like insurance and the costs spread around people if Government does not have hard deadlines in a case like this.

Another question that we will be asking is whether the settings for homeowners who cannot pay are right and how we can support people through a really difficult time financially. Labour had a solution for this. I won’t go into it as I don’t have time, but solutions around lending to people and requiring them to pay it back only on sale or death might be something here that we need to look to.

I’m sure that the select committee will have the opportunity to discuss this with submitters, because though this is relatively limited in scope—this bill in particular—we will attract a number of people who want to have their say on this issue, which brings me, in the final minute of my contribution, to the report-back date.

We oppose the shortened report-back date. We would like to hear fulsomely from those submitters, particularly in local government, and the homeowners who are affected and the people who have been through these earthquake events before, their reasons about how these deadlines are important to certainty in their areas. We’d also like to hear from property developers and people with an interest in other regions like Auckland who might oppose the rules on why they think the deadline extension is a useful thing. So we’re keen to get into this at select committee, and there will be calls on this side of the House about the report-back date.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. My contribution actually has a certain amount in common with the previous speaker, Arena Williams. Being a representative of a part of Wellington, this is a bill that will directly impact and assist those who own buildings in Wellington that have been having a really difficult time financing meeting the standards.

It’s a question that I’m personally very interested in. I have lived in a heritage apartment building that was just sort of 1 percent above the acceptable new building standard (NBS); I think it was like 38 percent or something. But, interestingly, because it was on bedrock in Mount Victoria, it seemed fine over the last 80 years of earthquakes; whereas some modern buildings built on reclaimed land in Wellington that were at 100 percent of NBS didn’t fare so well in the earthquake—in fact, fared quite poorly. So I’m really interested to understand how we can have earthquake standards that genuinely reflect the risk, taking into account more than just the building itself but also the ground conditions and whether that can be part of the solution.

The Greens have actually long recognised—in our arts, culture, and heritage policy—that the earthquake-strengthening system for heritage buildings is cost-prohibitive and leads to buildings being demolished rather than remediated, which is not always a great outcome. So one of our policies had been just recognising that if we want to address this, this is one of those things that we address together as a community and as a country, and Government is well placed to help find collective solutions. It’s going to be a similar situation with adapting to climate change and dealing with severe weather events. If we just leave it to individuals, a lot of people are going to be in incredible hardship.

I have a constituent who messaged me specifically about the previous Government’s assistance programme that was going to help with the cost of remediating building. She was actually writing on behalf of her mother, who also lives in the Rongotai electorate, who is on a fixed income, on a pension, has owned this apartment, it’s her home, she doesn’t want to give it up, and has found herself in a situation of needing to—alongside the other owners of the building, spent an enormous amount, went through all of the paperwork, finally got through all the hurdles to apply for that assistance fund, and then just as that happened it was announced by this Government that they were cancelling the assistance fund. It may have been a small number of people—and I agree that that fund hadn’t gone far enough to address the problem and that something needed to be changed there, but, I think, for those people who had already put a lot of time and effort and emotional stress that they were suffering from going through this effort to try and access that fund, to have it taken away like that was unfortunate.

This legislation just extending the time frames doesn’t address the issue of the compliance cost and of how we actually achieve safer buildings in a sustainable way. So that’s something that I think we need to be able to tease out in the select committee process. We do support this at first reading and we’ll have to see what comes out of that select committee process. I absolutely understand the discomfort with the select committee process being shorter. Ideally, it would have been longer than 2½ months. However, 2½ months is a lot better than 10 days, as has been the case for some other legislation we’ve seen earlier this year. So we do understand that because of the need to meet the deadline and give certainty to so many building owners and so many communities, particularly here in Wellington and Rongotai but also right across the country in rural towns as well—we can accept, I think the 2½-month select committee process.

As has been said by the Minister, we can’t really assess the risk of extending the time frames against a perfect scenario where all of those buildings were remediated by the time frames, because 80 percent of them were not going to be. But we do need to work together, I think, to find a truly sustainable solution that is going to look out for our people. We are a country that is very much affected by seismic risk. There are many other countries that have learnt to live with this. I hope we can get better building codes and better funding and better insurance options for people through this process.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Much like the previous two speakers, I too am a member of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee—

💬 Grant McCallum: Great committee.

—great committee—and I suspect the following speakers from New Zealand First and National may well be members as well. I’m looking forward to seeing this bill at select committee, and, therefore, ACT is proud to be supporting this bill past first reading.

I think it’s a pragmatic bill that the Minister has brought forward. You know, there’s a few things that need tidying up in our building legislation and this is seeking to address some of it, specifically the earthquake-strengthening issues that we have in New Zealand. There’s a lot of angst out in the community, in small towns and large cities, about the current regime for earthquake strengthening and the time lines around that. So I congratulate the Minister on extending that to give some certainty to the industry, especially since making that announcement back in April that there would be some extensions available. I think this is going to be well received by building owners up and down the country who have been seeking some clarity. And clarity will be coming because local councils will be required to reissue their earthquake-prone building notices. So that means if you are a building owner out there and you’re worried about how this is going to affect you, your council needs to be in contact with you.

The purpose of a bill like this should be about improving safety and compliance, not making it harder. So, I think, having a review to actually reassess where we’ve got to over the last decade with our regulations and the codes and practices of the building industry and the engineering fraternity, and the way they assess things such as the new building standard (NBS), and the way they use the national building code standard to actually assess the earthquake-prone or earthquake-risk elements of a building—there’s some great stuff happening in this review, and tidying up the other things that need tidying up in the Building Act at the end is a very good use of a bill like this.

In the confidence in the NBS ratings, I do think we have an issue that I believe needs to be addressed. As the previous speaker, Julie Anne Genter, mentioned, one point above the national building standard of 34 percent is the difference between an uncompliant building and compliant building. We need to have confidence that it is not being applied differently across the country by different engineering outfits, that there is some trust in a scheme such as that, because, you know, on one end, it can be that 33 to 34 is a requirement to remediate or not, but at the other end, the difference between 66 and 67 percent means that a bank might not lend, therefore you can’t sell your building to someone who’s unable to get a mortgage, and things like that. So these single digit changes in the rating of a building are very important and can lead to a massive change for a building owner. I think we need to have confidence. Building owners and the industry itself needs to have confidence in that.

Now, as I say, this is tidying up some great things, which is great, but ACT sees a building industry that is proportionate to the risk. We don’t want to have a ratchet effect of councils pushing up compliance, then engineers push up compliance, and then banks push up compliance and we end up over-engineering ourselves out of existence, to the point where, when our civilisation is dead and gone, they can see the expensive buildings that at the time cost a fortune and may have been great for archaeologists of the future to look at, but, actually, was that a good use of our funds on the day?

A test of reasonableness would be greatly appreciated. We don’t have the layers of protection that are just, like I say, ratcheting each other up. I mean, designers need to have confidence that what they are designing is actually going to leave them in a space where they’re not over-burdening the client who then has to pay for this, but at the same time are providing the necessary safeguards to the occupants of the building, whether it’s during the day or whether it’s overnight. Because, I mean, if you are staying overnight in a building, you need to have a higher degree of confidence. I think there needs to be a cost benefit done in the entire building industry.

I commend the Minister and I commend this bill. I think it’s a great start. I’m looking forward to hearing about it in select committee. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Mr Speaker, thank you. Like my colleagues on the Transport and Infrastructure Committee—a very good committee; a very hard-working committee—I’m also going to focus not so much on the other matters in the Building (Earthquake-prone Building Deadlines and Other Matters) Amendment Bill but on the issues around the earthquake-prone buildings.

This bill is good news because it’s a pragmatic approach. It gives more time for building owners. As a Wellingtonian, I have spoken with a number of building owners, particularly people who live in apartment buildings in the central city, who are stressed out about the arrangements as they are at the moment, trying to work out how they can possibly afford to do the strengthening that needs to be done, especially when their insurance costs are also going through the roof. Also, those issues of certainty around regular changes, which we’ve already heard—as my colleague Cam Luxton has just said—it’s not just the confidence about the rating of a building, whether it’s 33 or 34 or some other number; it’s whether the standards will change over time. They’re compliant at this point in time and then they’re not compliant at some other point in time. So there are huge stresses that are involved there.

Not only that; the other point I might make is that if we want to densify our cities, if we want to have more people living in our central cities, one of the worst things we could possibly do is to undermine the confidence of the very people that we want to be living in those cities, because that message will go out to other people, who might think about living in central cities and they will say, “No, I don’t want to live in an apartment building.” So we have to fix this. This bill gives four more years to strengthen those buildings, and potentially another couple of years. “Four more years”—it sounds a bit rugby-ish, doesn’t it? Not a good thing to remember. That is not a good thing to remember.

I want to give a lot of credit to the Minister, the Hon Chris Penk, for this. Also, it was really good, in seeing some coverage of this, to see the “credit where credit is due”. They were actually the words that were used by one of my former Green colleagues on the Wellington City Council. So, well done to the Minister. But let’s be clear, as we heard from the Hon Julie Anne Genter: this does not fix the problem. There is still a problem; it just gives more time to fix that problem. We live in a shaky country. In fact, some of us went down to the Crisis Management Centre earlier in the week, and we were reminded of the likely frequency of some major earthquakes in this country. We cannot just bury our heads in the sand and say, “This will go away.”; it won’t.

We have somewhere between 5,500 and 7,000 buildings listed as earthquake-prone nationally. I was interested to see that, in fact, while we’re very, very conscious of it in Wellington City—the rest of the region is added to that—Wellington City only represents about 10 percent of those. There are three times as many in Auckland, which surprised me, but that’s the way it is. It’s a much bigger city, of course. Wellington City has always taken this very, very seriously. In fact, as a council, the council started doing assessments of earthquake-prone buildings way back in 2006—obviously, before all the Canterbury earthquakes—and, in fact, I can remember at one local government conference, Wellington City had just about finished its work when just about everybody else had barely started it on that particular score. Wellington had done more assessments than every other territorial authority in the country put together. So it shows that it’s an issue which is taken seriously.

I do want to use Wellington as an example, and also one other jurisdiction if I have the time to do so, because it underlines the importance of this extra time. Wellington City has some 572 buildings on its earthquake list. For 229 of them, their yellow sticker turns red in 2027—229 of them—and if you include the ones between now and 2027, it’s 305. So nearly all of them, or the vast majority of them, are in the next three or four years. It’s not only a stress and a pressure and a financial pressure on the building owners but it’s also a question of the capacity of the market, of the industry, of the experts, to actually be able to do the work that needs to be done in that short period of time. So the extra time is really, really important.

I said that more work needs to be done. So it’s really great to see the Minister’s review which is being done. I’m sure—the Minister said it’s absolutely fine to hear this as well—we will hear many out-of-scope submissions which are talking about things which are more than just the time table, but they will be valuable. There will be valuable information, because they will all be related to the issues around the earthquake-strengthening regime and what the challenges are, what can be done to make it better, and I think that those will be very, very valuable. So I’m looking forward to that work.

If I might finish off with just one other area which I’ve also seen, I know how important this legislation will be to some of our rural and provincial towns, towns like Feilding, because giving more time changes the economics and allows people to get on with strengthening their buildings. I commend this bill to the House.

Tēnā rā koe e te Pīka, otirā tēnā rā tātou e te Whare. E tū ana ahau ki te waha i ngā kōrero mā Te Pāti Māori i te rangi nei. Ahakoa te poto o tāku kōrero, ka ū tika ki tēnei kaupapa mō te whakahaumarutanga o ngā whare e tūpono ai ka rū whenua, me te takiwātanga o ēnei angawā.

[Thank you, Mr Speaker, indeed greetings to all of us in the House. I stand to give voice to the statements on behalf of the Māori Party today. Despite the brevity of my speech, I will engage directly with this topic for the safety of homes in the event of an earthquake, and the extent of the time frame.]

I rise to take a short call on behalf of Te Pāti Māori in support of this bill, to see it go through to the select committee process and stages. Some of our key focuses and interests, in awaiting to hear public consultation, is from a number of marae, as marae may be forced to be demolished if they fail to meet these deadlines. Extending time frames may save some marae from demolition, but it will not address the core issue, as other members have said across both sides, that many hapū cannot afford to strengthen their marae. The Government should fully fund strengthening for marae.

Another issue I would like to raise is the bigger issue of all of this for us—as a person who lives near their papa kāinga and marae—is the future safety plans in place for houses, and particularly for marae, in a course of natural disasters. We’ve seen many marae, for the past couple of years now, getting hammered by natural disasters, yet they are the first place of response and locations during a natural disaster—whether you are non-Māori or Māori. Knowing that marae are not just walls and windows but they are our museums, also making sure that there are right protections in place taonga tuku iho like carvings, tuktuku, poupou, and tūpuna artifacts that we would like to have consultation process on, and how the process will look like moving forward.

So we would like to have those conversations no matter the political party, as the safety of our people is paramount. So, in short, we support this bill to the select committee stage and we await to hear submissions from the select committee. Tēnā rā tātou.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to support this bill, the Building (Earthquake-prone Building Deadlines and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. Like most of the speakers before me, I will be focusing mainly on the earthquake side of this, rather than the other matters. This is a very important bill because it’s going to help give us time to address some issues that have been building up for a while, but always at the heart of this we’ve just got to remember that we’re talking about buildings and earthquakes and the potential damage that can come from it. We’ve all seen in recent times what can happen and we must always keep that in our minds, which is that it’s a delicate balance at times to get between building something that’s going to protect us in a disaster and the actual costs of strengthening the existing buildings. So we always must acknowledge that.

I’d like to acknowledge my fellow committee members on the Transport and Infrastructure Committee: our great chair, Andy Foster; my other members Tom Rutherford and Cam Luxton, who’s sitting up there; and Julie Anne Genter is still here in the House. I acknowledge also the speaker before from Labour, Arena Williams. It’s interesting—I’m pleased to see that we have almost got unanimity within the House to support this bill through to select committee, with the one exception being Labour, which I find rather unusual, given that so far their speeches have pretty much been in support of what the goals of the bill are, to give us more time to do a better job, and yet they’re going to vote against it. I just find that interesting, it’d be fair to say.

The main reason we’re giving more time is because I know the Minister for Building and Construction, the Hon Chris Penk—who’s doing a great job in a number of areas, I might add—wants to try and bring some clarity to what is at times a confusing situation, and I’ll use my own province of Northland as an example. We are not renowned for our earthquake risk, and yet the current legislation is unclear as to where we stand on what we have to do in that space. So I want to bring clarity as to what Northlanders have to do to make their buildings safer versus other parts of the country which are more earthquake-prone.

It’s interesting; there’s been quite a bit of commentary on the fact that the proposal for this extension of time until the whole review came from, for example, the Mayor of Wellington, Tory Whanau, when she said that she welcomed this review and as she welcomed the extension of the deadline. “This is an extremely complex issue. It’s important that New Zealand has a system for strengthening buildings that is fit for purpose. The closure of earthquake-prone buildings come with significant social and economic costs, resulting in an often unaffordable and unsustainable position for building owners.”, said Mayor Tory Whanau.

Then I also have another quote here from another mayor—a deputy mayor in this case—from the Manawatū. Michael Ford said that the building and construction Minister Chris Penk had “listened to councils by providing a timeframe extension, which has helped take some pressure off. … There is not a one-size-fits all solution to this important issue facing our regions,” Ford said, “The review will need to answer some fundamental questions about how this system could work better [in the future]”. As a final comment, I would just note that the exceptionally outstanding MP for Napier, Katie Nimon, is quoted in her local paper as saying that the earthquake-prone buildings review being brought forward is “good news for Napier”.

So I just think what this highlights is that this is an issue that needs addressing. We have a Minister that is listening, and I think that is what this Government is doing a great job of. We’re listening to what the people of New Zealand want. They want us to review this, give us time to do it properly. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the chance to say a few words on this Building (Earthquake-prone Building Deadlines and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. Thinking about this bill, and listening to some of the contributions, always reminds me of one of those frustrating but real facts about human beings, and that is our reliability, if not always in a valid way, to favour the immediacy bias, to always be thinking about what’s right in front of us and how much it might cost, or what a hassle it might be, instead of actually putting the work into saving our own skins and doing what’s best in so far as a safety issue.

As other contributors have also mentioned, the impetus for this current law is premised on the lessons we learnt from Christchurch. I know I certainly will never ever get out of my mind all of the sights and all of the sounds and all of the smells and all of the horrible things that I witnessed on that day in the city centre in Christchurch in 2011. Whilst nothing could ever have provided any forewarning, and there was no building code that would ever have prevented the CTV Building coming down and taking the life of my friend and workmate, I think it is up to the people who lived through that experience—particularly some of the people who experienced real harm and have dedicated their time since then—to campaign for better regulations and for better safety, particularly with buildings in what can only be described as a very earthquake-prone country that we live in.

It’s not to say that we don’t also appreciate the fact that this is complicated and there are various considerations that need to be made. We’re not supporting the bill, primarily because of a fundamental understanding that if you keep kicking the can down the road, nothing ever gets done. There will always be a myriad of considerations that need to be made, there will always be competing variables at play, but at some point you’ve just got to get on with it.

I’d like to also note that whilst we talk about the fact that people should never be put at undue risk due to the buildings that they’re living in—and we talk about apartments if we talk about Wellington. Can I also just remind everybody that we also shouldn’t be put at undue risk from buildings that we merely may be driving past, or we merely may be passing by just for a moment. It took me a long time to notice it—years actually. Particularly I would notice it coming up to Wellington, walking in the CBD—which is a novelty because we didn’t have one for such a long time, or a concept of some sort of business district—walking up the town, and, without even thinking about it, my first thought was always “You won’t survive if you walk past that building”, or “That won’t last five seconds.” You know, people that haven’t seen it take it for granted. We have sayings about things being as strong as buildings or, you know, as safe as houses, and all these various other sayings that we’ve learnt over generations to take as a truism—and it’s just not, when you see them fall down as easily as they can.

So I think that it is incumbent upon the Government to look at different ways in which we can support—and as my colleague Arena Williams intimated earlier, no one’s saying that this is an easy solution or that there are quick fixes, but we are saying that the State and the Government probably do play some sort of role in ensuring that we can move forward. And we definitely need to move forward. This could potentially be the first of several different extensions, and before we know it we will be no further ahead and we will be regretting that decision.

Also intimated in a prior contribution from Arena Williams was the fact that she didn’t quite have enough time to go through specifics of what the solutions to this were. But Labour’s solution in Government was the Residential Earthquake-Prone Building Financial Assistance Scheme, and it has been cancelled by this Government. Whilst the member Grant McCallum, who made the contribution before me, found it somewhat perplexing that we weren’t supporting this particular bill, I likewise find it somewhat perplexing that some things that could have been helpful and could have moved us along in a bit more steady way have been cancelled. But, nevertheless, this is the situation that we find ourselves in.

I will watch with keen interest as it goes through the select committee stage, undoubtedly, and I look forward to hearing all the contributions from people with lived experience and all of the expertise that will be lent in that direction. Thank you.

I rise today to speak in support of the Building (Earthquake-prone Building Deadlines and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. This bill addresses critical issues regarding the safety and economic viability of our buildings in the face of seismic risks. It aims to provide clarity and breathing space for building owners and territorial authorities as we work towards a more effective system for managing earthquake-prone buildings.

The current system, implemented in 2017, aimed to reduce the risk to life by requiring the remediation of our most vulnerable buildings. However, it has become clear that this system is not working as effectively as intended. Around 150 buildings have already failed to meet their remediation deadlines, and many more are unlikely to be remediated, due to high costs and other barriers. With nearly 500 deadlines set to expire over the next four years, we are facing a potential crisis that could have devastating impacts on our economy.

The key purpose of this bill is to extend the remediation time frames for earthquake-prone buildings by four years, with a limited power to extend deadlines by an extra two years. This extension provides clarity for building owners and territorial authorities, prevents clusters of expiring deadlines, and offers relief from enforcement challenges.

Alongside this extension, our Government is initiating a comprehensive review of the earthquake-prone building system, to be completed in the first half of 2025. This review will focus on costs, risk-management proposals, compliance barriers, and alignment with broader Government objectives. The bill also clarifies responsibilities in the building warrant of fitness scheme, improves the building levy collection system, and addresses inconsistencies in dam safety penalties and obligations.

We are striking a critical balance between public safety and economic consequences. The devastation of the Christchurch earthquakes is still fresh in our national memory. We must do all we can to prevent such tragedy in the future. We must also face the very real economic consequences of overly burdensome regulations. Empty buildings in our city centres and towns don’t just represent lost revenue; they represent lost jobs, lost community spaces, and lost vitality in our urban areas.

In conclusion, this bill represents a balanced approach to a complex problem. It provides necessary relief and time for building owners and local authorities while work is done towards a more effective and sustainable system for managing earthquake-prone buildings. It’s about finding the right balance between safety and economic sustainability. I urge all members to support this bill and I encourage them to engage constructively in the select committee process. The safety and prosperity of our communities depends on getting this right.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s actually quite tricky to speak on this bill because there are a few members in this House who have had firsthand experience of an earthquake, and the alarming thing is that the earthquake that I experienced and some others in this House experienced was a little one. Andy Foster mentioned that he’s been in the emergency management bunker and has seen the projections. It doesn’t give enough emphasis to the devastation that will hit New Zealand—probably a real possibility that it will be this city—and the catastrophic damage that will occur.

Tracey McLellan mentioned that we’re all biased to kind of project our own experiences historically into the future and, therefore, if we’ve lived for 30 or 60 years and have never really seen a major disaster, we assume we won’t see one in the rest of our lifetime. We know it’s coming, so the question is this: how do we strike the balance between life and prosperity?

I heard the member before me talk about the need to fill up vacant buildings and have bustling inner cities. That’s all very nice, but when this earthquake strikes, if a building is earthquake-prone and we have a genuine earthquake—a serious earthquake—then some of those buildings will fall over and people will die. I know and have spoken to people who talk of the financial pressures, the stress, the anxiety, and the constraints on their lifestyle that earthquake strengthening causes, but if we leave people to entirely make their own decisions about the safety of buildings, there is never a good time. So we’re not going to be obstructive on this bill; we’re going to be constructive when it comes to looking at it in a select committee. But we can’t accept, when we live where we do and we have the science that we have before us and we know the quality of the building stock, that it’s a good idea to defer remediation of these buildings.

We agree that a review of the relevant earthquake regulations and building codes is a good thing—absolutely endorse that—and with the somewhat binary nature of these questions where it’s either a dangerous building or it’s not, it may be that we do need to look at that. But if we sit on our hands, we’ve been here before. The Christchurch earthquake was more than a decade ago. We know the problem. We’ve been nudging people to do the right thing, and the Minister for Building and Construction himself—and I’ve a lot of respect for the work he’s doing—has said that “We encourage people to do this remediation work.”, but on this side of the House, our view is that we can’t just encourage; we’ve got to compel. We might want to assist as well, and that’s certainly the approach that the Labour Party had put in place with financial assistance.

This is a really serious question for this House: where are you going to strike the balance between risk to life and prosperity? Let’s not fall into the trap of thinking that it probably won’t happen, because when it does happen, it will be catastrophic. It will be beyond anything we could imagine. So let’s take advice from our scientists, seismologists, and engineers, but, most of all, let’s get on and make our buildings safe. Kia ora.

It gives me great pleasure to rise to speak in the first reading of this bill and, as others have said, its key purpose is to extend the remediation time frames for earthquake-prone buildings by four years. It’s an extension that will provide clarity and certainty both for building owners and territorial authorities as well as the Minister announced recently that the review of the management of seismic risk in the existing buildings and subsequently any legislative amendments has been brought forward from 2027. So I want to acknowledge that.

We’ve got to strike a balance, and that’s what this Government is committed to with both this bill and with the review. If we don’t strike that balance, we will only see more earthquake-prone buildings rot in our rural towns and our city centres across the country, and if members want to know what that looks like, I invite them to check out the old Molly Malones building on the corner of Courtenay Place and Taranaki Street in central Wellington. It’s been abandoned, it’s been deteriorating, it’s almost unsellable, and it’s been in that situation for 10 years.

Another well-known Wellington building that I want to point to is the former Press Gallery Annex at the back of the Beehive—earthquake-prone, but having architectural merit, according to Heritage New Zealand. Architectural merit—brutalism. It’s too hard, at first blush, to remodel for ministerial offices, so subsequently it remains empty, right here in the parliamentary precinct. We want to see less examples of empty buildings than more, hence why the Minister is acting with some haste but with a lot of consultation with his expansive review.

In Auckland, interestingly enough, more than 1,700 buildings are registered as being earthquake-prone, which is a big proportion of the over 5,000 earthquake-prone buildings nationwide. Auckland Council’s general manager of building consents, Ian McCormick, has welcomed the Government’s review: “We support the review to ensure the investment by property owners to upgrade their buildings is proportionate to Auckland’s seismic risk.” Nearly 500 deadlines are set to expire over the next four years, so this gives us time.

Again, I want to give a lot of credit to the Minister for Building and Construction, the Hon Chris Penk, for bringing forward the review of the earthquake-prone building rules and extending remediation for four years. This is a great day, and a big sigh of relief is being exhaled by councils, mayors, property managers, property owners, and business associations up and down this country. We are giving them more time and that’s what they’ve asked for, and, as one property manager said in the media just recently, an extension is a godsend.

Also, let’s have a look at this review that that’s under way and will be completed next year—2025—and, again, it has been brought forward from 2027. It’s a wide-reaching review. There will be extensive consultation across the property sector and across local government which will result in legislative changes. It will result in legislative changes, but then they will go through an exhaustive select committee process and will then be reported back to this House for debate, for further consideration, and, ultimately, for ratification.

So, for Auckland, where the Mayor of Auckland has said that there’s been no signs of earthquake activity for 100,000 years—well, we know that the Mayor of Auckland sometimes exaggerates and has a turn of phrase. But for Auckland, it makes sense. We’re a low-risk area, we need more time, and our response needs to be proportionate. So I commend this first reading to the House.

The question is, That the Building (Earthquake-prone Building Deadlines and Other Matters) Amendment Bill be considered by the Transport and Infrastructure Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Transport and Infrastructure Committee.

Instruction to Transport and Infrastructure Committee