Building (Overseas Building Products, Standards, and Certification Schemes) Amendment Bill

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I present a legislative statement on the Building (Overseas Building Products, Standards, and Certification Schemes) Amendment Bill.

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

Hon CHRIS PENK: I move, That the Building (Overseas Building Products, Standards, and Certification Schemes) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

I’m very pleased with the reception that this bill has received from various different quarters, and I will set those out shortly, if I may. But I’ve been very pleased because it seems to me that this is an important matter for New Zealand. Of course, we understand the importance of the building and construction sector to the economy but also to society, if we think about all the aims that we wish to meet by having residential housing and, of course, other structures built more affordably, quickly, and more easily, as well.

I’ll start in this, the second reading, by acknowledging the work of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, whose work in examining the bill following its first reading we now are focusing on at this, the second reading. It seemed to me that all the members of that committee conducted themselves in a very responsible and thoughtful way, considering the aims of the bill but also the detail and how that would interact with other parts of the system to ensure to the maximum extent possible that all the available protections would be in place, while not undermining, of course, the intent of the scheme to provide quicker and more broad access to building materials in this country.

As well as thanking the members of the committee, chaired by Mr Andy Foster, I want to thank those who submitted on the bill, those who lent their expertise to the endeavour, and they too contributed to the fact that some changes were made. The changes are set out quite clearly and well, I think, in the legislative statement that’s been tabled, so I won’t go through those in detail, but I’ll touch on those briefly later, if time permits.

I also want to thank the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE). The officials who have been advising me and who also, in turn, have advised the select committee have worked really hard on this. Their work has been recognised internally by MBIE, but can I place on the record my thanks to them for working with me and, again, the select committee on this important endeavour.

In terms of why the legislation was brought forward and why it’s important that it’s reported back to the House in good form following the select committee consideration is that building products, no less than any other supplies within out market, must have a decent degree of competition, resilience, choice, and innovation.

Starting with competition and recognising the importance of that, of course, in terms of a reasonable price being able to be established, and also as a matter of fairness between suppliers and products, we know from the Commerce Commission’s report in 2022 on residential building suppliers—their market study—that there was found to be a lack of competition in the supply of products. That will come as no surprise to those who have experienced this, and, certainly, I’m always offered anecdotal examples of the difficulty of obtaining a good, broad range of products at a competitive price. So I don’t need to share those; suffice it to say that in a market of the size of New Zealand, it’s all the more important that we encourage as broad a range of products as possible, with, again, that obvious caveat around quality but also sustainability, safety, and so on.

Resilience is the next point. Of course, in relation to plasterboard and the shortage associated with the COVID-19 supply shocks and so on, but in other examples, too, in the matter of resilience, we are best served by having access to more than one—or, effectively, only one—supply of products in the building space. Otherwise, building projects and construction sites almost literally will grind to a halt.

Choice speaks for itself, really, and it goes along with the point around innovation, which is that in this country, if we can obtain the benefit of the research and the development being undertaken in countries other than New Zealand as well as the good work that is done in New Zealand by people applying themselves exactly to that endeavour, then we will all be the better off for that. I do just want to point out that for the sake of Kiwi manufacturers, enabling our building products to be used without additional hoops to be jumped through in New Zealand will benefit those who are bringing in those who are bringing in those supplies from overseas, but it will also benefit New Zealand manufacturers because they will be able to measure themselves against those standards in a way that will make them more attractive to export markets overseas. They’ll immediately be able to be measured against standards from comparable and credible jurisdictions, and so that, I think, in a counterintuitive way, will actually be good for those who manufacture building supplies in this country and it will, potentially, increase their export value, as well.

Basically, the mechanism is that three different ways of approving overseas building products are allowed by the bill. One is that the Minister for Building and Construction—who is currently me, but, obviously, it won’t be for ever—

Hon James Meager: Oh!

Hon CHRIS PENK: —to the relief of many, including myself—may, by notice, recognise groups of overseas standards and standards certification schemes.

The second is the streamlining of the citing, as we say—“citing”, with a “c”—of international standards that can be used as acceptable solutions and verification methods to comply with the building code, and there’s a new mechanism called building product specifications.

Then, finally, we’re requiring building consent authorities—which is, at the moment, mostly the different councils up and down the country—to accept building products and methods certified under overseas product certification schemes.

So the long and short of it, I suppose, is that we are going to allow ourselves to use products that have already been measured against overseas standards and certification systems. The baseline is that we don’t want to have any lower standard of product, so standards that are equal to or higher than those that are already prevailing in New—

David MacLeod: Makes sense.

Hon CHRIS PENK: —will be adopted. My colleague and friend David MacLeod says that that makes sense, and I think it’s fair to say that most of the feedback from the community, including at the select committee stage, has acknowledged the good sense inherent in the proposal.

The caveat comes from others—and I acknowledge it, too—that we need to make sure that in order to avoid a loss of quality, there be credible and comparable jurisdictions that are utilised for this purpose. In other words, they are places in the world and standards that are adopted that build at least as well as New Zealand and, in some cases—let us be frank—sometimes better, and also comparable in the sense of having similar conditions in the environment or seismic activity in a way that’s relevant to the built environment. There are a number of safeguards, but, nevertheless, I think it’s also fair to note that the select committee’s point about liability, and being very clear where that lies in the unlikely event or the occasional event of a failure should be addressed. So I’ll come to that shortly.

I do just want to point out, however, that because this is primary legislation and secondary legislation, it will be used to identify that the particular schemes that we’ve been talking about—the standards and so forth—will be under regulation. In addition to mentioning the select committee—and I’ve erred in describing it in a singular way. But, again, I’m just acknowledging Mr Foster and the members of the House—particularly those here now who contributed to that—but also the Regulations Review Committee, who turned their minds to the way that this would enable the law to be updated in time in a way that reflects the fact that it might be possible to add numbers of standards over the years in a way that, frankly, we wouldn’t want to trouble this House with fully in order to have amendment Acts, and so forth.

So, in terms of that point about liability, the point was well made by the select committee that we need to be as clear as possible, certainly, to reflect my intent and the intent of the Government that where a building consent authority—mostly, a council—would have to deem as approved certain products as specified in the building consent, then the council can’t be held liable for the failure of that product, and that sort of seems like a fair quid pro quo. If they’re not being given an opportunity to object and reduce the liability or to be risk-averse on behalf of the ratepayer, then they shouldn’t face any liability associated with such failure. That seems fair to me, although I also do state as clearly as I can for the record that the building consent authority will still have a role in determining if the building product is being used in a way that is proper for that product.

The other major point that was made by the select committee that I thought, again, was helpful was about the ability of the building sector to implement the changes at an appropriate speed. Obviously, the faster the better, in terms of obtaining the benefits proposed in the bill. However, I would point out again that a rolling maul approach will be taken, with regulations coming in progressively as we determine that overseas standards and schemes are suitable. So, for that reason, it’s not a matter of this sector needing to have the capacity and the resource to implement everything all at once; it’s actually going to be a matter where we will see improvement over time.

So, for those reasons, I recognise the effort and the usefulness of the select committee report. I thank them for that, and I thank all those who have contributed to the discussion that has led us now to this second reading, and soon, in due course—hopefully, for the passage of this bill—we think that New Zealand’s building standards and building quality and, certainly, building affordability will be all the better for it. I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Good to have the dulcet tones and a backing soundtrack, while I give this speech, of building and construction work in the building. To all those tradies in the building, while we progress this important part of our building system: tēnā koutou katoa, nau mai ki tō Whare.

It’s great to be able to speak on a bill which has had such enthusiasm in the Transport and Infrastructure Committee. Every member of that committee came to this with a real desire to make sure this is a workable system, not only for those builders and tradespeople who use the products and are often needing to upskill, needing to get familiar with new products—and so we were really thinking about them—but also for those people who are in the business of bringing in new products. We want to make sure these are workable for them. We want to make sure that there is competition in the building sector so that new products are available to Kiwis. Ultimately, we would love to see this measure bring prices down and make sure that our building sector is competitive in this area, which the Commerce Commission has studied extensively and found that it wasn’t working as it should.

I’m going to deal, in this second reading speech, with some of the more technical considerations of the select committee and the submissions that we heard. I do still have some things that I need to test with the Minister for Building and Construction, about how the various mechanics of the bill will work and the new powers that the Minister has, and the way that those powers work has changed, a little bit, since the introduction of the bill—but that will be later.

This is something that Labour is supporting, so we have, on this side of the House, a real desire to make sure that it will work as intended. The intention here is that building products will get cheaper, that there will be more choice in the market, and that there will be new and innovative products that people can use. This is in the context where building and construction is one of the most important sectors in New Zealand’s economy. It makes up about 7 percent of our GDP; it employs between 10 percent and 20 percent of our people, depending on which reports you’re looking at. Those are good, well-paid, meaningful jobs. I care about those jobs, because they are, for many people, a path straight from high school into a career with options and opportunities for young people, from whatever background they may have come from. So it’s really important to me that we have an entire view of the building system—and products is one—and this is something we need to see working in the long run, because it’s not working now.

If we do get it working, we have a way to tackle some of these affordability issues in the housing system. I think one of the most significant pieces of work that the Government has on its books right now is the way that our building system works and the efficiencies that can be gained there, because the housing crisis is everyone’s problem. Without being able to get young people into their own homes, without being able to get people who are renting into cheaper rental accommodation, we have a structural problem and a structural failing in New Zealand’s economy. We’re not doing what we should be doing to make sure that people have options and people have choices. It also makes the community stronger. It gives us a solution to the incredible rates of truancy and transience that we are seeing in our high schools now—which are higher than ever—when people have roots and can own their own home or have the ability to hope for that in the next few years. So this is very important to me.

The committee worked really effectively on a few issues, and I’m going to just take you through them in the time that I have. One thing that has probably emerged as the most important thing for Labour members was the possibility of enhanced competition and consumer choice, when we’re considering the products that are used and the barriers that have existed in the New Zealand market about the use of quality overseas building products, and the changes in this bill that are aimed to improve competition in the building products market. But we need to make sure that the introduction of this system doesn’t create actually more ways of established products in the New Zealand market having to go through more compliance mechanisms. We heard from importers of certain products—things like taps, things like fixtures, things like tapes that are used in airtightness—being worried about the way that those products would need to move through a new system. Ultimately, I think that the sector came away with some comfort after the select committee process, and also the work of officials to give some comfort that, even though this is a new process, there will be a way of feeding in to any regulations that are created under it.

The next issue was recognition of overseas standards as a whole. These are complex rules—I had to spend quite a lot of time getting my head around them, because there are different ways that overseas standards can, sort of, plug into New Zealand’s certification systems now and under the introduction of this bill. But we came away with the sense that this bill was an improvement on that sort of plug-in—that there would be an ability to enable the recognition of overseas building products standards and certification schemes, removing that need for designers and builders and building consent authorities to verify those individually, and a more systematised way of doing that. That’s a good thing. The streamlining and integration of international standards was also something that we heard about from the perspective of designers, and, often, the people who are working with these standards first. The introduction of the building product specifications that will sit under this will be key to that, so that is something I will return to later, when I have the ability to engage with the Minister on it.

Acceptance of certified products, then, in the market, is something that the system will really rely on. This is a piece of legislation which needs a very high level of industry buy-in and a lot of comfort with, and faith in, a system which will change. Given that the New Zealand building system is something that has grown up over the years, with differing layers of complexity and different bits bolted on, to then be redesigning this has, I guess, been confronting for a number of players in the industry. So there are still questions around how that mandating system will work. We also have questions about the ministerial oversight with industry consultation. This was something that I took a differing view on from other members of the committee: about how prescriptive the primary legislation should be, about how the industry should be able to speak to the Minister, and when the Minister should be able to seek advice from the industry. This is something that, given that I’ve already spoken about the importance of the industry having a level of comfort with this and plenty of experience in the last 10 to 20 years with bolt-on pieces of regulation that don’t necessarily join up and talk to each other, there is, I think, a bit of an industry in engaging with Government over those rules and regulations.

We have to ensure, I think, that the primary legislation makes it clear when the Minister will make a decision, and when the Minister is out seeking consultation, and when the Minister might make a decision without consultation, because there should be an avenue for a Minister to take official advice and make sensible rules based on the advice of industry bodies as a whole and well-publicised public discourse, without necessarily a long consultation period, especially in relation to products, because products change quite quickly—there is a lot of innovation in this space—and so that was something that I thought should be very clear. That’s not a change that has been included in the set of recommendations from the committee, which were unanimous, but it’s something that I will be testing with the Minister later.

I also wanted to canvass the industry feedback on the implementation of this. There was a real call for clear guidelines and a robust assessment process to ensure that recognised overseas standards aligned with New Zealand’s safety and quality expectations. This was particularly in relation to certain products, and those products are the products that New Zealand might use differently to other jurisdictions; an example here is plasterboard, and the way that New Zealand’s construction has, in the past, used plasterboard as a structural feature of some housing. That’s not a use of that in some of the jurisdictions that we will be importing plausible products from in the future—or could in the future. So there’s a real need for a process not only at the front end but along the way to assess whether those products are suitable for New Zealand safety standards, and that they will be used in the right way, and that the quality expectations are not just assessed at the front but are assessed by the industry along the way.

The last point I wish to raise is the potential impact on domestic manufacturers. I was interested in the Minister’s novel arguments around how that might—

Cameron Luxton: How competition works.

ARENA WILLIAMS: And I’ll bring it up in the committee stage.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Kia orana, Mr Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. I rise to speak on the Building (Overseas Building Products, Standards, and Certification Schemes) Amendment Bill. I do think that this bill is interesting because, on the one hand, there are definitely many examples I can think of since I’ve been in Aotearoa where people who are involved in the building sector have raised with me the fact that they would like to bring in products that are well-tested and high performing and deliver really great outcomes in countries like Germany, where they have far higher performance standards for buildings and more evidence-based, science-based standards that reduce energy consumption for heating and cooling and also produce quieter, more comfortable environments like the passive house standard.

So, on the face of it, this bill might help address that issue where you’ve got small players who are trying to do things to the very best environmental outcomes so we can have warm, dry, healthy, comfortable, quiet homes, but they’re facing these huge barriers because the cost to get that product assessed and approved in New Zealand was simply too high for a small player. We have a few big, vertically integrated players in the construction sector in New Zealand who really haven’t been pushing the boundaries in terms of efficiency and good outcomes, and they’ve been sitting back and maybe it’s been a little bit too comfortable for them. But they were in more of a position to be able to ensure that the products they wanted to import and use would be approved and then that became a big barrier to using more energy-efficient products. That’s why, on the face of it, the Greens supported the bill to the Transport and Infrastructure Committee and will be continuing to support the bill.

However, there is going to be a lot of devil in the detail of how it’s implemented. It was very difficult to assess at the select committee whether or not this bill will result in better outcomes because so much of the detail is going to be determined and put down in the secondary legislation—that is in regulations which will be promoted by the Minister for Building and Construction and Cabinet and won’t have the same level of scrutiny that the primary legislation does. I understand the rationale for that too, because there would be a desire maybe to be agile in determining which overseas schemes, but I would have thought that the criteria that are going to be put in the regulations to assess whether or not a scheme is adopted or approved could have been put down in the primary legislation, because the criteria is something that you would think we would all be able to agree on and then it’s the application of those criteria.

Whereas, the bill as it is proposed now, it is actually that, basically, the Minister for Building and Construction may recognise schemes or standards only if the Minister is satisfied that they meet the criteria which are yet to be set out in the regulations. So I think that was a bit of a missed opportunity to put that in the primary legislation, which would have strengthened the bill. So we’ll see when the regulations come out.

I hope that the Minister will consider having some cross-party consultation on those regulations and ensure that there’s very thorough consultation with the sector, but also the different players across the sector, not just the few big ones but the people who are really at the cutting edge of being passionate about and wanting to deliver more environmentally friendly, healthy homes. Because if we can make it easier to do that in New Zealand, I think that will be a huge win for everyone. One of the main things that even motivated me to get involved in politics after I moved here was seeing the quality of buildings and infrastructure in New Zealand and thinking, “Wow. Things could actually be a lot better with some changes from central government policy, regulations, and funding.” One of those areas is most definitely in the building code, where we have been lagging behind. It’s just such a huge win, win opportunities to get better outcomes.

One of the submitters that we heard from on this bill—and I thought it’d be worth bringing up in my speech on this—is an adviser at Tennent Brown Architects, Caitlyn Lee, who spent the last eight years as a materials researcher. She’s researching building materials for the Living Building Challenge, which is the most rigorous sustainability standard in the world for buildings. It’s really inspiring—it’s really what the future of buildings needs to be and it makes so much sense in an Aotearoa context for us to be embracing.

Indeed, there’s a new building up the road at Victoria University which is part of the marae which is world-leading and an amazing commercial teaching facility but also a wharekai adjacent to the wharenui at Victoria University. That building demonstrates what can be achieved when there is a genuine commitment to absolute best practice. So Living Building Challenge would look at things like whether or not there’s toxic materials used, what the carbon emissions are, what the energy-efficiency is. The main ones are zero net water, so you’re not putting extra stress on the water systems and you’re managing all of the stormwater and waste water pretty much on site or adjacent, which is pretty useful, particularly in a Wellington context.

Then one of the topics that is in this submission, which I highly recommend that people look at, is the issues around toxicity. There’s a whole lot of very commonly used building materials that are highly toxic and we actually need some sort of—they will have impacts on the environment, on human health. Because we don’t see the impacts immediately, we don’t fully account for the cost of those health impacts and the impacts it has on our society over time. But it actually does make sense to phase out toxic products and create that market and demand for a supply chain of non-toxic products that are viable alternatives. Timber is a perfect example as well.

One of the concerns that the Green Party had when we first looked at this bill is: is this going to lead to more imported building products as opposed to those that are domestically produced? The answer is, well, we almost couldn’t have more imported building products. As 90 percent of our building products are imported, we may as well be importing ones of a higher standard from countries that have better building standards. But I’m sure that everyone in New Zealand would like to see and could understand the economic benefit to New Zealand of us processing more of our wood here, for example, for cross-laminated timber, which could then be used in sustainable buildings as framing instead of seal—low-carbon, sustainably forested, locally produced.

This was one of the issues brought up in the submission from Tennent Brown that in the Living Building Challenge standard—and there are a number of Living Building Challenge buildings in Aotearoa right now—they do look at carbon emissions and local sourcing of products where possible. So you’re trying to balance up a whole lot of different things. But I think all New Zealanders would love to see more high-quality processing of wood, for example, more local production, because they’re important jobs that we could be creating right here in New Zealand and actually reducing some of the cost by not having to rely so much on imported products from overseas.

In order to achieve that, we need a couple of different things to happen. And that goes well beyond this bill, though it was raised in a number of submissions. The Wood Processors and Manufacturers Association also raised concerns that if we aren’t looking to have a specific support for the industry here in New Zealand, there is a risk that we miss out on those benefits, and also we want to be sure that the standards that we’re adopting are relevant to the New Zealand context and climate, which is quite unique.

My brother is a builder here in Wellington and up in Kāpiti and he will often tell me about—he’s actually quite excited to use some really novel products and techniques that are extremely environmentally friendly and it would be fantastic if we could start producing these here in New Zealand. One of the ones he’s really excited about is hempcrete. We do need to make it easier to grow hemp in New Zealand—that’s a regulatory issue the Government could take on—and to produce hempcrete because it actually is a very practical building material.

So the Green Party is supporting the bill but I would love to see from the Government more of a commitment to actually raise building performance standards here in New Zealand and address the issues around domestic production and products to real support for local industries here, and that requires actually taking into account full environmental externalities.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. On behalf of tradies, designers, and everyone who’s gone for an application with any kind of unique product, this is a great day, and it’s about time. Minister Penk, well done on bringing such a sensible, obvious piece of legislation. I think back to many times that I’ve been sitting around a building site with other tradies and the question just, you know—we’re a bunch of tradies, we’re having a smoko, we’ve been working all day, and we’d sit around and you’d ask the question, “Why can’t we just use these products that I saw on YouTube or on some other building influencer overseas who’s got this great idea?”, but we can’t use it in New Zealand.

Well, it’s got to be said, it is just ridiculous the amount of hurdles that you have to go through to get something into New Zealand. Let’s start with all the different building consent authorities (BCAs) and the fact that you’ve got to try and get your new, innovative product signed off on every single one of them before it’s accepted to be built in their area.

This legislation is going to have the added benefit of meaning that when you take the risk of importing a product and getting a house built for cheaper, more efficient, and safer, you will be able to have a one-stop sort of solution to that. You are no longer, and I—actually, it might help if I do this with a story. I was part of building a house. I was the licensed building practitioner of building a house that was imported from Europe. And the materials—it came in a container, it got stacked by a crane. It was a great, innovative idea. It was incredibly cheap material to bring in; a piece of plasterboard was $10 compared to the same purchased plasterboard in New Zealand for $25 a sheet. So that’s the sort of savings that we were talking about.

But it ended up costing about the same amount as a building built out of New Zealand products because of the hurdles of compliance. Every time an inspector turned up, you had to get 12,000 pages out and go through, “Was this allowed?”, “Was this not allowed?” It was actually one of the most ridiculous experiences I’ve ever seen in the building industry. And that company, after trying to do it in one BCA jurisdiction and planning to roll it out across the country, pulled the pin and bailed out of New Zealand and said, “This is ridiculous, we’re not coming back here.”

So, hopefully—not even hopefully—this legislation, and I know we’re in the second reading and there’s another committee stage and a third reading to go. But when this legislation passes, we’re going to see products from overseas that are cheaper, more efficient, safer, provide a better quality of building, but also mean that New Zealand producers can access ideas overseas, bring them into New Zealand, innovate products, and actually test it out in New Zealand and come up. So I think the Minister of Building and Construction’s innovative argument about the improvement in New Zealand suppliers is a real one.

Going along with other things that this Government has done—and this Minister has done—like improving minor variations so that like-for-like substitutions can be made. That is going to go hand in glove with a change like this. You can tell I’m a bit animated about this because I go back to some of these experiences where you go, “Look, they’ve run out of this type of building product, can we substitute it for this identical one where all the details and the plans are the same, it’s just the product logo at the top that’s different?” and you get “No, put the tools down, come back in two months—

Simon Court: Culture of no.

CAMERON LUXTON: —and see if you can do this”. Well, this—Mr Court, you raise a great point—is what we are doing to end the culture of no; it’s a culture of yes. We’re going to get affordable housing back, tradies are going to be happy, we’re going to get that sort of lifestyle in New Zealand that we expect of a property-owning democracy. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

What a pleasure it is to follow our resident builder. This time I think I can get away with saying that, because Mr Speaker is not actually in the Chair; it’s you, Mr Assistant Speaker, instead. So, look, I wanted to start off just by giving my thanks to, first of all, the Minister for Building and Construction for driving this through. I’m going to come back to some of the initiatives that he has been pushing through this House, which are all about trying to make sure that we can build houses cheaper because that is a really fundamental thing.

Secondly, I want to thank the Transport and Infrastructure Committee—which I have the privilege of chairing—for, as always, being collegial, constructive, and getting to the point and the heart of the matter, and I think it’s doing a great job. The officials who gave us a lot of good advice, technical advice, answering the questions that we needed answering, and also the submitters, who, again, were a lot of people with a lot of technical skills, which was very, very helpful to us.

The fundamental problem in New Zealand with housing is it’s expensive—it is really expensive. You can do a lot of things about making it cheaper. We can go through cycles. I mean, in Wellington City, where I have the sad pleasure at the moment of owning a house, the house prices have dropped by about 25 percent, or the house values have dropped by about 25 percent, over the last three years—I think it’s 22 percent, to be more exact. That’s not a great way, though, of getting house prices down for people who want to buy them, because as soon as you start doing that, what happens is that the cost of building starts becoming much more expensive than the cost of buying something that’s already there, and people just say, “I’m not going to build new houses.”, and that does nothing whatsoever for being able to create more houses, which we say that we need as a country.

Fundamentally, what we need to do is we need to get the actual cost of building houses down. So the solutions—there are a whole lot of those. As I said, the Minister, I think, is doing a great job there. One of the things he did say in introducing this legislation a while back is that the cost of building a house in New Zealand is about 50 percent more than the cost of building a house over the Ditch in Australia.

He also said that the productivity has not improved since 1985—1985. So that is a drag not just on the cost of building but it’s also a drag on the entire economy, if you have a whole sector which is not improving its productivity. If we want to make the boat go faster, that means the other boats have got to paddle even faster, and that is a real problem. So we have to make the building sector more productive and that is what the Minister is doing.

So this is one of several initiatives. Obviously, reducing the cost of building materials is very, very important, speeding up the way in which we do consents. And, especially, I mean, what Cam Luxton was talking about—I hear so often this issue: do you actually have to wait for the building inspector to turn up? That means down tools for quite a while, maybe somebody is sick, whatever it might be. That time really genuinely is money, so that is a real, real cost. We’ve got to get the building consenting process to be much, much more efficient.

Prefabrication, modular construction, the granny flats work which is being done at the moment to make those cheaper to deliver, Resource Management Act changes—there’s a whole suite of different things which are going through, and this Government is all about trying to make the boat go faster, trying to improve the economy, and in the building sector that is really, really important.

But coming back to the building products which this is all about, we know that more competition, generally speaking, improves productivity, improves performance. I think the point that the Minister was making is that you’ve got more productivity, you’ve got more different products being able to be brought in through the scheme, which I’m going to describe very shortly. That’s got to sharpen people’s minds in New Zealand, because you either sharpen their minds or you go out of business because you’re not competitive.

The Hon Julie Anne Genter just made some comments that it would be lovely to see more things built in New Zealand—100 percent agree. That’s why we’re New Zealand First. We’d like to see that. But we also need to know that we have to do that by being the best, by being competitive with other people. So having other products being brought into the New Zealand market has got to sharpen people’s thinking, sharpen people’s innovation, and so on, because we know that near monopolies or monopolies don’t perform very well. I mean, you’ve got to look across the banking sector, the supermarket sector, a lot of building products sector. That is a real problem in this country.

So what this bill is about is establishing new compliance pathways, speeding those compliance pathways up for the approval of new products or product lines. One of the things I would say, though, is it’s about, as the Minister said, making sure that the products which come in are not just picked off the shelf but are from established, approved, certified product lines and products that other constituencies or other jurisdictions have got. It’s only going to be the ones which we have confidence in. So you’re not going to pick them necessarily from every country in the world, but you will pick them from the countries and from those certification processes where there is confidence in those certification processes and in the products which come through their processes.

The important thing is, particularly, we all want confidence in any product that we purchase. It doesn’t matter what it is. We want it to be fit for its purpose. We want it to be able to last the length of time we expect it to be able to last. And, of course, when it comes to the product, which is the most expensive thing most of us will ever buy—a house—that is really, really important. Something that you would expect to last in New Zealand—a minimum of 50 years is what the building code says, and that to me is not long enough. We should be thinking about products which will last a lot longer than that. But it’s really, really important that it lasts the distance. So it’s not fit for purpose just now; it’s also fit for purpose for decades and decades and decades to come. That is really, really important. So people need to have confidence in that—the people who are building the buildings, but also the people who are buying those buildings.

We spent, as a select committee, quite some time thinking about safeguards and talking about safeguards and trying to say, “Are we going to see some of the risks that we saw going back to the leaky homes situation?” Because, for some of us, that is a very, very painful memory. For many New Zealanders, that’s a painful memory personally. But for those of us—for example, I was in local government for much of that time—that cost this city something like $150 million trying to clean up the mess that was made by substandard products and by substandard processes which were put in place to build those things. So it’s utterly essential that we make sure that this regime is robust and that people can have confidence in it. That is completely essential.

What we did here, because, as I said, we asked a lot of questions about this, is the processes are now far, far more robust than they were in the 2000s when we went through the leaky building process, or when those problems started to happen.

I must say, during that process it was so bad for us that I was certainly talking both as a councillor and as a mayor about handing our building consent warrant back, because it was just purely a liability for us. One of the things I do think is great is that the Minister is saying, “Why do we need 62?” You heard that from Cam Luxton as well. Why do we need 60-plus different building consenting authorities, because building consents should be pretty much the same across the country? You will have differences in insulation standards and so on, but, basically, building consent is about making sure you’ve got a building which is fit for purpose. It’s not about effects on other people. It’s not like a resource consent. It’s not like issues about effects on environment. So it makes sense to centralise those things and maybe the Crown should step up.

One of the things which we did ask about, and certainly I was very, very keen to ask about, is that this bill provides for, as you heard earlier—as I said, the leaky building crisis landed very heavily on local government, as the last man standing. Here, local government is, essentially, indemnified against the product itself failing. If the way in which it is constructed, the way in which it’s used, is wrong and the building inspectors don’t pick that up, then, yes, there’s an issue of liability. But the product itself, they’re indemnified against, and I think that is a great thing.

But that left the question, obviously, of: if the product does fail, who does the poor person in the street come to and say, “Well, who’s going to look after me? I didn’t know that this product wasn’t fit for purpose. You said it was fit for purpose.”? Oh, and in this case, who is the—oh, sorry, Mr Speaker, I can’t say “you” in this sense. But who is it that has approved that product? Well, it’s a product which has been approved in some overseas jurisdiction, and then it’s a product which has been approved by who? The Minister and the ministry of building, innovation and employment on behalf, essentially, of the Government. So should the Government, at the very least, be standing alongside the people who are reliant on these products which are approved through this scheme if something goes wrong? And we hope, of course, it won’t. And, of course, those processes, as I said, are much more robust. But should the Government be standing alongside those consumers? I think that they should.

This is all about trying to reduce the overall costs, which is a good thing. It’s about trying to give us more innovation, more different products. What it does is it reduces the expected time to process and to recognise those overseas products. Something like two years to about three to eight months is the expectation. What it should do is to help drive down the cost of housing. It is just one of many different initiatives that this Government is taking, and I think that is absolutely necessary because the cost of housing is a significant problem in this country, both for our people and for our economy. I commend this bill to the House.

Mr Speaker, tēnā koe. E tautoko ana mātou i tēnei Pire. [We support this bill.]

So that’s all good; we’re on board. I just want to start like this, just like, just steady: if only building Treaty relationships, or building hapū and iwi—[Interruption] I know; good right?

Andy Foster: We have a point of order already—ha, ha! Relevance.

MARIAMENO KAPA-KINGI: I know, I know, hold on; you got it. Just stick with me! It’s OK—or building hapū and iwi relationships had the same interest and effort that this Building (Overseas Building Products, Standards, and Certification Schemes) Amendment Bill had. Really critical. So I just want to start by opening with those comments.

We support this bill because hapū and iwi and whānau want safe and healthy homes. Of course we do—not a new thing. Why do I know that? Because I built 16 homes before I came to this job—just before I came, by the way—in a tiny little place, all the way in Te Kao. Sixteen homes. And here’s how we built them: we built them with our own product out of our forests. We built them with our own kaimahi. The original option was “Meno, you’ve got to go all the way to Hamilton to build your 16 homes, to transport them all the way up to Te Kao.” All the bulk of the funding would have been lost in transport. We decided to do it ourselves, in collaboration with the builders just down the road, like 20 minutes down.

So I understand this idea and this bill in this context. How do you apply the science? I’m not going to talk about the technicalities; there are much more in-tune people that understand those when you talk about standards and certification. That doesn’t really turn me on, by the way. But what does is the result of it, and how we get those results for whānau. What I can tell you is this: our whānau and our hapū and our iwi are ready to do this themselves, for themselves. Our whānau want homes, and they want homes—actually, they want homes, well built, whether it’s overseas—ideally it’s product from home, by the way, but if it’s overseas product, as long as we can work with it, as long as it’s checked off, as long as it doesn’t fall over and fail like leaky homes, because those impacts were terrible for Māori whānau, as well. So I want to make those points.

We want to own our homes. We want to flip homes, by the way. We want to own homes; our communities want to own homes. Our hapū and our iwi groups want to build not just the home but the community in which they exist. To turn a house into a home into a thriving tribal community. Those are the ultimate outcomes that our whānau are seeking and expect me to talk about. Not the technicalities so much, but sort of, “So, what does that mean for us, Meno? I mean, big deal, you’re talking about this bill. Tell me how it matters at home.” So I want to make those comments, in this very small contribution.

There’s always risk when people talk about red tape or blue tape, guys, whatever the tape is, and if you’re wanting to reduce that tape—I kind of get that, of course. No one wants to be hobbled by too much red tape, but don’t take away too much, then you’re going to have to apologise for what you took away before. So it is about a watch, analyse, assess, so we’re watching this progress all the time, because ultimately, if we fail, we fail our communities, we fail our people. That’s my contribution, that’s the contribution of Te Pāti Māori, and we tautoko mārika tēnei whakaaro [we fully support its intent]. Tēnā tātou.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I write in support of the Building (Overseas Building Products, Standards, and Certification Schemes) Amendment Bill. I echo the comments from previous speakers, particularly my colleague to my right—the Hon Julie Anne Genter—who is a permanent member of the select committee that evaluated this bill, the Transport and Infrastructure Committee. I think it’s really important to recognise that, throughout this House, there’s been so far a desire for our homes and our buildings to be good quality and suited to our unique climate and environment, that they deliver good outcomes for our communities—particularly health outcomes as well—that the way that we build things lasts, some members express interest, particularly, that the environmental impacts of the building products that we use are minimised so that we build with the environment, not against it.

I think this bill recognises that we have an issue where some players in the market have benefited from the current settings, and I recognise that this bill aims to increase access and competition so that we can have a broader range of building products. I think, to me, the real answer as to the outcomes for our communities will be, as other members have noted, in the secondary legislation. I echo the calls for, perhaps, the Minister for Building and Construction to look at whether we should actually have a framework that allows good decision making in those regulations so that standards are set to help guide this Government and future Governments to make good decisions.

I support and recognise that we don’t want to be prescriptive in primary legislation when it comes to some of the standards that we set, because, at the end of the day, building materials and products are an evolving piece of work, and there’s new technologies that enable new materials, and, for example, even in what my colleague referenced when it comes to hemp, there may be changes that will unlock the potential to actually use materials that, right now, are massively underutilised. So, yeah, we recognise the need for secondary legislation to create those frameworks.

But I think some guiding principles will be really good so that, actually, when people from offshore; from countries with comparative economies visit us, they’re not shocked at the quality of our homes. It’s wild to me when I’ve met peers from much colder countries who come here and they say they experience, for example, the winter here in a much more severe way than they would in their own home countries.

I acknowledge that to, for example, have good quality, healthy homes and buildings, we’ll need to look at other levers as well. I think, as part of this bill, the Government should be looking at other pieces of legislation and frameworks to change, including, for example, addressing the fact that while I accept that this bill is coming in, accepting the reality that we import most of our building products, but there could be some work that the Government and the State could be doing to process things like our timber onshore so that we, as Mariameno Kapa-Kingi talked about, don’t face these additional costs that come from the fact that, actually, we haven’t unlocked the potential in our own people and in our own materials to build good quality buildings.

I think, particularly, supporting our construction workforce will be critical alongside what this bill is aiming to do, because, right now, the construction sector has not been given certainty. What this means is that, actually, our workforce is facing peaks and throes when it comes to building projects. So we had an opportunity, for example, in the Kāinga Ora building programme to really sit in place and retain our construction workforce to develop them and support them so that, alongside what this bill is aiming to do, we have a really well-supported, well-paid construction workforce that allows us to build the best possible buildings that we can have in this country.

The Green Party is supporting this bill, but we continue to encourage the Government to set a framework so that the decisions that the Minister is able to do in relationship to what this bill prescribes have some good guiding principles to make this bill enduring and so that it can adapt over the years.

Finally, I just want to say that we all need to honour the comments that have been made around wanting people to have good quality homes. That means the Government then needs to own up to its other decisions that are actually leaving people living in mouldy, cold, damp homes. We shouldn’t be taking this bill in isolation; we should be seeing it as part of a holistic project.

It’s a pleasure to rise and join the chorus of support in this House today for this bill. It is a good bill. It’s a good bill that will speed up the productivity of building and there’s a lot of merit in this bill. I’ve actually heard a lot of the debate and I think the Minister for Building and Construction actually stole most of my speech, but it’s a very good Minister in Chris Penk. But I just want to say it’s been a pleasure to be part of the select committee process to examine the details of this bill. The Transport and Infrastructure Committee did make some minor recommendations. We discussed the issue of liability extensively, and I’m encouraged with the Minister’s direction of travel, which will be to do a review around the liability settings. I think this is a good bill for many reasons. We’ve just got to build more homes; more cheap, affordable homes. This bill will help us do that and I commend it to the House.

Kia orana, Madam Speaker. Thank you. It’s a pleasure to rise and take a call in support of this bill this afternoon, the Building (Overseas Building Products, Standards, and Certification Schemes) Amendment Bill. It’s often at this stage of the day when long titles like that can trip people up. It’s got a long title, of course, because it identifies the various aspects that this particular bill is seeking to address. It is about the building products that come from overseas. It’s about the standards and, of course, it’s about the scheme under which certification would take place.

I’m a member of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee and it was a pleasure to sit on that committee whilst this bill was progressing through the Parliament. I do want to acknowledge those submitters who took time to submit on this. There were 44 submissions that were received. Many of them, actually, were quite technical in nature, and then, of course, we had nine submitters that provided oral evidence to the committee, which was a great chance to just tease out some of the issues, often from those in the industry but also from those that are going about their business.

I want to acknowledge our colleague Cameron Luxton, who actually brought quite an insight to the select committee as someone who, prior to coming to this place, was actively involved in this particular sector. So I think it’s fair to say that committee members sitting on this side of the House or in our party appreciated the expertise that he did bring to the discussions, and teasing out some of the issues in a practical sense as well. I want to acknowledge the officials that were able to respond to many of the issues that were raised—again, many of them very technical in nature—and that is always appreciated by the select committee.

Of course this is not the only select committee that turned its mind to this bill. As our report indicates, the Regulations Review Committee also identified an issue initially, when they were reviewing the bill, that sought to question why it was that a decision-making provision would be left to secondary legislation by way of regulations. Their preference at the time, from what I can recollect, is that they would prefer that decision-making capacity of the nature within which this bill was seeking to provide is best suited sitting in the primary legislation.

But the report identifies that the Regulations Review Committee finally agreed that, actually, given the urgency that sometimes might be needed to address some of the concerns around criteria changing, in a circumstance where criteria may need to be changed at short notice in order to prevent or mitigate risk when it comes to building failure or product use that might be subject to failure, that actually it was appropriate in those circumstances for that provision to sit with the regulations through secondary legislation. So I do want to acknowledge the Regulations Review Committee for that.

This is a bill that does create speed, but, at the same time, it doesn’t create a sense of compromise, in a good way—compromising the integrity of building products, whatever they might be. This establishes a process that, effectively, is in the hands of the Minister for Building and Construction to sort of oversee. But one of the changes that the select committee did also look at was the role that a building advisory panel or group could actually provide. When this bill came to the select committee, it was suggested that there wouldn’t really be a direct link between the Minister and that body. Once the committee established that this is a body that—you know, they are public appointments, they have folk who are directly from the sector—actually, this would be another layer that could be provided to support good decision making by the Minister. So one of the changes that the select committee has recommended is that actually there’s a little bit more of a formality in the sense of the Minister being able to call upon the expertise of that group or that panel for any advice that they may be able to provide. So I do think that there is a good move in terms of providing some robustness around that.

My colleague Arena Williams, who is our spokesperson for building and construction, has outlined a few things already this afternoon. One of those is the benefit that this bill will provide, and that’s why we’re supportive of it, that this is a bill that will provide direct benefits to homeowners, that they can have some confidence in the products that are used around their homes or in workplaces are actually products that can be—I won’t say “guaranteed”, but there can be some confidence, I think is actually the word that the chair of the committee, Mr Foster, used, that there can be some confidence in that. This is targeted towards a sector within our community that is so important in terms of our economy; I’m talking about the building and construction sector.

My colleague Ms Williams talked about it being around 7 percent of GDP. That is not an insignificant sort of quantum where that would sit at. So it is important that we are promoting and supporting legislation that is going to empower and fuel that particular sector, that building construction is going to be able to thrive, that there’ll be people within the sector who’ll be able to get about their business, that they’ll be able to deliver on all of the things that people have already talked about in the House today that won’t provide a barrier or a limitation to having good products available to them. What does that do? It leads to competition. And at the end of the day, that is a good thing when it comes to this particular sector of our community and our economy. A strong, comprehensive building sector is so important for New Zealand, and having confidence in that is certainly important as well.

The thing I like about the sector is that it sort of delves into two areas. This bill really does target housing. It provides for affordability, it provides for more houses to be to be built—something that the Government might want to take a little bit of a leaf out of that particular book—but on the other hand, it also provides for good skill uptake and development, and that when we think about apprenticeship opportunities, that opportunities that exist in the trades are going to be effectively supported as a result of legislation like this, that there is good competition, there is the element of choice, but that there is the element of confidence and of safety as well.

This is a bill that has been called for by the industry. It provides a platform or an opportunity or a pathway for good decisions to be taken, but decisions that are also going to be safe. On that basis, I’m happy to commend this bill to the House.

Oh, Madam Speaker, hello.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Hello.

TIM COSTLEY: It’s a pleasure to just talk about this bill—fantastic piece of work. I want to commend the Minister, the Hon Chris Penk, and all those that have been working on it. Of course, there’s always a number of people behind the scenes—the officials that come to the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, those that submit, and the whole team that work in that office. I do just want to acknowledge them and give credit for the work that has gone into this, because it is really important: we have to cut the cost of building houses, we have to make it faster and easier to build houses.

But we also have to tackle some of the issues around resilience, in my view. When we think about supply chain resilience, that’s one piece I’d like to talk about in the context of the three key things that this bill sets out to do. The first one of those three is around increasing the supply of acceptable building materials and recognising overseas standards and standard certification schemes. In other words, not just having a really tight definition and just a singular product that you might be able to line your walls with but opening up to products that work really well overseas where it’s a comparable environment that they’re being used. It may be, for example, that some parts of New Zealand are very comparable to coastal parts of Australia and certain places, and we can say, “Well, look, if this product is certified by them and we accept their standards and their certification schemes, actually we can open up to a wider range of products.”

It helps New Zealanders in a number of ways. To start with, more products mean more competition. If we think back to the report—I think it was 2022—from the Commerce Commission that talked about the lack of competition in the building sector in some products, actually increasing the number of products available will drive down prices, will stop people being able to just ramp up their prices when there’s a limited supply in the market, and that makes it cheaper for the average Kiwi household to build a house. That’s got to be a good thing. More than that, it means there are more products available, so there is a bigger surplus of them. So you don’t have the same fighting over limited products, and wait times, that kind of thing.

Secondly, I’ll just come back to that resilience perspective. When that door got slammed shut—back in those awful COVID years—on our supply chain, if people hadn’t worked out how big an issue supply chain resilience was, well, they worked it out pretty quickly, because suddenly we made it way too hard for shipping and freight companies to come to New Zealand. Supply lines dried up. If we have more supply coming in, if we have different supply chains, then, if something would happen that would interrupt one shipping lane, maybe another one can carry it and we can bring in different products. We can keep building those houses that Kiwi families desperately need, and that’s what we are really focused on: growing the economy and growing the number of houses.

Of course, this sits alongside some of the other great work going on at the moment, like the rebuild of the Resource Management Act, because we need to cut through the red tape there in terms of the resource consents to open up new areas to build in. That goes hand in glove with this work around consenting, and that’s the second part of this: it’s around streamlining the citing of international standards that can be used. In other words, if the way to meet the building code in the country of this product or this design specification works, why wouldn’t we accept that as an equal way of meeting the compliance in New Zealand? Make it easier to get through those consenting pathways, because I just hear frustration after frustration from people hitting these barriers. Why wouldn’t we accept safe ways to meet that consenting pathway, when they’re available?

That all gets brought together by that third part, which is requiring building consent authorities to accept these new ones. So you put the three together: more products gets us cheaper homes; consenting pathways gets us faster homes; and the third part, around consenting authorities, ensures this will be done. It gets more houses for Kiwis, it gets cheaper houses for Kiwis, and it helps us grow our economy. That’s what we’re focused on. I commend the bill to the House.

This is a split call.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Tackling the productivity issues in the building and construction industry is surely God’s work. As long as I’ve been in this House, a venerable procession of Ministers and spokespersons have gone through this role. I see one of the former Ministers—the Hon Jenny Salesa—sitting there. I was a spokesperson back in the day, and many people have had a crack at it.

The challenges are formidable. Very low productivity by international standards—in an industry which itself is plagued by low productivity globally. The most terrible health and safety record in the construction industry, in New Zealand. A demonstrative lack of competition and the presence of anti-competitive practices in the market. And the granddaddy of them all was the leaky homes catastrophe, which was mostly in Auckland, a city plagued by cowboy builders—still today, actually—it’s an industry that is rife with exploitation of migrant workers.

There is much to be done and this bill tackles one of the issues that has been the subject of much debate over recent years, and that is trying to open up the market and make it more competitive by eliminating the barriers to building products that otherwise find it hard to get in to the market.

It was the market study in 2022 under our Government—as with most of the good things coming through this House these days, the genesis is in the last Labour Government and it’s good to see support from across the House for this bill. The impetus for the Commerce Commission’s market study on building supplies was a very strong perception, particularly in relation to the likes of plasterboard, that the market dynamics were preventing new players coming into the market. In fact, plasterboard is a celebrated case study of how incumbent market players used their market position to keep out products that were highly successful internationally but unable to get a toehold in this little market at the bottom of the South Pacific—to the detriment of the final consumers, the homeowners, homebuyers. This is one of many factors—not the biggest factor, but one of the factors—making our houses very expensive.

What this bill does is it tries to eliminate some of those barriers principally by allowing the Minister of the day to approve groups of standards from comparable jurisdictions overseas and allowing them to be basically dragged and dropped into our regulations. I think that is definitely to be applauded.

I just do want to register some of the concerns from—I didn’t serve on the select committee that was considering this bill, but some of the concerns that came out of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee discussions. Arena Williams mentioned earlier in the debate with plasterboard the fact that we have this quite unusual practice in New Zealand of using plasterboard as a structural material when it gets tacked up on the framing. It’s not used in that way overseas, so we have to be careful about the way that materials are used to make sure that the new materials are appropriate given the way that they might be used here.

Questions about whether or not this will, in fact, drive competition, because if it is going to result in increased competition, those products actually have to find their way on to the shelves of the retailers and wholesalers so that builders can actually get them. The industry is very, very adept at using various techniques at point of sale to prevent products actually getting to the consumers. So that’s something to be considered.

Other concerns that were raised is the question of being—

The member’s time has—

Tom Rutherford: Madam Chair.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: —expired. Thank you, Tom Rutherford.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m sorry to cut the member off. He was halfway through a sentence. But I’m in a bit of an unusual position, having been on the Transport and Infrastructure Committee when the bill was referred to it and, then, during the period, moving off the select committee and moving on to the Justice Committee. So I heard the beginning and I heard a lot of submissions on it, but I didn’t do the nitty-gritty bit at the end. But it was a really, as other members have said throughout, collegial discussion that was had on the committee. It looked at the detail around what was actually being spoken, and, as Tangi Utikere said as well, Cameron Luxton from his lived experience as a builder was really useful for tapping into his expertise and understanding in this space as well.

One of the points that hasn’t quite been canvassed yet, though, is around the 2022 market study, done by the Commerce Commission, on residential building supplies, where they said they found that competition for the supply of key building products was not working as well as it could be. We often forget, but New Zealand is a really small trading nation in the scheme of the world. We are a small trading nation, so anything we can do to remove barriers to high-quality products entering the New Zealand market, to increase consumer choice, and to increase competition and provide greater resilience to the supply disruptions is a really good thing, and that’s exactly what this piece of legislation does, so I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s my privilege this evening to speak on behalf of the Labour Party in support of the Building (Overseas Building Products, Standards, and Certification Schemes) Amendment Bill. Back in December of 2022, the Commerce Commission released the final report of its residential building supplies market study, which found, of course, that competition for the supply and acquisition of key building products is not working as well as it could.

Of course, in this House, surprise, surprise, if we go back—and it’s been mentioned in the House, of course—the challenges in supply across the COVID period at a time when we were building a significant number of houses in this country.

Of course, coming from the Northcote community, we are very familiar with some incredible housing developments, and we’ve seen firsthand the blend, I guess, between social houses, homes for first-home buyers, and those for market rental. Getting that right mix in a community is incredibly important. This week, yesterday, I attended the Project Auckland luncheon, where Minister Chris Bishop and Minister Simeon Brown spoke, and spoke to the complexities of Tāmaki-makau-rau Auckland and the city, particularly when it comes to housing—lack of—transport, and infrastructure, the impact that that has on both our GDP and productivity and the overall potential of a major city in this country. Huge opportunity missed, currently.

So when it comes to this particular bill, we know that, obviously, speed is important when it comes to the supply and products, but one of the major issues in our communities in Auckland is affordability. So that first opportunity to step up into having an affordable rental or, ideally, owning your first home and having that leg up in your life really comes back to affordability, and that’s one of the things that I’m most passionate about in this particular piece of legislation.

The building amendment bill today responds to competition issues in the sector by amending the Building Act 2004 to remove barriers to overseas building products that enter Aotearoa New Zealand’s building product market and are being used in New Zealand’s buildings. It does this, and can I acknowledge the Minister responsible for this piece of legislation, the Hon Chris Penk—in any case, he’s a good North Shore boy, like some of us in the room. His work provides him the opportunity, as the Minister for Building and Construction, to recognise overseas standards or standard certification schemes by notice. It’s important to listen to some of the industry experts, and acknowledging the number of submissions—44 in total, nine of which presented, online through Zoom or in person, to the Transport and Infrastructure Committee. Can I acknowledge you, Andy Foster, the chair of that particular select committee.

But that advice there, of course, is that these standards are important and that the select committee was very clear that while they wanted to eliminate barriers, they certainly didn’t want to compromise the key standards that were in place in New Zealand when it came from overseas suppliers.

One of the headaches I remember, of course, is, is when we had a bit of a shortage and we shifted to the need for plasterboard—you might remember, Madam Speaker. It was quite a common topic in this House, and we, on repeat, talked about plasterboard, plasterboard, plasterboard. Who knew that there was plasterboard? I certainly learnt something back in that time. But Labour is cautious about the product substitutions for plasterboard being approved in groups. They are used in a structurally different way in other countries. It may be that the rules in other countries for plasterboard should not apply here because of the way it is used by New Zealand house builders.

Phil Twyford actually got a major shout-out at the Project Auckland launch yesterday for the work that he’d done as the Minister back in 2017-2018. He was acknowledged in the speeches to talk about the urban development work that he’d done at that particular time and how relevant it is, actually, to this piece of legislation as well, because, obviously, without good supplies and the right supplies at the right price, it makes it very difficult to build the urban environments that a city like Auckland actually needs.

Lastly, you know, I do want to give a shout-out—within my tertiary education portfolio, of course—back to the apprenticeship scheme. It’s something I’m very proud of the last Labour Government for, and I want that work to continue under Te Pūkenga. Related to this legislation and housing overall, of course, is the 200,000 apprentices and trainees that were funded under the last Government. Particularly, we need to ensure that that support, that training, is available for young people to continue so work like this can be enabled, because, of course, we can have cheaper plasterboard, but we may not have the right subbies and the right team on board to do the job that is required.

So I think this is a very good technical piece of legislation before us today, and I commend it to the House.

I rise to support the Building (Overseas Building Products, Standards, and Certification Schemes) Amendment Bill. Time to get things built in this country. Time to get rid of the red tape which has been holding the construction industry back, let’s be honest. We are in an infrastructure deficit and we need to get on with the job. Part of this is making it easier to build infrastructure and easier to build our houses. This will ensure that we have more affordable houses. We need to remove those barriers to those high-quality products and bring them in from overseas—other countries are using them. We’re looking offshore to Australia, and it’s 50 percent cheaper to build a house across the Tasman. I mean, we need to bring down the cost of building in New Zealand so that we can create more affordable homes. This bill will go a long way to creating more competition so that we can bring down those prices and ensure that we can get families into their first homes.

If I look at my own electorate of Tukituki, I’m seeing a huge amount of development going on across Hastings; some wonderful housing developments in Flaxmere and also in Havelock North. We want to make it easier for builders to be able to get the quality products in to build the quality, affordable homes that we need. This not only creates affordable homes but it creates jobs and opportunities across our region. We’ve already heard in this debate that the construction industry is worth 7 percent to our GDP. That’s thousands of jobs for our regions, and that is what grows our economy. But, you know, it does come back to our families and having an affordable home, and this bill does go a long way to cutting the red tape, getting on with building, and saying yes to building houses, yes to building infrastructure, and I say yes to this bill. I commend it to the House.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a second time.