Building and Construction Sector (Strengthening Occupational Licensing Regimes) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Building and Construction Sector (Strengthening Occupational Licensing Regimes) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

I would like to start by thanking the Transport and Infrastructure Committee—including its chairman, Mr Andy Foster—for their careful deliberation on the bill and the recommendations that they have made. I note in passing that this committee has been very busy, including with legislation in the building and construction space, and I thank all members from across the House for their diligent work on this and other bills. Second, I’d like to thank everyone who submitted on the bill at select committee. The submissions resulted in several changes that, in my view, will strengthen and improve the bill. Of course, the purpose of the second reading is to give exposure to some of those changes that have resulted.

Overall, though, I would point out this Government is making building easier and more affordable through changes like granny flats, self-certification for plumbers and drainlayers, and a shift towards proportionate liability. These changes will move assurance away from building consent authorities—from here on, BCAs—and place greater responsibility onto practitioners in the sector. This means that it is more important than ever that building professionals be appropriately held to account promptly if things go wrong. This bill will strengthen complaints and disciplinary mechanisms in the sector and will reinforce expectations of professional conduct and competence, encouraging practitioners to consistently deliver safe, compliant, and high-quality building work first time, every time.

This bill will make changes to three pieces of legislation in order to meet those aims— (1) the Building Act, (2) the Electricity Act, and (3) the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Act—to ensure that the licensing regimes in those Acts are efficient, effective, robust, and sustainable.

This bill will amend the Building Act to further separate the board and registrar functions for complaints made against licensed building practitioners and allow the registrar to dismiss those that are frivolous or vexatious—meaning the complaints, not the practitioners. For all other complaints, the Chief Executive of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment—hereafter, MBIE—will appoint an investigator who will investigate a complaint and determine whether or not it warrants a hearing. At present, it can take over a year for a complaint made about a licensed building practitioner to be heard by the board. While this wait goes on, that person can continue working without any restrictions and the complainant is left waiting. This bill is about creating efficiencies and these changes will reduce the time that it takes for complaints by months, as the board’s resources will only be used on matters that do truly require their attention.

Currently, it’s the case that the registrars of the Electrical Workers Registration Board, and also of the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Board, are prohibited from initiating complaints. However, this bill will remove these restrictions. This will enable them to proactively begin investigations when they hear of potential disciplinary offences, or when someone doesn’t want to be named in a complaint, such as an employee informing the board of an employer using substandard products or ignoring building consents—what we might refer to colloquially as a whistleblower.

The bill will also amend the membership numbers and quotas for technical and non-technical roles on the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Board. The simple change will allow them to operate more efficiently and effectively in performing all their functions. The board handles over 50 complaints every year on a range of different issues. This new membership structure will ensure that there are sufficient consumer and technical perspectives so that it can fairly and effectively consider all the complaints that come before it.

Speaking now on licensed building practitioner, or LBP, licence renewal frequency. The efficiencies in this bill are not just for the Government. By moving licence renewal frequency for LBPs to secondary legislation, the bill will reduce administrative burden on practitioners by aligning them with two-yearly skills maintenance requirements. Less frequent renewals means less time spent in front of a computer doing admin work, and more time out on the tools getting houses built. When an LBP is disciplined and has his or her licence cancelled, their information is removed from the public register. However, this means that the public has no access to that information. This bill will improve transparency by requiring that these records continue to be displayed on the public register for three years after cancellation, giving consumers greater access to information when choosing who they wish to engage with.

Consumers have a right to expect that the practitioners that they invite into their homes—and I emphasise homes particularly; a person’s home is their castle, famously—that they act in an ethical fashion with integrity. To aid this, the bill establishes empowering and disciplinary provisions for codes of ethics to be made by Order in Council for licensed electrical workers and licensed plumbers, gasfitters, and drainlayers. These codes will reinforce consumer expectations around professional conduct and competence from the practitioners they use, and they’ll also incentivise practitioners to consistently deliver safe, compliant, and high-quality building work. These codes are not intended to impact practitioners’ rights to free speech. What they are intended to do is to ensure that consumers can expect the practitioners they invite into their homes will act in a professional manner and can be held to account if not.

On their own, the changes in this bill might seem minor, but taken together, they make crucial improvements to support the significant changes that the Government is making elsewhere in the sector. These changes promote consistency and efficiency—always worthwhile aims—in complaints processes, giving practitioners clearer obligations, and consumers a more predictable way to hold them accountable.

Before I cover changes made to the bill, again, I’d like to thank the Transport and Infrastructure Committee for their diligent consideration. They’ve made recommendations to strengthen accountability for practitioners, reduce administrative costs, and improve the workability of the bill overall. These changes were recommended unanimously by the committee and can be found in their report, and I’ll only briefly summarise the key changes now, noting that the greater level of detail is contained in that report for the record.

First, the committee noted that penalties for LBPs have not increased since the regime was first introduced in 2007. Where the maximum fine once equated to 3.4 percent of the cost of an average build, today it is only half that. The committee has therefore recommended increasing the maximum fine that can be issued from $10,000 to $20,000, and the maximum term of suspension from 12 months to 24 months. This recommendation will act as a stronger deterrent for practitioners by sending a message that misconduct and breaches of responsibility will not be tolerated and will make sure that those found in breach will appropriately be held to account.

Moving quickly through the remaining notes that I have in front of me in the remaining time, the committee’s commentary also noted that the clauses covering disciplinary penalties in each Act could be interpreted in a way that matters could be reopened, risking practitioners being disciplined twice for the same matter. To resolve this, the committee has recommended amending the provisions to better clarify situations in which the respective boards may make subsequent orders.

The committee also noted that it is currently difficult to manage competence concerns when a practitioner refuses to participate in a competence review. These reviews will become more important once plumbers and drainlayers are able to self-certify, which is work that we are doing elsewhere. The committee’s recommendation is that the board be able to order a person to complete a competence programme if they do not satisfactorily respond to a review.

Next, reducing quorum for the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Board. It’s a recommendation to reduce the costs of holding these hearings by over $1,000 a day, reducing that quorum from five members down to three, and this will not impact on the ability of the boards to hold to account any practitioners who appear before them.

Extending good faith liability protection was another area of reform indicated by the committee, whereby they recommended extending this good faith liability protection not just to investigations, or rather investigators of complaints, but rather the people appointed to a system as well.

Finally, I finish with an acknowledgement of the committee again and all those who submitted in suggestions and in support of changes suggested by others. I believe that the changes recommended and accepted by the committee, and in turn accepted by the Government as I’m indicating on its behalf, make the bill a stronger and better piece of legislation. With practitioners playing a greater role in the building control system, it’s important that these processes are strengthened. The committee’s recommended amendments will help the bill to achieve its intent of creating complaints and disciplinary processes that are effective, efficient, robust, and sustainable. For all those reasons, I commend this bill to the House.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: And thank you to the Minister for clarifying all those acronyms for the benefit of myself and the House. The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, and that was very thorough, Minister. Labour is happy to support this bill for many of the reasons that the Minister for Building and Construction has just outlined, notwithstanding the fact that it’s important that people that do come into our homes and perform work that is crucial to everyday life and specialised and there’s expertise involved, that they are well regulated and well supported to do that.

Labour will be supporting this bill. It’s about making sure that people carrying out some of the most important and potentially dangerous work in our homes and buildings are properly qualified—I think that that’s a fair expectation—and properly regulated. If you’re going to put a system in place, you need to make sure that it is properly regulated and held to those very clear professional standards. Certainly, the people that came to the Transport and Infrastructure Committee were very proud of the professions that they were part of, very proud of the trade that they trade on, and wanted themselves to make sure that those were kept at a very high standard.

As we can all imagine, electrical workers, plumbers, gasfitters, drainlayers, licensed builders, practitioners, they all work in environments where poor workmanship can have some really serious consequences and very expensive remediation consequences as well. It’s not hard for us to imagine a wiring fault that can cause a fire, a faulty gas work that can put an entire household at risk, and heaven forbid, poor drainage, which can cause long-term damage, which is very expensive and difficult to repair. So it is important that a strong, modern licensing system is in place, and it does matter.

I’m not going to go through the three or four pieces of legislation that this bill will change—I think the Minister did a very thorough job of going through that. Also, to the average person, it sounds quite boring, to be honest, but it’s technical, and the gist of it remains in place. It’s about making the system better so that both the people working in it and the people benefiting from it have that confidence.

The overall objective, we believe, is sensible. It does create better oversight. We do think that the standards have been made much clearer, including the improvements that were made through the select committee process, once again showing what an important part of this democratic process it is to have good select committees. I also would like to lend my thanks to the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, very ably chaired by Andy Foster, who, no doubt, will be giving a contribution a little bit later on. As the Minister said, at the heart of this it is about consumer confidence, because these aren’t just ordinary consumer products. These are trades that are applied more often than not in people’s homes, which, as he said, is someone’s castle.

There are a couple of things that we did want to highlight, though, the first one being mainly a reiteration of the fact that consumer confidence and quality is incredibly important. It’s not just an administrative function, and it’s important that it doesn’t get implemented or treated like that. It’s perfectly reasonable for people to have confidence. Most homeowners certainly aren’t in a position to independently assess whether electrical wiring, for instance, has been installed safely. Whilst we can all probably think of many examples of friends, families, members of the public that we interact with who self-diagnose, who think of themselves as being amateur journalists, who read the internet and say that they’ve done a little bit of research, and goodness knows there’s enough bush lawyers around. This is something where the rank amateur can’t necessarily do or assess the quality of, so they rely on licensing and they rely on regulation.

For Labour, this fits with our broader view that New Zealand deserves warm, safe, affordable houses that are built to last, that are a priority of society. If we don’t keep building and making it possible to build houses that are warm, dry, safe, and built to last, then we soon find ourselves in a bit of a pickle, as we have seen. Higher standards can absolutely help achieve that.

The second thing I wanted to highlight was that stronger powers must also come with some safeguards, which I think is perfectly reasonable. The second issue is that of significant expansion of investigative and enforcement powers. The bill allows regulators to compel, for instance, the production of documents that require statutory declarations and obtain information during complaints and disciplinary investigations. I don’t think anybody would think that that was unreasonable, but when they have those new powers, we have to make sure that it is done properly. It provides for entry and inspection powers in certain circumstances, so I think that that is perfectly reasonable. There’s a legitimate reason for those powers, and we acknowledge that, and the regulators need to be able to investigate serious allegations and act before any type of unsafe practice, not just retrospectively unsafe work but any kind of hint that unsafe work could lead to unsafe practice in the future, because that’s a harm reduction measure, and that makes sense to us as well.

The select committee has needed to test whether the requirements around consent, notice, warrants, privacy, and the use of information are sufficiently robust. There must also be a clear review of what should always be rights to appeal. Appeal rights are an important part of any process.

The third thing I just wanted to highlight was the costs and resourcing. So we also may be a little bit concerned about the potential costs of the new system, not in a statutory sort of kind of way, but the bill modernises levy-setting powers, and the Government has not really provided enough analysis on the likely effect on licence fees on small operators and homeowners. Obviously, a levy placed on a tradesperson doesn’t simply disappear; it may be absorbed by the worker, it may be passed on through a business or ultimately added to the price by the person building or repairing a home. So it’s important that that costing and that resourcing is well known and the system is fit for purpose. It doesn’t mean that reasonable licensing costs are unjustified, obviously; it means that those costs absolutely need to be transparent, they need to be proportionate, and they need to be clearly connected to an effective regulatory service, and that should be obvious. Practitioners should also themselves be able to see what they’re paying for.

So Labour is going to support this bill because it’s clearer and it provides a more consistent licensing system. We were pleased with the process. We think the select committee and all of the submitters did a really good job of making sure that not only technical but all the information painted a really robust picture of what needed to be done, and we were satisfied with some of the changes that were made and the direction of this bill. We support complaints processes that give consumers confidence and treat competent tradespeople fairly. I think we saw that again through the select committee process, where it was the tradespeople themselves that were really, really invested in making sure that the standards were high.

Labour’s focus, obviously, is on protecting consumers, supporting skilled tradespeople, and ensuring that stronger standards produce safer, quality homes without shifting any unnecessary costs further down the chain to the consumer, but we’re happy to support this bill.

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. This is very unusual in that it’s a bill that’s come to the House that we actually support and very few people submitted on. For this term of Government, that is incredibly unusual. We’ve had record numbers of submissions, highly polarising laws rushed through by this Government, but for once they’re doing something that’s actually useful. So I congratulate Minister Penk on this part of the bill.

I’m sure that select committee chair, Andy Foster, will speak very eloquently about the select committee process. Unfortunately, for most of this bill, I wasn’t on the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, as I usually am, because I had to be on the Environment Committee for the planning and environment bills, which, by the way, were overwhelmingly opposed by the submitters and just being rushed through by this very careless and irresponsible Government for the most part.

Simon Court: Rushed through? Three years.

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: I’d be interested to hear Mr Court’s contribution on this bill.

Anyway, there were only 15 submissions on this bill—not very many. The previous speakers have outlined what the point of it is, and I think it’s good. Our tradespeople have an incredibly important role to play. Consumers have every right to be assured that there’s a fair process when things don’t go well. Since we’re shifting away from the system of oversight—which has not been great, I’ll be honest—that we have had, it’s really important that we beef up the process around investigations, complaints, disciplinary measures. We also have a whole lot we could be doing to lift the standards of building in this country, particularly with the challenges we’re facing: the need to rapidly electrify everything, to harness wind and particularly the solar energy that we could be harnessing in our households, switching to electric devices, electric cars, electric hot water heat pumps. Things like that are going to require a whole lot of upskilling and new skills and new opportunities for people working as electricians.

As plumbers—the need to get off gas. We need to urgently get off gas for our households, because it’s going to be extremely expensive, not to mention it’s very bad for people’s health. I don’t know if people realise that we have higher rates of asthma in this country and there’s been some really interesting research recently that demonstrates—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): As it relates to this bill.

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: Yeah, well, getting off gas is going to require a whole lot of tradespeople to do retrofits in people’s homes. Like, here in Wellington, I think about a third of our households are using gas for cooking or hot water heating or heating the house, and it’s super expensive; it’s totally unsustainable; it has huge, harmful health consequences for the people living in those houses and they’re going to be paying through the nose to do it. But with the shift to electric appliances, we also need to switch to far more efficient electric appliances because our grid won’t be able to handle all those household domestic gas users switching to, like, an electric hot water heater, but a hot water heat pump is an opportunity to use way less energy to have great hot water. So there’s win-win-win-win-win, but we need to have Government leadership and support for this transition.

Now, we don’t fully agree with the other side of this proposal, which is the self-certification, but we are very happy to support this bill. As I said, I don’t want to take up a lot of time, because I’d rather it just pass second reading. We’ve already been waiting several months. I think it was reported back by the select committee four months ago, and yet it hasn’t come to the House for second reading. Why are all these, like, useless, controversial, polarising bills coming to the House through urgency and extended hours, but, for some reason, the sensible thing the Government’s trying to do gets delayed and delayed and delayed? That’s probably because of the disproportionate influence of the two support parties wanting to get through their vice-signalling decks of legislation, like—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Back to the bill.

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: —the English Language Act, which just passed a few minutes ago.

So, yeah, we love our tradies. There is a huge amount of work for our tradies. We think that everyone in New Zealand will benefit from having a more robust and better process to make sure that people are protected when things go wrong and they have a good oversight over practitioners, and those practitioners also need to be provided with additional training to be able to do the enormous mahi that’s in front of us when it comes to electrification; getting rid of fossil fuels in our homes; building more warm, dry, energy-efficient homes; switching to great things like hot water heat pumps. Can’t wait to see it. Hopefully, under our next Green Government, we’ll have a lot more Government support for that sort of thing.

ACT supports this bill because it’s about cutting red tape and aligning the needs of consumers—particularly those wanting electrical services, plumbing and drainlaying, and building services—with their needs. For too long, we’ve had an archaic way of regulating these trades, and the regulatory bodies responsible for the trades have not been able to effectively impose sanctions and controls and require additional training and performance improvement from some of those tradies at the margins who do not meet the standards. So ACT supports this bill because it strengthens the compliance and enforcement side of building and other trade regulations in order to provide confidence to consumers that the people coming into their homes and businesses are competent, going to do good work, and they’re going to get value for money.

There was something else that came up, though. There are a group of people in New Zealand who want to insist that not just tradies but professional people too have to comply with a code of ethics. Now, as a former civil engineer—and potentially I’ll go back to it one day, if I’m ever released from this democratic prison that we’re confined to—this is the problem: some people’s version of ethics is actually “wokery”. Tradies, plumbers, gasfitters, builders, and electricians do not want to be told how to think by the high priests of diversity, equity, and inclusion and environmental, social, and governance on some kind of professional board.

Some of us, as the report says—in fact, that was the ACT committee member, and, potentially, Andy Foster, the committee chair—consider that codes of ethics should be confined to professional practice matters and trade practice and should not creep into subjective matters, such as political views. Some of us consider this is especially true for contested political matters, and we do not consider that these should be reflected in a code of ethics.

Now, while we are pleased that this has been reported back to the House for this important commentary, there is one further step that ACT would take, and, in fact, Todd Stephenson, ACT MP, has proposed a member’s bill which would confine professional and other bodies only to regulating trade practices and competency and exclude these contested political matters from being able to be considered.

I don’t know if any of you have ever worked on a building site—I mean, I worked on a landfill for six years. Some of the opinions that are offered by the bulldozer drivers and the digger drivers around various matters, like, they’re not repeatable. I wouldn’t take them home and report to my wife what was said in the lunchroom.

Hon Mike Butterick: Free and frank—free and frank.

SIMON COURT: Very free and frank, Mr Butterick, that’s right. But, again, they are not matters that should be regulated by a professional body or a trades-regulating body. On that basis, ACT commends this bill to the House.

I rise as chair of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, which considered this bill, and also on behalf of New Zealand First. I just want to start off by saying thank you to all the people who were involved in it. Thank you to the Minister for the generous comments at the beginning. Thank you to all the submitters. I did particularly want to say that this must be “Tradies Recognition Day”. It’s lovely to hear the Green Party with their support for the tradies, which, I assume, will also extend to their support for the tradies’ chosen vehicles, which, I hope, they will back in future. Tradies always love their utes. Thanks to the submitters. But I really did want to say thank you to all the tradies who are out there doing fantastic work for us up and down the country, and this bill is for them. Also, just thank you to the committee for, as always, the collaborative way in which we worked through this legislation and improved it and reported it back.

This bill is part of the drive by this Government to reduce the cost of building. That is, basically, it takes away some of the council, sort of, regulation, and we’ve got more ability now to be able to self-regulate. The people who have got the professional skills are being trusted to self-regulate. This bill sits behind that, which says, “You can self-certify, but, if you don’t do the job properly, we’ve got to have some way of being able to investigate, to make sure that people are up to spec.” That’s what this bill is all about. It’s about giving confidence to people that the practitioners are able to do the job that they’re trying to do and that they’re confident to do it.

It makes the licensing regime more robust. It empowers the registrar to instigate investigations, to enforce training orders, to do competency reviews, and also to provide penalties as well. So it gives a greater degree of enforcement. That’s all about giving people confidence in the system as a whole.

There are two other things that I just wanted to say very, very briefly. One of them is that there is a gap which I didn’t identify—or was identified, actually, by our leader—which is that there are some people who occasionally will pass themselves off as something that they are not. They say, “Well, I’m a licensed gasfitter, drainlayer, plumber, electrician, builder”, or whatever it might be, and they’re not. We don’t appear, it seems, to have a regime to say, “Well, actually, that is a problem, that should be an offence, and there should be a penalty for that.” That’s something I’ve taken up with the Minister, and we will continue to pursue that, because that, of course, is very important.

I just want to finish off, also, just by talking briefly about the issue that Simon Court was talking about just a moment ago, which is the code of ethics. What we’re talking about there is that the code of ethics should be about knowing, when somebody comes into your home, somebody comes and does some work for you, that they are competent; that if they say they are a licensed practitioner, they are a licensed practitioner; that they act with integrity and honesty in your home; that they do the pricing and all that sort of thing properly; that you can trust them.

This is the area which ACT and New Zealand First said very strongly—we would have loved to have the National Party on board on this one, our dearly beloved friends there. They didn’t want to support us on this. It’s not about what sort of political views, or whatever else it might be, that you have. I don’t think we’ve seen stories about that in these particular industries. We have in other industries, where people have been told, “You must go through a training process”—and we particularly think of the real estate agents—“on something which doesn’t look as though it’s related at all to the industry which you’re in, and if you don’t do that, then you will lose your practising licence.”

That’s the kind of thing that New Zealand First are really concerned about. That is why we have that part in the report back from the committee—that’s why it’s there. It’s something which we do think needs to be addressed, because if we get more stories about that, that becomes a real problem—it becomes a problem for confidence in industries but it also becomes a problem for the confidence of those practitioners that they continue to practise what they have trained hard for, the work that they do with diligence, and yet they’re being told they need to do something else which is not relevant to their jobs.

With that, I want to thank again everybody who was involved in that, this piece of legislation, and commend it to the House.

Kia ora, Madam Speaker. Happy to rise to speak in support of this bill. As a partner of an electrician, I know this bill isn’t about electricians, but very aware of the lifestyle that they live and the work environments that they work in. He is an electrician, so will have lots of work helping to electrify our country.

Anyway, last week, when I was at the airport, I just happened to meet this young women, and she’s a plumber. She’s actually a qualified plumber, she’s a qualified gasfitter, and a qualified “drainslayer”, as she likes to call it, but she’s a drainlayer. Her name’s Hera, and her name on Instagram is “shes_a_maori_plumber_”. I actually messaged her this morning when I saw the House programme and said, “Hey, what do you think about this bill?” I thought it might be helpful to read some of the comments from someone who will be affected by this. She said, “Currently, us gasfitters already self-certify our work. It’s been like that for a very long time. However, once this bill passes and us plumbers and drainlayers can start certifying our own work, all it really means is this: we don’t need some”—I’m going to say “person”, but she used another word—“[person] coming in and telling us how to do our job, what we’ve done wrong or right. We’ve done an apprenticeship for six years, continuously upskilling ourselves, and on the tools daily. We know what we are doing. Council will still get all the information that they need from us, so fewer council inspections and delays on jobs waiting to finish, meaning productivity is improved and costs are reduced. So, essentially, as a plumber, less time waiting for inspections, more control over my workflow, and the opportunity to deliver jobs to clients more efficiently once we’re endorsed.” So, hey, that’s a nice way to summarise it right from the mouth of the horse—is that right?

Lemauga Lydia Sosene: Horse’s mouth.

TAMATHA PAUL: Horse of the mouth—whatever it is.

Glen Bennett: Plain English!

TAMATHA PAUL: Good to hear from someone who—oh, there’s English; so confusing. Glad it’s official now!

So I think that’s a really good endorsement of this bill from someone who will be impacted by it. But the reason I met her, actually, is because she was coming back from the National Association of Women in Construction conference that was held here in Wellington recently. That also peaked my interest, because I am very passionate about increasing the number of women in trades.

One of the things that this bill does is it enables a code of ethics. My colleague over there, a prior civil engineer, Simon Court made a comment around diversity, equity, and inclusion. I’m not sure how serious he was about those comments, but I do think it is pretty serious that only 15.8 percent of the construction industry are women. Actually, under 3 percent of the construction industry are actually women who are on the tools. I think that’s a problem, because if you look at the wider workforce in New Zealand, half of our workforce is obviously women, but then when you look into construction and trades, which is where you are really seeing an issue.

I am really lucky because, here in Wellington, we’ve got a really awesome advocacy group called Cahoots. They’ve got a workshop here in Mount Cook where people can join for $1 a week and have access to all of their tools and a workshop to practise their skills and their trade. But they also do a lot of advocacy about how we can improve the numbers of women and gender minorities within the trades. One of the things that they found when they conducted a study of male tradies is one of those tradies commented that the trades culture is blunt and rough and a “final frontier” lagging behind broader social norms.

I think that is really important that we consider code of ethics as an important thing, because if only 3 percent of workers in the construction industry are women, that is really, really concerning, especially when we look at the infrastructure requirements of our country over the next few generations. We need as many people as possible working in the trades. So we really need to have a look at this and the workplace culture and safety and treat gender equity within construction as a workplace health and safety issue—just like personal protective equipment, just like every other aspect of health and safety while on the site.

The last thing I’ll say, just on women in trades, is one thing my partner always says about women tradies on site is that they are the hardest-working person on site. But I think the point of having a code of ethics is that they shouldn’t have to be the hardest-working person on site because they are a woman.

Well, this Government has been cutting red tape to make it easier and faster to build, while ensuring consumers are protected. This legislation strengthens accountability by ensuring licensed building professionals can be held to account through a robust complaints process. We are here, not only about building more houses; we are about fixing the basics and building the future. I commend this bill to the House.

If I had a tradie that spent only that long in my house, I’d be very, very concerned. I’d suggest that they wouldn’t be taking the job seriously—that they wouldn’t be examining it sufficiently to be able to provide me with the certainty I’d need, that their quote was efficient, and actually had taken into account all of the factors that one should take into account when they prepare a quote. That speech was just so fast—I’m still recovering. But it does give me the opportunity to take to my feet [Interruption] and—despite the noise, which I think is supportive from the other side of the House—take a call on this, the Building and Construction Sector (Strengthening Occupational Licensing Regimes) Amendment Bill.

Despite the protestations from the other side of the House, I am standing to take this call in support of this bill, because I believe—as do members on this side of the House—that New Zealanders deserve warm, dry, safe homes. Ultimately, the intention of this bill, I believe, is to be able to create warm, dry, safe homes for New Zealanders.

Now, I want to start with just a shout-out to tradies across New Zealand. This is because I know how hard they work, I know the amazing work that they do to make sure that we’ve got good, warm, dry, safe homes, but also because previously when I’ve taken a call on this bill in the House, I actually told a story about a gasfitter that drilled through the water waste pipe in my kitchen and caused a leak inside an internal wall.

So I think it’s time that I redeem that story and the honour of tradies nationwide by sharing the story about the electrician who one day when I was sitting in my house and a noise came out of the fuse box that sounded like the rustling of cellophane or foil—it was not the noise that you want to hear from your electrical mains box—and I rang my electrician and I said to him, “This is the noise that’s coming out of the mains box inside my house.” I made the noise of the crackling sound down the phone. I won’t do it here, but I did it down the phone. He said to me, “Touch nothing. I’m on the way.” This was at the weekend, and he was at my house within about 15 minutes. He repaired the wiring in my house at the time. He said to me, “I don’t know how your house hasn’t burnt down.” He couldn’t believe that that was the noise that had come out of my meter box.

When, eventually, that house—which, unfortunately, had to be demolished after the earthquake—was demolished, the steel pipe conduit within the walls and ceilings of that house that carried the electrical wiring was probably stronger than the framing and joists that had held that house up for 100 or so years. So a big shout-out to that sparkie, to that electrician who stepped in and saved the day—made sure my house didn’t burn down—and to tradies and sparkies everywhere across New Zealand who work so hard to make sure that we have warm, dry, safe houses.

But back to the bill, because, ultimately, this is a bill that serves those people. I think it’s important for us to remember that other members of this House worked really constructively at the Transport and Infrastructure Committee to make sure that what we’ve got is a bill that does the things it sets out to do. They are, as an omnibus bill: amending the Building Act 2004, the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Act 2006, and reaching way back into the past—something this Government seems intent to do with a lot of its policy direction—the Electricity Act 1992. It’s also about strengthening occupational licensing regimes by updating governance administration licensing complaints and disciplinary systems across three major regulated trades—that’s really important too. Part of that, too, though, and in handing some of that responsibility over, is that it also needs to give investigators and inspectors clearer powers to obtain the information that they may need when they’re looking at self-regulated or self-signed-off activities and construction activities.

It also modernises the levy-setting powers across the licensing boards and it introduces the new entry, inspection, and information-gathering powers to support the investigations, including allowing people to have access to the properties where that work is carried out, subject to appropriate safeguards. So there’s a whole lot to consider. It’s not as simple as saying, “Oh, we’ll self-certify it—all will be fine.”; there are a whole lot of additional considerations that the Transport and Infrastructure Committee had to take into account when they were looking at this and progressing this bill through the select committee process.

They also create several new strict liability offences relating to working without proper licences and failing to comply with notices, summons, or information requests. That could be a tool we could introduce in the House for when a speech—unlike mine—is delivered far too short. It may be something that the Speaker could have an enforcement mechanism there to say, “Speak a little longer. This is a bill of value and we need a substantive contribution from either side of the House.”

What this aims to do, finally—not finally in my speech, but finally in what the bill aims to do—is create consistency across building-related professions and improve the quality, safety, and oversight of regulated construction work. So a very, very good aim; very good intent. I think that’s why you’ve seen broad support from across the House for that.

But there is a risk, and the risk is risk, because what we’re seeing with this bill is the shifting of risk. So when you look at the potential to shift risk, you need to really carefully consider that you still have the appropriate protections in place, ultimately, in this instance, for consumers. You need to have a protection in place for the homeowner, or the person building the home or having the work carried out within their home, to ensure that they are not being placed at risk by something that is going to fall foul further down the track or something that is not going to be compliant and is going to cause either a malfunction in their home or potentially an injury or serious injury. When you’re talking about things like electricity and gas and structural components of your home, I think that’s something that you need to be very conscious of the risks of shifting risk.

So, I guess, if people wanted an example of shifting risk, it would be potentially something like a leader of a political party that promises to fix the cost of living and then can’t answer basic questions in the House about whether, actually, lowering the cost of living is a good idea or not. That could be someone who has shifted the risk, made some big promises, and then failed to deliver, and then claimed that he never intended to do those things in the first place. That sounds like shifting risk. I’ve heard it called quite a few other things too, but given that it’s a Thursday and given that I’m in the House, I really don’t want to resort to that kind of language.

Hon Dr Duncan Webb: Go on—throw it out!

REUBEN DAVIDSON: Look, I’m being asked to throw it out—by my colleague here, I’m being asked to throw it out—I fear if I did throw it out, that it would in fact be me that was thrown out of this House for using that language. So I won’t go there, but I will just warn people that shifting risk is something that you should certainly look out for at this time of year, particularly when you’re listening to such quality speeches as this one delivered in the House on a Thursday afternoon.

Ultimately, what I do need to come back to is the bill. As I said at the beginning of this speech, prior to having to cover so much important material around the content and substantive inclusions within the bill, we do support this bill. We’ve heard from some other contributions, too, some specific shout-outs to people working in the trades, and particularly some observations around the lower levels, potentially, of women working in the trades.

So I want to take this opportunity to give a shout-out to some of the students that I met at Haeata Community Campus earlier this week, who are actually—whilst they’re at high school—also completing trades training, and are really, really excited about how they can contribute to New Zealand and New Zealanders through working in the construction sector, and particularly a couple of young women who were part of a conversation we had at Haeata Community Campus who are studying two days a week at the Ara campus just down the road there in the great electorate of Banks Peninsula, and are doing their plastering training, so that they will be able to be part of, hopefully, the construction boom that we might see if a Government of the future decides to build the houses that we desperately need to tackle the homelessness issues that we have across Aotearoa. But, ultimately, Mr Speaker, thank you for this opportunity to explore this bill and a couple of other things, and we do, on this side of the House, support it.

My goodness! If I had a tradie like that turn up in my house, waffle on, get nothing done—the only bill he seemed focused on was what he paid for his dodgy wiring in his house. There couldn’t be a better metaphor for him and the Labour Party needing to get their own house in order before they start criticising someone else. For him to criticise the great MP for Mount Roskill, Dr Carlos Cheung, for the way he speaks—I know the motivation behind it, I don’t like it, I think it’s poor. I would contrast it with the Minister for Building and Construction, who has spent three years fixing the basics; now he has a bill that builds the future. I commend it.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise to take a call on this bill. I’m really happy to take the call and know that Labour will be supporting the bill. I do want to thank the Transport and Infrastructure Committee members—I don’t sit on that select committee, but I have had the opportunity in the past and really appreciate it—and also the submitters that did submit on the bill.

We’ve heard what the bill does. I want to spend quite a bit of my time with the tradies and I want to thank the tradies. In Māngere, we have, at the Auckland International Airport, the Ara skills hub. What this bill does will help make it very clear what those tradies, electrical workers, plumbers, gasfitters, drainlayers, in high-risk environments—and so to be competent, to be clearly competent.

I just want to reflect, also, on a couple of examples where I’ve been a project manager with no skills, other than being a property owner, in terms of identifying what the standards must be. One of the things that I’ve really appreciated about this bill is the clear competence and the consistency and enforcement and also the modernising of complaint systems.

When you’re a homeowner and you’re shopping around for good tradies and you don’t understand the system, it is really important that the principles and the standards that are provided—as a homeowner in South Auckland, it’s really important that you understand what a tradie brings into your home, because a lot of people in my area recommend tradies.

What this bill does, what Labour supports, is that New Zealanders deserves homes that are affordable, that are built to last, and that stronger licensing will help lift that quality, because it is fair, proportionate, and really improves the safety of homeowners and consumers, and with the bill introducing broader investigative and disciplinary tools, that will be transparent and balanced, and not punitive for small operators.

I just wanted to reflect my comments in appreciation of one of the providers in our area, called the Ara skills hub. It is really helpful to have young people in South Auckland, particularly of different diverse backgrounds, be attracted to becoming a qualified tradie and also be able to lift their games in terms of this licensing tool.

I am concerned, though, with regards to new levies and compliance costs which will be passed to workers and homeowners. People really need to understand that if you’re going to modify your home, (a) you understand the world of tradies; and (b) that you’ve got a licensing system that is available through legislation to help you identify those risks.

It is important that Labour’s focus is about protecting consumers and supporting competent tradespeople. I keep going back to the examples in my area because some of our young people have left school without the skills, in terms of academia, but they have turned to the trades to be able to have a career in that area.

What the bill does: we’ve heard that it amends the Building Act for plumbers, gasfitters, drainlayers, and the Electricity Act 1992. It’s really important that this legislation strengthens those occupational licensing regimes by updating governance and administration, and especially, too, the licensing component, because for some of our young people English is their second language and when they go into a trade—it’s to understand all the rules; that when you’re going to go and modify people’s homes, you’ve actually got all those components to do that work.

Finally, I was just receiving some texts as to why the tradies are important in all the different building projects. I wanted to reflect that in Mangere, we’ve had a lot of building projects where some of the tradies, unfortunately, have been cowboys, so it’s going to be very important to get this legislation through. So I’m really pleased to speak on this. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There is indeed a pressing need to strip back the layers upon layers of regulation, which have been blocking real progress in our building industry, and this bill is a great tool for productivity in building and construction. Shout out to Ostle Electoral and Swift Fix Plumbing, who they do a lot of great work in Takanini. I commend this bill to the House.

Kia ora e te Mana Whakawā. Thank you for giving me the call. It’s quite interesting to hear Reuben Davidson’s shout-out to his electrician for saving him from a house fire. Quite some years ago now, I had some electrical work done on a hot water cylinder. The element that heats the water was replaced. Then, as I went to bed one night, there was a strange smell—actually, kind of an ozone-y smell—but I didn’t think much of it. I was woken at about midnight by my cat scratching at the door and smoke coming under it. So my house did actually burn down—ha!—and I was in it at the time, and I can tell you, on a June night, leaving your house in your underpants and sitting on the front lawn until the fire service gives you a blanket is actually quite cold. No lives were lost—although it was a house full of flats as well, and so it was a classic fire risk—but it was actually quite a frightening experience to sit on the front lawn and watch the flames leap from the roof of your house, and is something I don’t recommend. But it was a pretty simple mistake. It was a competence error. The element that was put in drew too much power for the 1920s Bakelite switch, and the Bakelite switch melted and, basically, burst into flames from the heat of the electrical load—a classic competence question. Whilst there has long been regulations and that clearly did not comply, it is good to see that we’re updating and keeping modern our regulations around all of these trades.

I think that making sure that the machinery of industry regulation works is really important, and input from the profession itself is also important. It’s good to see that there’s flexibility around having members of the industry, the experts in the area, having input into it. I can’t not say a little bit about the code of ethics issue because this is actually a matter which I hold dear to my heart. Codes of ethics do a whole lot of things. Obviously, competence is part of it. Trade practices and integrity is part of it as well, but increasingly, the code of ethics across various businesses and industries have done a bit more.

My colleague Lemauga Lydia Sosene made a comment which I thought was worth repeating, and that is that you want a diverse workforce as well. The comments from some on the other side around code of ethics, I think warrant further examination. If you’ve got someone coming into your house and doing work, being in your personal space, you want to feel safe in every respect. Also, you want your employees to feel safe in every respect. One of the things, certainly in the legal profession, that has found its way into its code of ethics is standards around workplace bullying and harassment. Not only is a lawyer liable in an employment, should they, for example, bully their employee or sexually harass their employee, but it also reflects on their fitness to practise law. Now, if we want more, for example, women or Pasifika tradies, then we need to make sure that their workplaces are safe.

I have no difficulty whatsoever with saying that an operator—a principal or owner of a trades business—needs to act in a way that is respectful and aware. There’s a whole lot of chatter about the real estate agent case. For those who might not be aware, it’s a case where a real estate agent refused to do a course on tikanga. The rules were a bit clumsy—and they’ve since been fixed by Parliament, but the rules were clumsy and said, “If you don’t do the course, you’ll lose your practice certificate.” Now, that was blunt, but the idea that someone who’s going to be dealing with all members of society in his or her trade needs to be aware and not a cultural moron—I’m fine with that. So I have no difficulty if we have codes of ethics which require people to be ethical and responsible, not engage in bullying, not engage in sexual harassment or other misconduct of that nature, and be competent and honest—I’m OK with it because I think it builds a stronger profession. So, the comments of one member of the House that—you know, there were comments; he didn’t say exactly what they were, but comments that he wouldn’t repeat to his wife, which suggests they were perhaps sexist or racist. Well, I actually don’t think there’s a place for that in a trade. If he was talking about people who were supposed to be respectable tradespeople, please call it out. Let’s say that that’s not the kind of environment that we want to create.

So codes of ethics have an important part to play—and I do think this is another important thing about codes of ethics: that them coming from industry is a good thing. The provisions in this piece of legislation which are enabling of those codes of ethics—essentially, the industry develops them, and then they will go through the ministerial office for approval by the Governor-General, which is, of course, a formality once it’s gone through the Minister’s office. I think it’s a good process. It makes sure that they align with what the industry needs because that’s where they’re sourced, but it also makes sure that there’s some oversight of the content of that code.

So, look, it’s good, this bill. Again, as was noted, if we’re going to build warmer, safer homes, that’s really good—and keep them warm and safe by repairs and renovations and what have you—that’s good. The Labour Party is very much on the side of warm, safe, and affordable homes. There is an outstanding question because this Government is wont to increase the costs on New Zealanders, surreptitiously, by increasing fees and levies. That’s happened across the board. With one hand, it says don’t increase your rates; with the other hand, it puts up your registration fees and your ACC levies and all kinds of other levies across the board. And here again, there are new levies and there hasn’t been a lot of work done around whether this will increase costs for, fundamentally, homeowners, and I think that always deserves careful scrutiny. Any levy, of course, needs to be, essentially, cost recovery and appropriate. So I think it would be appropriate, when those levies are imposed, to make sure that, across the period—which is usually around a three-year period because there’s ups and downs across that—they no more than recover costs.

Of course, the other thing—the member of the ACT Party sort of said that this is cutting red tape; in fact, there’s a whole lot of powers here that are given, which are good because you do want to have the power to intervene when it’s appropriate, including the power to demand information. There are additional powers for investigation and discipline, because it’s no good having a body which is given responsibility for the proper management of a profession and then not giving it any teeth to do that with. The ability to impose pretty significant fines, is good. I do think, in the disciplinary space, you need to be careful imposing fines and other disciplinary measures.

Of course, alongside those are education orders—or “training orders” I think they are called in this piece of legislation—and I think that’s good as well because if you think of the outcome you’re after, it’s not punitive, it’s more protective. So if you’ve got a tradie, a gasfitter, who’s made a mistake, and you’re not going to strike them off, they’re still going to be a gasfitter, it’s better to say, “Go and upskill and get it right and pass the certification to show that you’ve learnt this method.”, or whatever it might be; then simply saying, “That was bad, pay $5,000 in a fine.”, because a fine is punitive only. That’s actually a shift across professions, generally, to say, “Look, we’re actually after proper competence and it’s not a punitive framework; it’s protective for the public and that should be our focus.” So that’s why we think this is a pretty good piece of legislation.

We are hammering away at our ambitious programme of reforms.

Tim Costley: Oh, you’ve nailed it. You’ve nailed it already.

SUZE REDMAYNE: I did nail it. We’re stripping back regulations and we’re getting on with the job.

I want to take this opportunity to thank a very special business in my electorate, Homestead Construction in Levin—a great business. They’ve just celebrated their 50th birthday. Reuben, Jason, and Daniel Lawry and Stephen Griffiths—congratulations and thank you.

Kia ora, Mr Speaker. It is good to celebrate businesses in our communities and those who are doing the hard work. In this piece of legislation, we do support it, as has been said, and I think that part of that is around—we talk about small and medium enterprises in terms of how they are the engine room of our economy and of our communities—I think it’s around 97 percent are small and medium enterprises, which, obviously, are our tradies, our sole traders, those who are doing things like doing work in people like Reuben Davidson’s or Duncan Webb’s homes, and making sure that they are fit and proper to live in.

I was thinking, as I was looking at one part of this legislation, which was around the introducing new entry and inspection information-gathering powers to support investigations, including, you know, the paperwork and access to that type of thing. I thought about it because I’ve spent a lot of time, back in the day, in the hospitality sector and it’s just a given. If you sort of look at the different sectors and the different kind of industries and the standards they have or just what’s always been, and so I think having access to that paperwork and information is just a given. Coming from hospitality, where when you have your hygiene and your food licence, that type of thing, I mean, it’s just a given that you have the council inspectors who have access to all of that paperwork to make sure they know what is going on, and to make sure that when it comes to food and food safety, obviously, they can see everything that is in place to make sure that the customer has the experience they should have, shouldn’t get sick, shouldn’t have any kind of infection or cross-contamination. So when I look at this legislation and looking at the building and construction sector, it just, to me, makes sense the fact that there is this ability to introduce the entry and inspection information-gathering powers.

It is Thursday afternoon and I know that it probably is almost time for us to depart, but it is nice to listen across the floor and have consensus on something that looks simple and just legislation that actually can make sense. There’s been a few submissions where we’ve come to a place where we can say, “Yes, the Building and Construction Sector (Strengthening Occupational Licensing Regimes) Amendment Bill is something we can all agree to.” Labour, on this side of the House, commends it to passing.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill

Legislative Statement