Kedgley Sue: Building Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third Reading 
Kedgley Sue: Building Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third Reading 
[Volume:655;Page:5136] 
SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party is very pleased to join in the consensus in this House on the Building Amendment Bill (No 2). A previous speaker talked about how wonderful it was to have consensus between the National and Labour parties. I remind members that there are other parties in this House as well. I believe that all parties including the Green Party ACT and the Maori Party are joining in the consensus the reason being that the bill is an eminently sensible amendment bill which was originated by the previous Government and is being carried through by this Government. 
The bill provides for multiple-use approvals for houses that are built on a large scale. We think here of Lockwood Homes Golden Homes etc. One small point I would like to mention which no one else has mentioned is that during the consideration of this bill in the Local Government and Environment Committee which was ably chaired by Mr Auchinvole we managed to make a small but I think important concession. We ensured that Lockwood Homes could also benefit from this bill. Previously there was a regulation that prevented Lockwood Homes from benefiting from this bill as it was not able to be considered to be a volume builder. I am very pleased about that change. Actually at the start we were told it was impossible for it to be considered to be a volume builder. The committee persisted and we included Lockwood Homes. That was a small thing that the committee was able to do. I am sure that Lockwood Homes which is an important and iconic New Zealand company will be very pleased that it is not excluded from the provisions of this bill. 
The bill does many good things. It will streamline as many others have said the building consent process. It will hopefully produce economies of scale. It will make homes more affordable and it will speed up the approval process and enable houses to be built more quickly. 
A previous speaker mentioned that we really will not know the consequences of this bill until it has been enacted and I would like to mention a couple of cautionary notes that we need to have in the back of our minds. Other speakers have pointed out that really this bill is a reaction to the previous building bill the Building Amendment Bill which of course was passed in response to the leaky building problem and arguably went too far and created too many hurdles in the Building Act. But there is a danger that the pendulum will swing too far and we will end up once again cutting corners. The Minister said when he introduced the Building Amendment Bill (No 2) that it will bring down the costs of building while not compromising building quality. Others have repeated that statement but nobody has explained to me how this bill will ensure that we will not compromise building quality. I have no idea how we will ensure that we will not compromise building quality or slip back to the days when poor regulation resulted in the leaky building crisis—and it is indeed a crisis and a growing one. So we need to have that at the back of our minds. 
The second issue I would like to touch on is that some submitters as is noted in the select committee’s report raised concerns that the national multiple-use approvals could lead to a proliferation of standardised housing that is not designed with reference to the specific environment. I share those concerns. I think there is such a possibility. We know that 40 percent of new homes will be built by volume builders and there is the risk that we will have standardised identikit houses—absolutely identical—one by one and side by side because it is cheaper to build them. Someone said we are not building little boxes with this bill but the possibility does exist that that would be the consequence and that we would end up with a lot of little boxes that are not built in harmony with their environment. 
One needs only to travel briefly to Europe to recognise the importance of building homes that are not ugly and are in harmony with their environment. One of the huge appeals of tourism in Europe is that there tend to be in many areas—not all by any means but many—buildings that are in harmony with the environment. We can think of areas where they are not in harmony with the environment. There are for example huge multi-storey buildings on the Spanish coast. They tend to be very ugly and tourists are often put off by them. So we do need to be mindful. We do not want to create a whole lot of ugly standardised buildings all looking the same as a consequence of this bill. We need to make sure that that does not happen. We will not know whether it will happen as someone said because we will not know the consequences until these regulations are put into effect. 
 However on the positive side the bill will help in some small way to enable affordable houses to be built. Everyone agrees that it is a huge huge problem in New Zealand that homes are not affordable we have a huge number of New Zealanders living in overcrowded homes and there are not nearly enough homes being built. This bill may take one small step towards making homes more affordable enabling them to be built more quickly and reducing compliance costs. For those reasons the Green Party is pleased to join in the consensus on this bill. We very much hope that our fears about identikit standardised ugly houses being built as a consequence of the bill will not be realised. Thank you.