Goudie Sandra: Energy Safety Review Bill — First Reading 
Goudie Sandra: Energy Safety Review Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:627;Page:21807] 
SANDRA GOUDIE (National—Coromandel) 
: 
 I take issue with the Minister’s claim that this board is being created for plumbers drainlayers and gasfitters etc. This board is actually being created from the consumer’s viewpoint and I would like the Minister to take a look at  
ElectroLink 
 magazine which is about safety in the electrical industry—which is actually the Government’s rationale for coming up with this multitude of paper in support of the whole compliance contingency around drainlayers and plumbers. In fact the board is a consumers’ board. It is not a drainlayers’ and plumbers’ board as the Minister likes to assert and perhaps he would like to go back and have a look at his own paperwork to find out that fact for himself. 
I want to look at the other reason for the promulgation of this bill. I say there has never been a demonstrated need for competence-based licensing requirements in this industry because the record shows that for the year ended 2003 the board received 32 complaints. Is that a reason to go this far? I think not. After all the industry has a perfectly good audit system in place and it was working well. Everybody appreciated it and most of the people involved in the industry accepted that audit process. So the board received 32 complaints and there are an estimated 9000 tradesmen New Zealand - wide who complete 450 jobs per year and that equates to about 4050000 jobs and out of that there were 32 complaints. Where is the problem? 
Another incorporated society of plumbers is advising its members that in order to meet the proposed compliance costs of the consumer board’s competence-based licensing proposal they should add another $3.10 an hour to their charge-out rate. So let us look at the figures. What will this add to the invoice the consumer will receive? Well $3.10 per hour times 40 hours is $124 times 48 weeks is $5900 times 9000 tradesmen is about $53 million. That would be the cost to the country but there were only 32 complaints last year. The Government thinks that is a good premise on which to put forward a bill of this magnitude. 
Let us look at some of the costs that are being applied by the board. There are fees to accompany applications for registration and it lists all the different registrations at $75 dollars each. There are fees for issue of a certificate of registration at $50 fees for issue of a licence at $75 and a fee for a provisional licence at $75. There is a fee for just about every imaginable contingency. The saving grace is that although the board requires an interim registration for an apprentice it does not require the apprentice to pay the $75 fee. Wow! What generosity! 
This bill gives the plumbers and drainlayers board a licence to print money and who is going to be forking out that money? The drainlayers and plumbers are and that is only the course fee. It does not anywhere near take into account the time away from work to do those courses the travelling time involved the cost of that travelling time and the cost of accommodation if people have to stay overnight. 
I have a letter from a plumber in my neighbourhood. He says that he has been upskilling and has had to take time off work to do that. He has completed some courses and he thought they were pretty relevant to the work he was involved with. So he had several days off work and three nights away to complete the study and attend workshops and training courses. These included certificates of attendance for workshops on the new Building Act the workshop agenda for the new Technical Publication No. 58 held by the Auckland Regional Council covering on-site treatment and disposal of effluent first aid certificate among other things which were New Zealand Qualifications Authority unit standards. So he has spent a lot of time effort and money on those sorts of things. He attended an all-day course on servicing Rinnai gas appliances. It was not until the day was over that he found out the board would not award credits although with a few changes to the course it now does. 
So the board is pleasing itself about what it accepts. It makes the determination and I see from the bill that at the end of the day one’s final recourse is to the courts. So if people really want to get some justice out of the system they have to take the board to court; and all the board members are appointed by the Minister. There is absolutely no involvement by the gasfitters plumbers or drainlayers. The Minister says though that this board is being created for them. No way is that the case. So perhaps he should be looking at the premise for actually making that claim. He says it is covered in the preamble to the bill but that certainly does not match up with the information that has been provided in a number of other forums. The drainlayers and plumbers whom I have spoken to are very clear that this board is being set up for consumers not for plumbers and drainlayers. This bill is all about fleecing plumbers and drainlayers. 
Hon Pete Hodgson 
: No it’s not. 
SANDRA GOUDIE 
: It absolutely is. It will be interesting to know what the board will do with all that money and to see where it goes. As I was saying that particular gentleman from my electorate has written to me. In previous years he has attended a number of other courses. 
We have a shortage of tradesmen in this country. Their numbers have been declining over the years. I have talked to a few drainlayers and plumbers who are saying that they are not going to bother to register for a licence. They will just exit the industry. They have done their time. They have put in the hard yards and in the face of this legislation they are saying they have had a gutsful. They are getting out of the industry. They are not going to bother any more if they have to confront this type of hurdle in terms of compliance and costs. That is what it is. It is a huge amount of cost to these people and it is just another hurdle that they simply do not want to have to confront. 
Yet they do not disagree with the need for some upskilling but what is being proposed is going way overboard and that fact is certainly evidenced by the schedule of charges I have elucidated on. [ 
Interruption 
] I have touched only on some of them. There is no limit to the amount of charges that are able to be applied by this board and for anything that it deems necessary. 
The interesting thing I discovered in relation to the establishment of the board and the appointment of board members is that the board consists of two persons who hold or are deemed to hold a licence issued. So does that mean they can hold a licence but not really be upskilled to the level that is required and that the board is requiring of others? Is that what is meant by “deemed to hold”? It sounds to me like the board members can have a licence but they may not have done the upskilling and they do not have to do the upskilling but they can be “deemed to hold” just for the purposes of being appointed by the Minister to place all these charges on to other tradesmen who are out there doing the hard yards doing the hard graft and being whacked in the teeth by the board because it does not recognise courses that have New Zealand Qualifications Authority unit standards. 
Those people are slapped in the face and then told to do a range of courses. I have in front of me a range of courses many of which are set up by different types of businesses but that is a question in itself. Certainly there is a whole range of computer courses a dozen or so; and a whole range of business courses. There is a heavy-traffic licence course but where is the relevance of that? There is a range of first aid courses a whole range from Medical Hawera Ltd which have all been recognised and a whole range of safety seminars although that is not unrealistic. However the small-business management schedule is absolutely huge. Each one of those lines equals 10 units. What does having that as part of the competency-based licensing have to do with putting in a drain or doing a bit of plumbing? It is an absolute nonsense and it is a rort. It is about fleecing people blind and taking money on any pretext without any real sense of sensibility around it whatsoever. 
This Government is badly letting down the tradespeople of this country when we start getting into this sort of exercise. There were only 32 complaints in a year yet this is what we have to deal with. The bill is disgraceful.