Tisch Lindsay: Building Bill — In Committee Procedure 
Tisch Lindsay: Building Bill — In Committee Procedure 
[Volume:619;Page:14869] 
LINDSAY TISCH (National—Piako) 
: 
 This is like the house that Jack built. That is what we have been going through in this Committee stage—the bill is an absolute nonsense. It will add considerable costs where there need not be costs. The genesis of this bill was the leaky homes issue. It actually goes back further than that. There was an industry group that got together in 1998 and said the current Building Act 1991 needed to have some changes made to it. Industry players got together and started to work through improvements that needed to be made. A change of Government a year later in 1999 meant that all the good work that was done at that time was shut down. It was not even considered. The point I make here is that at that time it was said that the process to review the 1991 Act would have taken at least 4 years. As a consequence of the weathertightness problem and the leaky homes we have legislation on which the industry has not been widely consulted. 
Dianne Yates 
: Absolute rubbish. 
LINDSAY TISCH 
: That member chairs the select committee and we would not have had that sort of nonsense if the industry players had been involved. The only time they had any input into this was when they made submissions to the committee. 
 If a bill was drafted one would have thought that the whole industry—everyone—would have been involved and of course the players were not involved in that. It is an overkill. It will increase the regulatory burden that all players in the industry will be faced with and at the end of the day it will not do what the bill is supposed to do and that is to give consumer protection. 
We know there are issues with the present Act. We have acknowledged that. We know there are issues with leaky homes. But in no way does this bill prevent the problem and that is why the bill is not titled the right way. The “Building Bill” should actually be “The House That Jack Built Bill”. If we were to look at the whole question of the benefits and the costs associated with this there was a cost-benefit analysis report that said that for a 150 square metre house the costs could increase about 2.9 percent. I think that is on the light side. In fact the figures we have used in previous debates and also in National’s minority review suggest that the costs are going to increase by about 12 to 15 percent. 
The economic impact of this bill will lead to significant increases in labour costs. There is already a short supply in some trades especially those skilled trades such as bricklayers. They are actually naming their price at the moment. It is a very competitive field to be in and they are doing extremely well. If we look at comparative prices between homes in Australia and in New Zealand to build a home in Auckland it is $2300 per square metre; in Adelaide it is $1170 per square metre. To build a smaller home a 120 square metre home will take 4 months. The actual costs are not $6500 that we have talked about before because I did a rerun of the figures. It will take 85 hours of supervision time and that is what the bill says. The bill does not say “inspect” it says “supervise”. That is what it now says. One has to supervise everything not inspect so it will be 5 hours per week over a 4-month period—85 hours in total which will be closer to about $10000 just to meet the new requirements of the bill. 
We have the Minister for Small Business John Tamihere who is sitting there and he has not taken any notice of what this is going to do. I ask the Minister whether this is going to enhance protection give customer safety or give a sense of security. 
Hon John Tamihere 
: Yes. 
LINDSAY TISCH 
: The Minister says that it is. Well we will find out very quickly will we not when people are having to pay these huge costs. There will be absolutely no guarantee that there will be anything in it for them. We will see a lot of people building new homes for the first time being disadvantaged by this. What will that lead to? It will lead in my view to illegal construction. People will go through the back-door. They will say: “I’m not going to go through this process. I’m actually going to go and do those renovations to my own home. I’m not going to get a consent. I’m not going to have a licensed building practitioner come around. I’m going to do it myself.”