O'Connor Damien: Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Connor Damien: Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 05 March 2014. Volume:696;Page:16354. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Labour—West Coast - Tasman): I will speak briefly on this Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill. This is a very important bill for provincial New Zealand. There are many many building owners and business people out and around there in New Zealand who are fearful of what this bill might deliver for them. It could be termed the “Risk Management Bill” because as the poor people in Christchurch know full well you cannot guarantee anything absolutely. We are in a country known as the Shaky Isles. It is inevitable that we will have earthquakes in the future and we have an obligation as a Parliament to try to reduce and if possible prevent any harm occurring in the event of another major earthquake.It is however virtually impossible to do that. Speakers before me have raised the issue of balance and my good colleague Raymond Huo has spoken about this on numerous times. The bill as the Government has presented could potentially cripple many hundreds and thousands of small businesses up and down this country. I am speaking to them on a regular basis. Greymouth and Motueka are two towns in particular where we have many many buildings that are way below code. They are occupied by people who are battling away to try to survive in business. They are confronted with internet purchasing. They are confronted with the big chains that have built brand new buildings—coming in riding into town and of course squashing opportunities for those people to survive. The last thing they need is to be confronted with an unaffordable situation around their tenancy.I spoke to a person who is closing down a business a sports store in Motueka. They have got 18 months still to run on their lease and they have to try to find someone to sublease to. It is in a building that needs a lot of work done to ensure that there is protection for the people who come in to buy and for the staff in that building. It is a real dilemma and there will be as I said thousands of people around the country like that. We have to trust that the Local Government and Environment Committee—and I am sure that the Labour members from this side will do their very best—will get the right balance. I know that that will be important.I would like to take the opportunity to just mention the heritage buildings. There is one in particular in Hokitika and that is St Mary’s Catholic Church. I have to mention it because I had the very sad occasion of the funeral of a dear friend and a stalwart Jim Keenan. He was a stalwart also of the Catholic Church and one of the greatest I guess losses for him was his inability in his last months to attend Mass at St Mary’s CatholicChurch because it has been deemed by the Catholic Church in Christchurch to be unsafe and unfit for service. It is a beautiful building. I am not sure how the passage of this legislation will affect the Catholic Church’s ability to do up that church and restore it to a usable building. It is a heritage building. It is magnificent. But we now have the tensions between building owners with a responsibility to people who utilise the building and then the huge costs facing an organisation in this case a big one. In many other cases around the country small landlords or individual business owners are faced with a real dilemma. So I hope that the select committee does the very best it can to find that right balance.I guess this is a word of warning. The National Government has not been very good at sorting out the leaky homes situation. I hope it does better at the shaky homes situation. That is what we are facing here. Councils up and down the country clearly need direction from central government. They are doing their best and using their own initiative to delay some of the implementation time lines that have been laid down. But they are not sure what legal liability would then occur if there is a terrible situation of another major earthquake in any one of those towns.We need clarity for the councils and we need clarity for the building owners but more important we need some security and protection for the business people who already have their backs to the wall in terms of provincial New Zealand. They need to know that they can carry on safely and that they can do so without having to pay ridiculous fees and costs of upgrade. So we wish the select committee all the very best in its considerations.