Smith NickHon Dr NICK SMITH (National—Nelson): There's a very important question that the Minister in the chair needs to answer for this Parliament to answer for the people of New Zealand and to answer for the CTV families. I've asked it twice my colleague has just asked it and it is critical and may well be the subject of a royal commission of inquiry and other discussions in the future: will the one year and one day exemption be available to an engineer who has badly designed any of the 4200 buildings built in the Christchurch rebuild?The officials told the select committee they would be exempted and that they would be able to use that loophole. I ask again—for the Minister; he's been nodding his head and giving all sorts of answers—why can he not answer that critical question for the people of Canterbury? Isn't the silence deafening? Isn't that a question that my colleagues would like the answer to? Wouldn't the half a million people who live in Canterbury and went through the Canterbury earthquakes and have seen their city demolished and rebuilt—haven't they seen all the tears and emotion that the CTV families—don't they deserve an answer Minister? Why can you not simply answer the question: will your law allow the loophole that resulted in the injustice for the CTV families to be repeated in future with a similar scenario to the CTV families'? The answer is yes the answer is that that is wrong and that is why the law should be changed. Let's just go through the scenario of the buildings. We've got one group of the buildings like CTV and the Pyne Gould Corporation buildings and the like that were built and have failed. Nobody in this Parliament is arguing that you could rewrite those laws for where people have previously died. Nobody's suggesting that. But you have this massive group of buildings that have been built since the earthquakes before this law has passed and the key question is: will this loophole be available for those buildings? Our view is no they should not. Members opposite are saying that rule—the loophole—should continue for those buildings. If we take nationwide Minister we're talking over 220000 buildings.Of course I acknowledge there is no question that for buildings that are designed after the passage of this law—they're buildings that will be starting to be constructed in 2020 and beyond—quite rightly the loophole does not apply. But actually whether that loophole is available to those 220000 buildings around New Zealand is absolutely a pertinent point on which this Minister has it wrong. Now the Minister has said well you can't do what I propose in my Supplementary Order Paper because it might breach the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. Well actually he's been responsible in passing in a waka-hopping law that breached the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. We have a bill before the House right now on euthanasia that members will be debating which we're advised breaches the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act because it discriminates against 16- and 17-year-olds when the age should be 18. That is not a legal impediment. Parliament is sovereign; Parliament is able to deal with that. Let's further deal with the issue of section 10 of the Crimes Act. At the very core of the Minister's claim is that it is not an unlawful act to build a building that is seismically flawed resulting in death. Actually it is. Absolutely it is. Here's the silliness: the silliness is that if I as an engineer design a building today and it fails on the 364th day and kills a hundred people I'm in the gun. But just by the anomaly of this archaic law if it happens to be 367 days I'm free. So it is a crime right now—criminally negligent for an engineer to build a building. So the argument he poses in respect of both section 10 and the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act is incorrect. Let us be in absolutely no doubt: the Minister gave a commitment to the CTV families that said the CTV injustice would never occur again and what we know with this Government's policy is that for 220000 buildings if any of them are badly designed they can still use this loophole and that injustice is repeated.