Ardern Shane: Building Bill — Second Reading 
Ardern Shane: Building Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:619;Page:14544] 
SHANE ARDERN (National—Taranaki-King Country) 
: 
 That was another fine contribution from the member for Whanganui. She is right partly. Despite the fact that National will oppose the Building Bill she is partly right in this area because she said one’s home is the biggest asset most people will ever own. Apart from that nothing in her contribution had any relevance to what we are debating today. The reality is that this bill came about as a result of the leaky homes inquiry—that is true. It is also true that the regulatory requirement that was in place prior to that inquiry clearly had some deficits and that something needed to be done. National acknowledges that. But the Government has come up with a piece of fine academic work—358 pages of it! That is what happens when we get the socialist academics—along with the lawyers Messrs Franks and Smith I hasten to add—involved in trying to design something to take care of a very practical problem. We have ended up with this “sledgehammer to crack a nut” approach. That is what we have here and that is why National opposes the bill. 
The National Party looked at all the submissions that came before the Government Administration Committee. There was a large number—150 submitters. We went through all the issues raised by submitters and decided that the proposed changes in this bill would add a huge layer of cost to the building industry and by and large would not achieve the outcome that is intended. I will give a couple of examples of that. One of the problems identified in the inquiry as leading to the leaky homes syndrome was the fact that the wrong materials or products were being used together with one other. Nothing in this bill will stop that from happening. Further another thing identified by that process was that a large number of contractors and developers—particularly in the Auckland area—would not be caught by this process. So we will add this huge cost—submitters said that as much as $6300 could be added to the cost of an average home—to the cost of buildings and the legislation will not address the problem. 
Much has been made of the role that private certifiers may have played in the leaky homes problem. Private certifiers cannot be found to have been liable in any one of those cases. I challenge the Opposition member to give me an example of a case where a private certifier was found to be the core reason for the problem that occurred with regard to the leaky homes syndrome. We will not find an example—at least National has not found one anywhere. At the end of the day this heavy-handed legislation will crack down on a group of people that is doing nothing that could be identified as wrong—in fact those people are providing a service. The Government’s way of getting rid of that group—this was correctly identified by the United Future speaker—is to make the regulatory requirement around it so tough that it cannot survive. Those people will not be able to continue. 
It was also submitted to the committee that the average cost of building a medium-quality home in Auckland is around $2300 per square metre. Currently the average cost of building an equivalent home in Australia is about A$1100 per square metre. That is under the current regime. What will happen when we add a further $6300 to the cost of the average home? It was interesting to listen to the Green member Sue Kedgley’s contribution in which she said it has been identified—and this is true; I agree with her—that poor housing low insulation levels and those kinds of things contribute to our health problems. There is absolutely no doubt about that being true. How will the addition of $6300 worth of compliance costs to the cost of an average home help people in the low socio-economic group to get a better standard of house? How will it do that? It is absolutely true that insulation and proper building standards play a major role in the quality of our housing stock. 
 But would it not have been a much more sensible idea to have empowered the Building Industry Authority to have a self-policing role and not to lay all that cost on the industry and on every house that is built? 
I want to cover a number of other things and one of them is the whole issue of treated timber which is not addressed in this bill. Most old builders will tell us the notion of using untreated  
Pinus radiata  
in the framework of a house is about as nuts as we can get. Most of them will tell us that. Sue Kedgley said that I want to put a regime in place whereby all chemicals—and particular mention was made of the use of tanalised timber where the treatment is arsenic-based—are banned in the preservation of timber. We cannot have it both ways. If we are to have houses that are sound watertight healthy and do not fall down then we have to start asking those questions. This bill does not address that issue. On the other hand the Green Party also says we cannot use native timber in the construction of our houses because its milling is not sustainable. Well one can build a house in a sustainable long-term reliably constructed manner from untreated native timbers but we are not allowed to use those timbers because it is not sustainable to mill them. So there is the conundrum that the Greens face and it is some of the conundrum that the committee faced during the process of considering this bill. 
Further the idea that we can put in place some kind of superior person who will go around and supervise the construction of houses particularly in outlying rural areas where there is a large number of semi-retired builders who will now find it very difficult to keep themselves up to speed with the regulation that is being applied in this bill will mean that we will end up with a poorer or a lower standard of construction rather than an improvement. 
Janet Mackey 
: Oh that’s stupid! 
SHANE ARDERN 
: I see the member who represents a large rural area is saying that is not so. She should go out and look at who builds houses and does some of the work in the small towns in her electorate. 
Opposition Member 
: She should take a call. 
SHANE ARDERN 
: That is right. She will most likely have come across the kind of people whom I am talking about and we need those people. There is a huge shortage of skilled builders in the industry. So there is a large number of people out there who are qualified and do quality work but who will be excluded from doing it in future as a result of this bill. Now where will the replacements for those people come from? Where are the people who will carry out the training for quality people whom we need so desperately in the building industry? Where will the volunteers who do work to the local hall or school and carry out those kinds of renovations come from once this legislation is passed? 
This bill is 358 pages of socialist bureaucratic overkill in terms of what will happen in rural New Zealand and we oppose it.