Luxton CameronCAMERON LUXTON (ACT): Thank you Mr Speaker. Much like the previous two speakers I too am a member of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee—Grant McCallum: Great committee.CAMERON LUXTON: —great committee—and I suspect the following speakers from New Zealand First and National may well be members as well. I'm looking forward to seeing this bill at select committee and therefore ACT is proud to be supporting this bill past first reading.I think it's a pragmatic bill that the Minister has brought forward. You know there's a few things that need tidying up in our building legislation and this is seeking to address some of it specifically the earthquake-strengthening issues that we have in New Zealand. There's a lot of angst out in the community in small towns and large cities about the current regime for earthquake strengthening and the time lines around that.So I congratulate the Minister on extending that to give some certainty to the industry especially since making that announcement back in April that there would be some extensions available. I think this is going to be well received by building owners up and down the country who have been seeking some clarity. And clarity will be coming because local councils will be required to reissue their earthquake-prone building notices. So that means if you are a building owner out there and you're worried about how this is going to affect you your council needs to be in contact with you. The purpose of a bill like this should be about improving safety and compliance not making it harder. So I think having a review to actually reassess where we've got to over the last decade with our regulations and the codes and practices of the building industry and the engineering fraternity and the way they assess things such as the new building standard (NBS) and the way they use the national building code standard to actually assess the earthquake-prone or earthquake-risk elements of a building—there's some great stuff happening in this review and tidying up the other things that need tidying up in the Building Act at the end is a very good use of a bill like this.In the confidence in the NBS ratings I do think we have an issue that I believe needs to be addressed. As the previous speaker Julie Anne Genter mentioned one point above the national building standard of 34 percent is the difference between an uncompliant building and compliant building. We need to have confidence that it is not being applied differently across the country by different engineering outfits that there is some trust in a scheme such as that. Because you know on one end it can be that 33 to 34 is a requirement to remediate or not but at the other end the difference between 66 and 67 percent means that a bank might not lend therefore you can't sell your building to someone who's unable to get a mortgage and things like that. So these single digit changes in the rating of a building are very important and can lead to a massive change for a building owner. I think we need to have confidence. Building owners and the industry itself needs to have confidence in that. Now as I say this is tidying up some great things which is great but ACT sees a building industry that is proportionate to the risk. We don't want to have a ratchet effect of councils pushing up compliance then engineers push up compliance and then banks push up compliance and we end up over-engineering ourselves out of existence to the point where when our civilisation is dead and gone they can see the expensive buildings that at the time cost a fortune and may have been great for archaeologists of the future to look at but actually was that a good use of our funds on the day? A test of reasonableness would be greatly appreciated. We don't have the layers of protection that are just like I say ratcheting each other up. I mean designers need to have confidence that what they are designing is actually going to leave them in a space where they're not over-burdening the client who then has to pay for this but at the same time are providing the necessary safeguards to the occupants of the building whether it's during the day or whether it's overnight. Because I mean if you are staying overnight in a building you need to have a higher degree of confidence. But I think there needs to be a cost benefit done in the entire building industry and I commend the Minister and I commend this bill. I think it's a great start. I'm looking forward to hearing about it in select committee. Thank you Mr Speaker.