Huo Raymond: Building Amendment Bill (No 4) — Instruction to Committee In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHuo Raymond: Building Amendment Bill (No 4) — Instruction to Committee In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 19 November 2013. Volume:695;Page:14966. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]RAYMOND HUO (Labour):Ni hao. Following the good spirit of the Minister for Building and Construction who has just resumed his seat I would like to acknowledge the Hon Shane Jones Labour’s spokesperson on building and construction who was an experienced Minister for Building and Construction as the current Minister just acknowledged. I am lucky to be his associate and to be his understudy.I would also like to acknowledge the current Minister for Building and Construction. I should say that the more I have got to know about the issues involving building andconstruction the more I appreciate the complexity involved in the Building Act review. I do feel for the Minister for Building and Construction especially whenever he was accused of taking a piecemeal approach for various reasons as he just outlined in his contribution. But that does not mean that he is exonerated.Last but not least I would like to thank the officials for their thorough analysis for their thorough departmental report and for their advice which was very very helpful. The departmental report on this particular bill the Building Amendment Bill (No 4) is one of the best of this kind. The departmental report and indeed the Building Amendment Bill (No 4) itself covered a number of issues. Some of them are outside of the scope of this bill but are a very important part of the Building Act review.Labour supports the Building Act review but our position remains the same and that is that we cannot—at least at this stage—support the passage of this bill. Two events would have played a certain role in affecting our position. As stated in our Local Government and Environment Committee minority report given the range of serious issues that have been raised by the submitters and the fact that the Government would be considering the findings of the report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Building Failure Caused by the Canterbury Earthquakes it would make more sense to separate off the elements of the No. 4 bill that relate to dams and to hold back the provisions that deal with consumer issues in relation to residential properties. If that happened as indicated in our minority report we would have no problem in supporting the provisions in relation to classifiable or referable dams.The second event is related to the review of the non-ductile column buildings built between 1982 and 1995 with three storeys or more. The purpose was to establish whether there were any buildings with similar design flaws to the CTV Building which collapsed in the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake killing 115 people. I should say the approach taken by the Minister for Building and Construction was sensible and professional. There are two building owners who have refused to engage with the review despite the council asking them to get an engineering assessment. The status quo does not give councils or the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment the power to compel at-risk building owners to have their at-risk buildings assessed and their problems addressed. I agree with the Minister who found it unacceptable and I understand he has been investigating options to increase accountability.The options that the Minister has been investigating are either a Supplementary Order Paper to this bill or stand-alone legislation. If the Minister introduces such a Supplementary Order Paper it may affect our position with regard to the bill in its entirety. It is more in sorrow than in anger that we have no other choice but to decide to vote against this bill. Having said that I should reiterate that our position as stated in our minority report in the Building Amendment Bill (No 3)—now the 2012 Act—has remained the same as well. It is an opportunity lost in that the Minister has so far taken a piecemeal and uncoordinated approach.I do find the Minister’s explanations to some extent acceptable. However I am not quite sure how many stand-alone bills the Minister is going to introduce or when he is going to introduce for example the Building Amendment Bill (No 5) (No 6) or (No 7). It sounds like the Minister is competing against Steve Jobs in releasing iPhones 5 5s 6 or 7 but the building sector needs certainty. We legislators need to look beyond the status quo to introduce effective measures to prevent a repeat of the man-made leaky buildings saga and to prepare us for rainy days both in the literal and figurative sense.There are some other issues that I would like to touch upon at this Committee stage. The first one is related to the Weathertight Homes Tribunal. The No. 4 bill states that owners of dwellings that suffer from building defects that are not remedied by the liable parties can seek redress through arbitration the Weathertight Homes Tribunal or thecourts. These courses of action are already fully available to aggrieved owners. But certainly in the case of the courts and even the Weathertight Homes Tribunal they are ruinously expensive.This bill does nothing to reduce this cost to improve the technical ability of these judicial bodies to arrive at technically correct findings or as stated above to ensure that responsible parties are held accountable. Whereas the Government could reasonably claim that a review of joint and several liability vis-à-vis proportional liability—by the way I do accept the explanations given by the Minister in his earlier contributions—and the technical performance of the courts are matters for the Law Commission to consider the effectiveness of the Weathertight Homes Tribunal should have formed a major part of the Building Act review and as a consequence this suite of legislation.The other related matter is a mandatory home warranty. I support Wellington City Council and Christchurch City Council two of our largest city councils and a number of other submitters who have called on the Government to introduce a home warranty insurance scheme and urge the Minister to refer the matter to the Law Commission for review. As pointed out by the Home Owners and Buyers Association if the parties responsible for defective building work have either gone out of business died or left New Zealand the consumer is left exposed and faces having to cover the costs. Building law should be amended to offer greater protections. Oddly the Local Government and Environment Committee which considered the Building Amendment Bill (No 4) now before the Committee to be passed under urgency was forced to amend its report to the House. The committee and public were led to believe that the Minister had referred the matters of both joint and several liability and the mandatory home warranty scheme to the Law Commission for review. However the Law Commission later informed the chair that mandatory home warranties had never been referred.For the general public it does not matter as to who misled the committee but I continue to urge the Government to refer this issue to the Law Commission and establish a system that provides meaningful and effective protections and guarantees for consumers and consenting authorities. We must legislate to prevent a repeat of the man-made leaky buildings saga especially in light of an imminent construction boom in parts of the country. New Zealand consumers deserve protection and the Minister needs to make sure that the law ensures that contractors and suppliers will be held accountable. The Government’s piecemeal approach will not work and introducing inadequate measures or partial instalments is not the answer.