Smith Nick: Weathertight Homes Resolution Services (Remedies) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Smith Nick: Weathertight Homes Resolution Services (Remedies) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:641;Page:11095] 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH (National—Nelson) 
: 
 This motion from the Minister represents everything that is rotten about this Government. It is about incompetence it is about abuse of process and it is about bad outcomes for ordinary New Zealanders out there in respect of both the Building Act and the Weathertight Homes Tribunal. 
Let me first deal with the issue of incompetence. In 2002 the Government rushed through—in 2 weeks—the legislation to deal with weathertight homes. It got it wrong. In 2005 the Minister in the chair came along to the House—again in a rush again breaching normal process—and said that the Government would fix the botch-up but got it wrong. Submissions were made to the Social Services Committee that the bill did not provide for general damages that it was unfair and that we needed to make it explicit but the Minister said that he knew best and that the bill did not need to include it. Now we have this amendment bill before the Committee which is effectively about a botch-up that was fixed in 2005 but turned into a botch-up and now we are trying to fix that botch-up—again in a mad rush. 
Then we have the splitting of this bill to be inserted into the parts of the Building Act. We see the same levels of incompetence in that area. That is in 2004 the Government brought this big bureaucratic Building Act into Parliament and in 2005 it said: “Oops! We’ve made some mistakes and we’ve got to fix it up.” Now here at the last moment after the bill has gone through its Committee stage the Minister introduces amendments that now require the splitting of the bill. National says that this is absolutely incompetent. What makes it almost laughable is that the Minister in the chair has given speech after speech to the building industry saying: “Do it once; do it right.” and when it comes to the weathertight homes legislation and the Building Act the track record is mistake after mistake after mistake. That would be all right except there has been an awful price for New Zealanders to pay for these botch-ups. 
Five years after this Government introduced the legislation to address leaky homes only 15 percent of cases have been resolved. The Government has spent $85 million on the bureaucratic process to deal with leaky homes. That works out at $111000 per case. But the tragedy is that the average payout on each of those homes has been $70000. So I ask the Minister in the chair who wants to split the bill why we should agree to that. Why should we agree when there has been mistake after mistake after mistake? 
Then we look at the core Building Act which this legislation also amends. Have we obtained the objective of trying to generate good quality buildings at less cost? My colleague Bob Clarkson—“Bob the Builder” we colloquially call him because he knows a thing or two about building—has rightly exposed the fact that 5 years after the leaky homes legislation the chief executive of the Department of Building and Housing can still not give this House an assurance that there are not more leaky homes being built. That is incompetent. But even worse is that if we look at the bureaucratic nightmare it now takes for any citizen to get a building consent we see that it is an absolute disaster. 
Members should look at yesterday’s  
Dominion Post 
 in which the Wellington City Council says that the amount of paperwork that is now required to build a standard New Zealand home has increased fivefold. I simply ask why members on this side of the Chamber would want to do that. The fascinating part is—and this is again where there is a double standard—that the Minister has said that he stands for reducing compliance costs. Then we have in this crucial area of building an increase of fivefold in the amount of paperwork that is required in the building industry to the point that talented good professionals are leaving New Zealand to go to Australia to avoid the bureaucracy that has been created. 
The third point I have made about the motion to split the bill is that the legislation has caused bad outcomes for people. Every year that Labour has been in office we have seen a 1 percent reduction in homeownership—and really that is a telling sign of the failures of this Government.