Beaumont Carol: Building Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Beaumont Carol: Building Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 28 July 2009. Volume:656;Page:5203. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Assistant Speaker. It gives me great pleasure to rise to speak on this bill for the third time. First of all let me start by acknowledging my colleague the Hon Shane Jones for his work on this bill and of course for the very fine contribution he made just a few minutes ago. 
When I and my colleague Maryan Street spoke on this bill previously we talked about it in the context of its being one of a range of initiatives about affordable housing under the previous Labour Government. Affordable housing is a key challenge for us all. Mr Macindoe mentioned the aspiration of New Zealanders to have their own homes. We need to focus on this issue. It is a very difficult one for us. Housing affordability is very very difficult for many New Zealanders. 
The previous Government put in place a wide range of initiatives to try to help people to get into their own homes. Those initiatives included provisions in KiwiSaver to help people to save for a deposit for their first home enhanced first-home buyers provisions in the Welcome Home Loan programme and shared-equity schemes. We looked at the rentals charged for State houses. We looked at a whole range of initiatives around finding places where we could have affordable housing built. 
The previous Labour Government had many many initiatives in place because for Labour housing has always been a very important policy plank. That is because housing is not just about houses. Housing is about providing people with homes. Having a home is about having a place where people can live with their families a place where they can get a sense of community and identity a place that provides them with security a place where they can ensure they are warm and safe and a place that gives them some sense of ownership in their community. Housing is not just about houses. In fact housing is about people and their homes and I think that is important to realise. 
Housing is an important issue and affordable housing has become an increasing challenge in recent times. As Maryan Street noted in her contribution a couple of weeks ago it became a particular challenge for the last Government with the massive increase in housing prices. Houses became a lot less affordable. I believe that the last Government rose to the challenge and I am very keen to see what the current Government has planned in this space. I acknowledge to members that it is a challenge. It is not an easy thing to do and the Government needs to rise to the challenge. 
I will reinforce the main provisions of the bill we are talking about. This bill addresses three main areas of concern. It looks at national multiple-use consents and that is because 40 percent of all new homes in New Zealand are built by volume builders. It talks about achieving efficiencies by providing a system of national multiple-use consenting. But I stress at this point that the bill is very much associated not only with those efficiencies but also with retaining quality in this regard and that is very important. 
There are some who seem to think that regulation always gets in the way of efficiency and productivity. Regulation is often in place for very good reasons and in the housing area I do not imagine anybody in this House could fail to recognise what happens when there is an inadequate regulation. First of all the bill looks at national multiple-use consents. Secondly it covers how we deal with amendments to building consents and the types of small variations that occur during the building process and so on. The third area concerns the project information memorandum or “PIM” which is intended to provide a one-stop shop for all information regarding building work requiring a building consent. Only a minority of project information memoranda were being applied for prior to a building consent application being made and consequently the full benefit of that was not being realised in most cases. Those are the main areas covered by this bill. 
The Local Government and Environment Committee received 17 submissions on the bill and a number of the issues that were raised were incorporated in the bill we now have before us. A couple of areas that were not able to be covered included submissions made by the Historic Places Trust which raised particular difficulties around the fact that making project information memoranda voluntary may make it more difficult to monitor building projects that adversely affected historic places. 
I will finish by focusing on some recent comments made by the Minister for Building and Construction Maurice Williamson. He was talking about this bill recently at the annual general meeting of the Building Industry Federation in Auckland on 16 July. He said that the Government is committed to cutting red tape in the sector and getting rid of unnecessary rules and regulations and that this bill will speed up the consent process and reduce costs. Hopefully that is something we are all in agreement on and hopefully that will be a very positive outcome of this bill. But he did go on to say that he thought it was a start and that it did not go far enough in addressing compliance issues. 
As I mentioned earlier in this speech for some people the whole issue of regulation seems to be a negative thing from start to finish. I hope that that is not what the Minister is saying in this case because we need to ensure that our buildings in this country are of good quality and that we do not have a repeat of some of the dreadful experiences people have had. Mr Williamson talked about the fact that the Government will be reviewing the Building Act 2004 to drive down the regulatory costs associated with building. To give him credit he did go on to say that the Government wanted to do that without compromising building quality and that the terms of reference are currently being finalised. 
I read the Minister’s comments with interest and one of the things I thought was very interesting was the risk and liability framework in the sector and what concerns he was raising about the behaviour of councils. I know that this gets us into the territory of the Resource Management Act and other things that are going on around council regulation. He also talked about a number of other non-regulatory ways to improve performance and I think that is an interesting area to focus on. The area that really jumped out at me is around getting better outcomes from the increased investment in trade training and I think that is a good thing. The Minister talked about the proliferation of qualifications the absence of good qualifications for some lower-level trade skills and the different funding and assessment models for apprenticeship training. 
I doubt that anybody in this House would have a problem with those issues per se but I thought it was a little bit rich for a National Minister to be talking about trade training when trade training took a nose dive under the previous National Government. In fact the current National Government has got off to a very poor start in this area. We are finding that the investment in adult education industry training and tertiary education generally is either flat lining or in some cases being severely cut. So I thought it was a little bit interesting that the Minister was talking about the desire to get better outcomes from increased investment in trade training and I am looking forward to finding out what that increased investment is because I do not think we saw it in the current Budget. Clearly we would have to agree that increasing investment in trade training would indeed be a good thing. With that I commend this bill to the House and I again acknowledge the work of the previous Government in getting this bill into the House. Thank you. 
Bill read a third time.