Hipkins ChrisCHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): I am very pleased to see this Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Act 2016 Amendment Bill progressing through the House at a reasonably steady pace this evening. I am pleased to see the introduction of the new powers in the bill as it is—but it will become an Act—that will allow local authorities to require building owners to have proper inspections done following an event such as an earthquake.It is a sad thing to say but there have been reports of some pretty disgraceful behaviour by a small number of building owners following this most recent earthquake. The idea that a building owner could walk through a building and say that they had deemed it to be safe and tell their tenants that they had deemed it to be safe is not good enough. Actually one of the responsibilities of being a landowner and a building owner is making sure that that property is safe. After an earthquake very few people actually have the appropriate skills and knowledge to be able to undertake those detailed assessments. It is only right that they bring in those people who do to make sure that the building is safe.I want to make an observation based on some of the comments that I have heard. It is that no two earthquakes are the same and so the fact that a building stood up during one earthquake is no guarantee that it is going to stand up during the next one. Earthquakes are located in different places they move in different directions and they have different effects; so to say that a building withstood a great earthquake at some given time and therefore it will be fine—that is simply not the case. Earthquakes do not behave that way; every one of them is different. Therefore it may well be that after each quake the building has to be reinspected because we do not actually know what the particular effect of different quakes is going to be on that building. So I think we have to err on the side of caution and therefore it is one of the costs of being a building owner.I acknowledge the legitimate concerns that people have raised about the potential for significant cost to building owners in a case such as this. Unfortunately that is simply the cost of the line of business that they are in. When an earthquake like that happens they have a responsibility to ensure that their buildings are safe and they should be getting in the appropriate expertise in order to do that. The cold hard reality of it is that if a landlord is so badly capitalised that the costs of getting building inspections following an earthquake brings into question their viability as a landlord then they are in the wrong business; they should actually get out and make sure that the building is taken over by someone who is in the position to do that. Ultimately if something goes wrong—yes we have got health and safety laws that suggest that that landlord would be liable if something went wrong—it is too late by then. We have got a responsibility to act before something goes wrong to ensure that people are safe. So these provisions are welcome. To be honest I was quite surprised that we did not have provisions like this in the law in the first place so I welcome the fact that they are being inserted into the Act. I do not intend to delay the bill's passage any further.Bill read a second time.