Williamson Maurice: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Williamson Maurice: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Sitting date: 29 January 2013. Volume:687;Page:7545. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (Minister for Building and Construction) 
: 
 I am delighted today to be able to take a call in the debate on the Prime Minister’s statement. Unlike a lot of my colleagues on this side who I think have admirably covered almost the whole range of issues about the economy and about what the Government has achieved in a whole range of things like water and so on and law and order which Judith Collins has done a magnificent job with I actually want to concentrate on only one subject. I am going to spend 10 minutes on the one subject and it is affordable housing. I have heard over and over again rhetoric from Opposition parties that the Government thinks it can sit on its hands and do nothing about the affordable housing issue. Well first of all I want to take them through a number of initiatives that have already been done by this Government and are finished and now working. I want to take them through a second tranche of initiatives that are currently under way like the Building Amendment Bill (No 4) which has currently just been reported back from the Local Government and Environment Committee and is awaiting its second reading. And I want to talk finally about some initiatives that I think are longer term but that will bear fruit. 
The first thing I think we have really got to do as a Parliament is separate out the issue of an affordable house from affordable housing. Why? Because one is just the building and the other is the entire piece of kit—that is the land the building the access the roading the water and the sewerage. That is what makes up housing. An affordable house is actually easier to do. If David Shearer wants to build an affordable house it is easy. It is absolutely easy to do. I will explain to members what we did. We ran a starter home competition through the Department of Building and Housing. We went out to New Zealand’s architects and we said: “Can you design a really nice three-bedroom house that is absolutely livable and that has got all the warmth and sunlight and everything else and the absolute limit on the build is $168000?”. Architects from across the country took part in the competition. We got it down to a shortlist of 10 designs—those designs are available on the Department of Building and Housing’s website—and finally a design won it. We had made a commitment as part of that that we would build that one design to show that it could be done. And so if members want to they can drive down Preston Road Otara and as they drive along they will see State house after State house after State house that is identical and then suddenly they will see the standout house. I do not even need to give you the address in Preston Road; it is a standout house. It is magnificent. It has got beautiful glass that lets sunlight in. It has got warmth. It has got double glazing. Any member of this House would be happy to live in it. And we built the actual house for $168000.  
But that is not what the debate in this House is about; it is about affordable housing. Let me tell you about that. The Housing New Zealand Corporation made the land available. We got all sorts of speedy consents done. We got all sorts of product suppliers and that helping along the way. But in the end do you know what the house actually cost when it finally went to sale? It was $420000 for the land and everything else in terms of services that go with it. So when I hear the debate in this House about affordable housing please stop that nonsense if you are talking about $100000 and something and tell me you are talking only about the house. Unless David Shearer wants to build his houses on some cloud somewhere he is going to have to pay for the cost of all the services the Resource Management Act stuff and all the land that goes with it. You cannot do that in Auckland for $300000. You cannot do it for $400000. You would be very lucky on a modest house to do it for $500000. Why is that? I look at the valuation of my property in Pakuranga—in fact I looked at the valuation of my property in Pauanui recently and 80 percent of its total value is the land. It has got a nice house on it—it has got a lovely house on it—but 80 percent of the property value is the land. That is the problem. They are not making any more of it Mr Shearer. There is only a certain amount of land and right now the restrictions and the limits that go on have stopped it. 
I want to talk about some of the things we have done because when I first became the Minister for Building and Construction in 2008 anybody who wanted to build a house could. All you needed to do was have a cellphone a dog and a ute and you could head off and build. Well we have brought a licensed building practitioner regime in place. It came into effect in March last year—mandatory—and now you have to be a qualified skilled competent person to do the various work streams. You cannot just go out and say: “I want to build a house.” You are actually acting illegally and face huge prosecution if you are not a skilled person. We have got the private sector working with us headed up by a very very competent man called Bill Smith and it is working on what is called the Productivity Partnership. It is making recommendations to the Government on a whole range of issues where we could get some improvement. 
Let me tell you this. Building and construction used to be about building something. It is rapidly becoming about manufacturing something. Kevin Stanley in Matamata took me to the Stanley building and construction company one morning and showed me these massive big jigs that had all the four-by-twos flow into place and the bolts all come down and the panelling all go up. They were building the building before your eyes inside the massive shed and when it rolled off on to the truck it was a manufactured building. But our processes in this country are still so archaic that every one of those has to get a building consent for itself not the process. What you should do is license the process and say: “If you meet the certain qualifications of building this building properly then you can build as many as you like.” Well guess what? We did that. We passed something into law called MultiProof. MultiProof now means that if you are building multiple numbers of a particular building you no longer have to go to the council to get a consent for each and every one as you had to. You get the consent just once and only once and then you can go out and build that building as many times as you like. That is hardly hands-off Mr Little. That is hardly hands-off; that is a pragmatic solution that has been put in place under this Government. 
We have also passed some legislation—not looking to but have passed—that initiates risk-based consenting because again the worst thing about the building consent process in this country up until recently was we had a one-size-fits-all. So if you were building the Mark Hotchin $35 million house in Paritai Drive you faced the same scrutiny and the same inspection rate as if you were building a single-storey three-bedroom timber-framed house on flat ground with no risk at all and that is nonsense. So the new risk-based consenting regime that has been triggered by the Building Act amendment now says that the level of consenting the level of inspections and the level of scrutiny that you should be subject to should be proportional to the risk that is associated. So if you are building a weird and wacky design of multiple levels where you could have leakages or things that could be damaging or dangerous you should face the full scrutiny. But if you are building a stock standard timber-framed three-bedroom home that is using standard treated timbers which are now mandatory by the way and which we brought into place—the new mandatory H1.2 timber; again not sitting on our hands— 
Hon Member 
: You took it out in the 1990s. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: —again not sitting on our hands—we brought in the mandatory treatment of timber. So the whole process of building a house starting from the design where the designer has now got to be a licensed practitioner and not just someone who grabbed a piece of paper and decided to have a scribble right through to the consenting of that design right through to the building of it right through to the actual sign-off has now got way more professional management about it. But there are still some unbelievably antiquated old-fashioned bits to the process. I have to say that the old idea of keeping a standards book called 3604 which weighs half a tonne but you have to buy it as an apprentice or as a carpenter and carry it with you as opposed to that being freely available on your iPad—when you are under a house flicking your iPhone out going to the page and having a look at how you connect a joist on a 45-degree angle seems like a more sensible thing. 
So in the end my message to this House is this. There is a huge amount of work being done on affordable housing. There is a huge amount of work being done on affordable houses but there is a lot more to be done in the housing area because most of that relies on getting some land freed up that is affordable and getting the services provided so that when you do put some of these quite good affordable houses on to those sites they actually do not then get drowned by all the cost of doing it. 
So I take my hat off to Bill Smith in the Productivity Partnership. I am delighted we have now got licensed building practitioner schemes. I am delighted that we have got risk-based consenting through this Parliament. There is more to go but this idea that it is a sitting-on-our-hands Government doing nothing is just simply wrong. I will not accept that. Yes they may say we have not done enough yes they may say there is more to do but I am proud of the achievements so far. Watch this space as we roll out some more of the affordable housing reforms during the course of 2013.