Twyford PhilPHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): This is my first opportunity to take a call since the quakes and I want to add my comments to those of my colleagues here in the House who have reflected on the loss of life—the two people who died in the quakes at Mt Lyford and Kaikōura. I also want to recognise the members of Parliament in the affected areas—people like my colleague Rino Tirikatene; Stuart Smith the MP for Kaikōura; and Grant Robertson and Chris Hipkins in Wellington. I also wanted to mention the Labour candidate in Kaikōura Janette Walker who does a lot of work in the town of Blenheim working with some of the most disadvantaged and displaced people whose lives have been upended by the natural disaster. She has been doing some amazing work.As colleagues have noted we come to this debate with consensus across the House that this is the appropriate course of action in the wake of a disaster like the recent earthquakes. There is I think unanimous all-party support for the measures that we are debating in the House today. These truly are the shaky isles and the most recent quakes are I think a reminder that earthquakes not only make this country in a geological sense but also kind of make us who we are. There is no doubt that the experience of the Canterbury quakes the thousands of aftershocks and this recent flurry of quakes has made us. And there have been some really interesting reflections on how communities and people have responded to the disaster and how they have reached out to their neighbours—the efforts of marae and others in the community to look after their fellow citizens.Notwithstanding the general atmosphere of non-partisan commitment to the recovery and transition there are some serious questions that need to be answered some of which we are debating with these bills. For example why did so many modern buildings sustain such serious structural damage in the earthquakes? I was pleased to see the Hon Dr Nick Smith Minister of Building and Housing announce that there would be I think within a couple of days of the quakes an inquiry into that. And so that is one of the really pressing issues but there are others.I think a lot of people around the country have been asking why we do not have in a country that is so prone to earthquakes a decent nationwide tsunami warning system. There has been quite a debate about Geonet and whether or not the seismic monitoring service should be better resourced so that it can provide 24/7 coverage. I suppose the other question is for all of the people whose homes and assets and businesses have been damaged or destroyed by the quakes and that question is whether or not the insurance companies and the Earthquake Commission have learnt the lessons of Canterbury where there is no question that much of the pain and the protracted delays in the rebuild in Canterbury were a result of the insurance companies and the Earthquake Commission not living up to their side of the bargain. It is our hope that those hard questions will be dealt with. So what does this bill do? It basically brings forward the commencement of the Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Act 2016 by about 6 months so that as soon as it gets the Royal assent from the Governor-General that Act will come in to force and that is completely appropriate. What it does also is it gives powers for building owners to be required to carry out assessments and evaluations in the wake of a natural disaster like one of these earthquakes or a flood for example. There are a number of issues that we need to tease out in this debate and one of them is to just come back to the question of buildings and the fact that so many modern buildings sustained serious structural damage. I think is it appropriate that procedures are in place for a very speedy assessment—an appropriate assessment—of buildings that are damaged by earthquakes but I also think we have to ask some hard questions about whether or not we have a problem in New Zealand with compliance with the building code and the standards within the building code. I am no expert on this but I suspect we will find that the building code and the standards are in pretty decent shape but that there is a real problem with compliance and there are many buildings out there that are apparently built to code but in fact are exposed in an event like this as falling woefully short of the standards required.There are other examples that we can see of this—the epidemic of shoddy building in Auckland that is going on at the moment is one example of it. In Masterton recently the local paper has been running stories about several buildings in the main township of Masterton that are falling unbelievably short of the standards in the building code and have major structural problems. That raises some pretty serious concerns for us and they are exposed and highlighted in the event of a disaster like this. I think that the post-disaster period when these assessments of buildings are taking place is particularly important given that in a CBD like Wellington's you had something like 60-odd buildings empty and cordoned off and in fact 2 weeks after the quake they are still finding buildings that have sustained structural damage and pose a risk. When buildings are sustaining that kind of damage in an environment where there are repeated aftershocks the potential risk to the public is massive.Unless we are satisfied that we have a system in place that can adequately assess the risk posed by those damaged buildings in an environment where there are large numbers of aftershocks how can the public have confidence that the streets and buildings of these city centres are safe? I think that one of the issues that we are going to have to deal with is we are going to have to test whether or not the standards for compliance are up to scratch in order to restore public confidence. We are going to be very interested to see the progress of Dr Nick Smith's inquiry into why so many of the modern buildings in Wellington copped serious damage.There are some other issues I think that emerge out of this. The assessments themselves need standards and colleagues have already commented on how surprised they were that there were in fact no powers to compel building owners to undertake these assessments. So there is a huge gap here. This bill appropriately gives those powers but I think we also want to see risk-based standards so that timely assessments can be done that will not be unduly expensive or time-consuming given the wide range of possible buildings and situations that need to be taken into account.The information from the assessments will be critical and that is about how we gather up the data that is generated by these assessments—it will be a hugely important source of data—and how we respond to future earthquakes. It is critical that we learn the lessons as the royal commission attempted to do in relation to the CTV Building collapsing in Canterbury. We have to learn the lessons from these earthquakes to ensure that we are constantly improving our system in order to give the public confidence.