Parker David; Tisch LindsayHon DAVID PARKER (Labour): I rise to take a call in support of the amending legislation that is an amendment to the 2016 amendment to the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act. I agree and in fact I was somewhat surprised as I am sure a lot of members would have been to learn that there is no power to require the owner of a building that may be in need of repair or assessment as to whether it is safe—there is no regulatory power easily available to the Government to require that that building be inspected. So I agree that it is necessary.It is a somewhat small step in that I think we are going to have to have a serious look in New Zealand as to whether the building code has been up to a high enough earthquake prevention standard given the relatively young age of some of these building that are no longer occupied. I think we should also—and this is addressed to Minister Brownlee—be looking at whether some of the warnings given by occupants of buildings following the 2013 earthquake off Seddon where there was damage to buildings or defects had shown up in buildings at that time were not properly looked into by landlords or I would suspect on other occasions by Government departments. I am aware of at least one of the buildings that are now unoccupied Mr Brownlee—Hon Gerry Brownlee: I'm listening.Hon DAVID PARKER: —oh thank you—where I am told that in 2013 staff raised concerns as to the integrity of the building and they were not taken seriously. I do not know whether those accusations are correct. The people whom I had that information from are not reckless people; they are people whom I know quite well and I place some trust in their word. I think we should have a look at whether some of the buildings that are occupied by Government departments were showing flaws in 2013 that the management of those organisations did not respond to adequately. They are actually not buildings that were built during the tenure of the National Government; they were built during the tenure of the prior Labour Government but I have had some suggestion that there were concerns raised in 2013 that were not looked into properly. We did not need a new power under the civil defence legislation to require Government departments to do what they should have done. We do now sometimes need a power of compulsion in respect of private building owners and private building occupiers and that is what this amendment bill does. In respect of the Government and the civil defence authorities which are effectively an agent of Government in times of emergency when they go too far and make an onerous or unreasonable request of a building owner there is protection set out in clause 7 of this bill which inserts the new clause 26A into the principal Act—sorry which inserts new section 26A into the amendment Act which changes section 91 of the underlying Act. It is a bit confusing but effectively this new power is to be found after this amendment goes through in section 91 of the underlying Act. It is subsection (6) that says: The owner (or the owner's agent) may appeal to the District Court on the grounds that the direction is unreasonable." So I presume and we will ask the Acting Minister of Civil Defence this during the Committee stage—because I have been racing around trying to follow this through in the underlying amendment which was just passed in 2016 and in the 2002 Act—that the effect of subsection (7) is to say that they have still got to do the review they just have the ability to get back the cost of that review if the District Court later finds that the request made of them was unreasonable. So I think that is a fair enough check and balance. I think that the emergency powers of the civil defence people ought to be able to say "You need to get a report now." and if they do not there needs to a consequence and that consequence presumably would enable the recovery manager to direct someone else to have access if the owner or the agent has refused to do so. That is another matter we should be checking at the Committee stage of this because if you have got an unreasonable owner then I think the State should be able to do the report itself and recover the cost from the building owner. The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I call Eugenie Sage—5 minutes."