Genter Julie AnneHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green—Rongotai): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. My contribution actually has a certain amount in common with the previous speaker. Being a representative of a part of Wellington this is a bill that will directly impact and assist those who own buildings in Wellington that have been having a really difficult time financing meeting the standards.It's a question that I'm personally very interested in. I have lived in a heritage apartment building that was just sort of 1 percent above the acceptable new building standard (NBS); I think it was like 38 percent or something. But interestingly because it was on bedrock in Mount Victoria it seemed fine over the last 80 years of earthquakes; whereas some modern buildings built on reclaimed land in Wellington that were at 100 percent of NBS didn't fare so well in the earthquake—in fact fared quite poorly. So I'm really interested to understand how we can have earthquake standards that genuinely reflect the risk taking into account more than just the building itself but also the ground conditions and whether that can be part of the solution.The Greens have actually long recognised—in our arts culture and heritage policy—that the earthquake-strengthening system for heritage buildings is cost-prohibitive and leads to buildings being demolished rather than remediated which is not always a great outcome. So one of our policies had been just recognising that if we want to address this this is one of those things that we address together as a community and as a country and Government is well placed to help find collective solutions. It's going to be a similar situation with adapting to climate change and dealing with severe weather events. If we just leave it to individuals a lot of people are going to be in incredible hardship.I have a constituent who messaged me specifically about the previous Government's assistance programme that was going to help with the cost of remediating building. She was actually writing on behalf of her mother who also lives in the Rongotai electorate who is on a fixed income on a pension has owned this apartment it's her home she doesn't want to give it up and has found herself in a situation of needing to—alongside the other owners of the building spent an enormous amount went through all of the paperwork finally got through all the hurdles to apply for that assistance fund and then just as that happened it was announced by this Government that they were cancelling the assistance fund. It may have been a small number of people—and I agree that that fund hadn't gone far enough to address the problem and that something needed to be changed there but I think for those people who had already put a lot of time and effort and emotional stress that they were suffering from going through this effort to try and access that fund to have it taken away like that I think was unfortunate.This legislation just extending the time frames doesn't address the issue of the compliance cost and of how we actually achieve safer buildings in a sustainable way. So that's something that I think we need to be able to tease out in the select committee process. We do support this at first reading and we'll have to see what comes out of that select committee process. I absolutely understand the discomfort with the select committee process being shorter. Ideally it would have been longer than 2½ months. However 2½ months is a lot better than 10 days as has been the case for some other legislation we've seen earlier this year. So we do understand that because of the need to meet the deadline and give certainty to so many building owners and so many communities particularly here in Wellington and Rongotai but also right across the country in rural towns as well—we can accept I think the 2½-month select committee process.As has been said by the Minister we can't really assess the risk of extending the time frames against a perfect scenario where all of those buildings were remediated by the time frames because 80 percent of them were not going to be. But we do need to work together I think to find a truly sustainable solution that is going to look out for our people. We are a country that is very much affected by seismic risk. There are many other countries that have learnt to live with this. I hope we can get better building codes and better funding and better insurance options for people through this process.