Woods Megan: Weathertight Homes Resolution Services Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is subject to correctionWoods Megan: Weathertight Homes Resolution Services Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 10 February 2016. Volume:711;Page:8913. Text is subject to correction.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): I too would like to take a call on clauses 1 to 3 and in particular start my contribution this evening by considering the title of this bill the Weathertight Homes Resolution Services Amendment Bill. I would like to acknowledge that we are putting in place a scheme that offers an alternative to litigation and allows homeowners who have been caught in this leaky homes nightmare a way in which they can get just and fair resolution for repairing their homes without needing the redress of the courts. I think that that is something that is positive. I think that we have traversed throughout this evening the long history of how we got here. My colleague Phil Twyford in the contribution that he has just concluded has also talked about how the Government members and the Minister who was previously in the chair Nick Smith had in Opposition quite a different approach to how it is that this may be fixed.I think that we have a very apt title for this legislation but I think quite clearly there are other names that we could have given this bill. One of them would have been the “Why Regulation Matters Bill”. What we have is a Government that often derides regulation. It talks instead about the need to be pragmatic to just get on and do things. But regulation does matter and nowhere can we see that more than in the leaky homes saga and what happened when we did deregulate an industry and let it go on and do things. Phil Twyford has talked about the deficit of standards that is occurring in the Auckland housing market. I in earlier contributions have talked about the fact that this Government has put in place at this very moment a system in Christchurch where we allow builders to certify their own work. We do not have an independent certification of some of the repairs that are going on in the Canterbury Home Repair Programme. We need to learn those lessons.And it is not just in the case of housing; it is in the case of so many things. This is a Government that is hell-bent on deregulating everything from employment to education and thinks that it is the answer. It dresses it up in all kinds of fancy words and says that it is making things easier but actually what it is doing is cutting the very kinds of protections in a way that has led to this leaky homes saga. So I think the “Why Regulation Matters Bill” name is a very very good alternative.I would also like to talk about the commencement of this bill and when this comes into force and to acknowledge that we are yet again doing validating legislation. We are needing to put into legislation things to fix up what has already happened and that is not the purpose of this House. I do not think it is why any of us came in here. We came into this House to make a difference. We may differ on how it is we think we can make a difference to the future but spending inordinate amounts of time validating what has already happened seems a bit like being shut in a bad episode of a bad sitcom—we are always having to deal with the past. We are better than that. Our legislation should be future-focused. It should be about what we can do to make New Zealand better not about fixing up disasters of deregulation gone bad in the past—and that is what we are here spending the time of this Committee doing tonight.Labour supports this legislation but we do not want to be in this situation. And we urge members and Ministers opposite to learn the lessons of how we got here why it is we are here and what happens when we do not put in place adequate protections for people and do not use the law to actually protect people and in this case their property. It is not just a nuisance; it is there for a reason.