Smith Murray: Architects Bill — Second Reading 
Smith Murray: Architects Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:625;Page:19916] 
MURRAY SMITH (United Future) 
: 
 United Future will support the second reading of the Architects Bill which is to become the Registered Architects Bill. It is notable that I was part of the Government Administration Committee for the purpose of this bill. At that time a large part of the reason for joining the committee to deal with this bill was that we were dealing with the reformation of the New Zealand Institute of Architects in conjunction with the Building Bill that went through. It is important to note that there is a link between the two. That link really comes down to the terminology of “licensed building practitioner” in the Building Bill and in particular the need for all building practitioners which will include architects to be licensed building practitioners in order to do the work they want to do in so far as it relates to the construction of buildings. 
It may be worthwhile outlining both our understanding and the select committee’s understanding of the way the two relate because I know there has been some confusion about it in the past. As I just said all building practitioners will need to be licensed. The intention is that when it comes to design work licensed building practitioners will be of a design category. They will be divided into classes of licence under the design category and different classes of licensee will be entitled to do different levels of work depending on their competence experience and training. 
It is yet to be seen just how many classes of licence there will be under the design category but it is envisaged there may be three or four. That was the expectation we had at the time we were considering it. We are not sure whether the licences will rise up in scale from one to four if that is the number or down from one to four. I will assume it is scaled upwards and that a class 1 licence will entitle very basic work to be done and a class 4 licence the most sophisticated buildings and complexes. 
It is envisaged that the people who are able to obtain class 4 - type licences will be registered architects and are likely only to be registered architects. Certainly that class of licence may be open to people who can prove they have the same competencies of registered architects but it is hard to see how that would happen without their having registration at least of an equivalent status to the sorts of qualifications and experience that New Zealand - trained registered architects have. So the highest level will be reserved to registered architects and the lower levels to people such as those who are currently termed “architectural designers” and so on downwards. 
So there needed to be a dovetailing of the Architects Bill with the intention under the Building Bill to have those classes of licence. We took that into account in the select committee when we looked at this. 
As we looked at the need for changes to the architectural profession and its governance and at the need to update the New Zealand Registered Architects Board as it will become we took into account three aspects as alluded to in the report we wrote. The first was consumer protection the second was professional competencies and the third was market competition. We were well aware of the confusion in the public sphere between people who call themselves architects and people who call themselves architectural designers. Indeed I recall mentioning at the time that I had spoken to a friend and asked what the difference was between an architect and an architectural designer. He was of the view that the architectural designer was the one who had the qualifications which just shows the level of confusion that was there. And that was somebody who had actually been involved in building his own house and one would have thought he would have known something about it. 
But there is certainly a degree of confusion in relation to the term “architect” as to who is an architect and what it means when people say they are architects. It is really that more than anything else that motivated the select committee to think that it was time we should be referring to “registered architects” rather than simply to “architects”. 
The second reason for doing that as previously stated is that we have all sorts of architects now. We have landscape architects eyelash architects and a wide range of people who are using the term “architect”. It has become something of a generic term. The term “registered” of course is already well used in the professional sphere. We have registered medical practitioners. We also use the term “chartered” for chartered accountants and chartered professional engineers. So New Zealanders have become accustomed to having an adjective in front of a generic occupational term. We have registered valuers as another example. 
That then gives the public some sort of idea that the person they are dealing with has not only some professional competency but also the backing of some sort of registration board that has acknowledged that competency. It seemed to us that it was to the benefit in fact of the architectural profession to be using the term “registered architect” because in the mind of the average person it denotes that that person has something more than simply a degree or holding themselves out to be capable of something. It means they have the backing of a board that has registered them and a professional organisation that is effectively behind the term “registered” and that is giving some credibility to what they do. It is actually in the long-term interests of architects to refer to themselves as registered architects. No doubt under this bill they will be able to do that because we are indeed changing the term to “registered architect”. The sooner architects who are experienced have the necessary qualifications and have become members of the New Zealand Registered Architects Board refer to themselves as registered architects and not architects the better it will be for consumer protection and the better it will be for the architectural industry generally. 
That raises the issue of what to do with people who are at a lower level of competence but who are designing basic buildings—maybe single homes that are not complex garages or structures of that sort—and their ability to be able to do that work and to call themselves architects rather than architectural designers and titles of that nature as they do now. There is a huge amount of confusion out there about people who are using that other sort of terminology. I do not think it is feasible that architects should be able to ban the use of titles like “architectural designer”. It makes for too much of a closed shop. There is a place for people who are not registered as architects to do that sort of basic work and as I said right at the very beginning the whole purpose of the Building Bill in terms of the licensed building practitioner regime is specifically to ensure that people who have competency at a certain level are able to exercise that level without having to have the high standards that registered architects require. 
So that is really the issue that confronted us and that is the reason the Government Administration Committee thought it would move to the term “registered architect” and free up the term “architect” to be used in a generic sense. 
One of the other things we had debate about and conflict with the architects board was the issue of who should be the chairperson and deputy chairperson of that board and how they should be appointed. The bill provides that the Government will appoint the chairperson and deputy chairperson but the architects wanted to make those appointments themselves. I think the Government’s insistence that it appoint chairperson and deputy chairperson is right because at the end of the day that board has quite a strong element of consumer protection. There is nothing to stop the Government appointing to those roles a person who is an architect and in most instances I think it would certainly be advisable for credibility’s sake to have appointees who were knowledgable about the industry they were meant to deal with. 
Nevertheless there is a role for the Government to be involved from a consumer protection point of view in order to ensure that the architects board does not become a closed shop and to do such things as limit by very strict rules those who can enter their profession. There is the important role of allowing some degree of freedom and not having a hierarchy created and that is one way that that can be achieved.