Williams Andrew: Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliams Andrew: Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 16 April 2013. Volume:689;Page:9414. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]ANDREW WILLIAMS (NZ First): I take a call on behalf of New Zealand First on the Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Amendment Bill. In this respect can I just state firstly that New Zealand First will not be supporting this bill. We are of a mind that once again this Government is trying to retrofit legislation and this should not have been brought to this House in this position some 5 or 6 years later. This Government has been in power for 5-odd years and quite frankly it is too often that retrospective legislation is being put in place to sort out problems of this nature.In this particular instance there have obviously been some errors made but it would be now wrong that so many plumbers and gasfitters and others in the industry should be penalised for something that was not of their doing because people have made a huge error in terms of the officials in terms of the legal advice in the original legislation and then indeed the oversight of that legislation. Therefore innocent parties and people who are going about their business should not now be hounded retrospectively for money in many cases where they simply do not have those funds to pay the retrospective fees that are trying to be charged. In some cases where they are being hounded unnecessarily we feel it is very onerous on many of those tradespeople and it is not something we would condone.In this respect Minister Maurice Williamson we believe again is trying to sort something out which he should have done perhaps in a more collegial way with theindustry. In this situation I am sitting on many many many emails have come in from all parts of the industry that are most incensed about how this is being handled and it is very disappointing that it has really driven a wedge between many elements within this particular industry and that you have people fighting each other over this whole issue.This Government seems to be getting into a habit of if something is not quite working changing the law or rewriting the law or changing the legislation. Today we heard from the Prime Minister who said that because illegal spying has gone on for something like a decade and because it had been caught out with conducting illegal observation of New Zealand citizens let us just change the law let us just rewrite the law and let us suddenly make all that legal. This is the sort of thing that is going on too often. These things need to be picked up a lot earlier. These things should not just fester year after year and then suddenly somebody says: “Oh we made a mistake there. Let’s just rewrite history. Let’s rewrite the law and let’s put all that right.” We had that in the Tasman District Council (Validation and Recovery of Certain Rates) Bill a few weeks ago where again rates had been struck in Tasman that had not been correctly done—again let us rewrite history let us rewrite legislation to get it off the hook. Unfortunately we cannot go through life all the time where you just rewrite history to try to let people off the hook. Sometimes people have to just stand up and say: “We made an error and we’ll take it on the chin.” In this case the Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board has made some grave errors in this and quite rightly many of those involved with that should be taking full responsibility not trying to put it on Parliament to sort the problem out.We are also concerned that the Minister has tried to suddenly rush this bill through the House and ram this through in desperation but that seems to be a habit of that particular Minister in terms of other bills such as the Building Amendment Bill (No 4) and other aspects of building and construction. A lot of it is all about sorting out problems of the past. We had the leaky homes situation which again could be tied back to the same Minister from a decade or so ago where legislation changed and the building code was changed to allow for kiln-dried timber and to allow for monolithic cladding to be applied directly to kiln-dried timber - framed houses. All these sorts of things seem to have the same stamp on them and the stamp is one Minister Maurice Williamson. It seems to be that Minister Williamson spends more of his time sorting out errors and problems and retrospective mistakes much of which he has had some involvement in than actually doing things for a proactive improvement in the building industry. Much of it is very negative in terms of dumbing down the building industry and taking away from it.It is somewhat ironic that under the Building Amendment Bill (No 4) which is going through the House there are proposals to have a lot more self-regulation to have a lot more checking by the tradesmen to have a lot more of a hands-off approach—to have less council and local authority involvement—in the oversight of inspections and all that sort of thing. So on the one hand this Minister is saying let us remove a lot of the legislation around controls and compliance by local authorities and let the building industry have a lot more of its own say on these things in what is very much a hands-off approach from this Minister. But then he turns around and comes to the House with this particular bill where he suddenly wants to impose the legislation to tighten up the restrictions on plumbers gasfitters and drainlayers. It is almost as if he cannot decide quite what he wants as a Minister. Does he want hands off or does he want hands on? He seems to want to back two horses in this respect and he is in two minds as to which way he is going. In this respect there are elements of this industry that are very aggrieved by this. They feel that they have been hard-done-by and quite frankly the ministry and others involved in building and construction and the Minister himselfshould have addressed this a long time ago so that it was not the situation of many many years ago—going back to 2006 or 2007—when these levies were incorrectly charged or the board was incorrectly going after people whom it could not lawfully go after for the levies. In this respect New Zealand First has great difficulty with this. We think again that you could drive a bus through this bill in terms of the message it is sending in terms of this legislative Chamber and the way that Parliament works and New Zealand First will not be supporting it.