Williams Andrew: Building Amendment Bill (No 3) — Third Reading 
Williams Andrew: Building Amendment Bill (No 3) — Third Reading 
[Volume:678;Page:924] 
ANDREW WILLIAMS (NZ First) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak to the Building Amendment Bill (No 3) for the third time. We have already covered a lot of material on this and New Zealand First opposes this bill. We have already heard all the comments in relation to how the leaky homes national disaster came about—because of inadequate building codes and inadequate building practices—and that has ended up with this country and our nation carrying the bill for something like $20 billion in remedial works to sort that building disaster out. 
We heard from the Minister for Building and Construction today as to why this amendment bill is necessary. It is to reduce the red tape reduce the costs of building and reduce the compliance costs around building and to put more responsibility on to the building industry—the builders themselves—and indeed the end consumer so that there is less “buyer beware” and more “buyer aware”. 
However I would like to draw the House’s attention to a situation at Cave Creek in 1995 on 28 April where 14 people died while standing on a viewing platform which collapsed. The inquiry that followed from that particular very sad tragedy at Cave Creek found that the platform collapsed as a result of inadequate building practices. It was shown that because the platform had been constructed poorly with inadequate supports inadequate bracing and inadequate substructure supports for the beams the weight of the people was too great and it collapsed. 
This bill in a sense is going down the same path. It is taking the building industry into areas of self-regulation in a sense—into an area where the building industry will be policing itself on the final construction of properties homes decks and other structures. Leading into the Building Amendment Bill (No 4)—and I have just been reading that bill—there are so many open-ended situations where the building practices will certainly be in perhaps a suspect situation leaving I believe consumers and New Zealanders open to great risk. Although we support reduction in costs as anyone does—trying to find cost-savings across the board to try to lower the cost of housing in New Zealand—at the same time we do not think that should go hand in hand with reducing what should be a very controlled regulatory environment that ensures safety at all times for the property owner. 
We have heard that licensed building practitioners will be required as of 1 March this year to build all structures unless there is an exemption for a DIY person building their property. However there has been great comment about the varying standards and levels of expertise of elements within the building workforce. This country has not been a great one in recent years for apprenticeships. It has not been a great one for training our younger people coming through in these trades. This has been a situation where for more than two decades now we have had a declining number of tradespeople moving into some of these areas and where the skill levels are perhaps not the same as those of the good old builders of days gone by. 
I built my first home myself. It is still standing it is as dry as a bone and it will never leak but I spent the best part of 2 or 3 years of my weekends building that home making sure it was a good home and making sure that I absolutely went over the top in terms of the safety aspects of building that home. I look at the houses some 25 or 30 years later and I look at what is now being constructed and there are still questions about the products going into many of these properties. There are still questions about the method of construction and there are particularly questions about design aspects such as overhangs and making sure there are sufficient safeguards. Too often these days we are seeing things just being bogged up with varying silicones sealants and anything that comes out of a tube with the thought that that will be good and that will keep the property safe warm and dry only to find a number of years later that the sealants have dried and cracked and the water is getting in. We are seeing often inadequate materials being used. We are seeing a cheapening of materials being used. We are seeing short cuts being taken on building materials to try to get an end product as cheap as possible. 
In many respects this is a “back to the future” bill because we have not learnt from the past it would seem. In the 1990s we had the onset of the leaky home situation we had the lowering of the building code and we had the lowering of building standards. Standards New Zealand allowed new inferior materials to be used such as monolithic cladding directly applied to untreated air-dried timber in an unvented situation. Once the silicones the sealants and everything else started to crack and much of that cladding started to crack then the leaky homes the leaky schools the leaky hospitals and the leaky commercial buildings problem commenced. 
In a sense we are going back to that. This country at the moment faces a $20 billion bill for that disaster from the 1990s from previous Governments who should have learnt from that. This Government is now going down the track of basically giving carte blanche open treatment to the building industry to start a whole new potential leaky building situation all over again. New Zealand First is very worried about this bill. 
We are also worried about the next part the Building Amendment Bill (No 4). When I look at that bill I see that it is so open and so open to interpretation of what could be built by varying people within the building industry with next to no compliance requirements and so many different structures that will be permitted to be built without consents in the future. We could see a whole new national leaky homes situation all over again in the next decade or two as a result of the Building Amendment Bill (No 3) and the Building Amendment Bill (No 4) coming before this House. 
New Zealand First will continue to oppose this bill and we will continue to highlight many of the negative aspects of it that really do put us at risk not only from a safety point of view but also from a major financial point of view. This country I think cannot afford once again to be looking down the barrel of a major major problem with our housing with our schools and with our buildings. This Government talks about for instance putting money back into the education system and says that by selling the State assets it is going to put money into the schools. I know for example of one school on the North Shore that is having to spend $20 million to $30 million rebuilding many of its leaky buildings and many of its structures because they have failed. Through this Building Amendment Bill (No 3) and the Building Amendment Bill (No 4) potentially—who knows—we could have this happening all over again. This nation could be up for a very very large bill in the future.