Carter John: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Carter John: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:645;Page:14209] 
JOHN CARTER (National—Northland) 
: 
 Could I just commence this address by acknowledging my Northland colleague Brian Donnelly and on behalf of Phil Heatley and myself as Northland MPs I would say “Thank you” to Brian for the way in which we have worked together as people representing Northland. We are a bit unique in Northland— 
Hon Member 
: “Different” is the word. 
JOHN CARTER 
: —well different or unique; we will not get cunning about it let me tell members—in that down here in the House we may well have a shot at each other and reflect our political views but in Northland we work as a team. Brian has certainly been part of that team along with the other members of Parliament from Northland. So I thank Brian for all he has done. We all have his name and address in Rarotonga and I suspect that there will be a whole flow of people coming over looking for accommodation from time to time. 
In making a contribution to this debate I will start by saying that I support the motion that was moved by the National Party leader John Key. 
Hon Darren Hughes 
: Read it out. 
JOHN CARTER 
: I will do that just in case the member has forgotten because it would have slipped from the memory of people like Darren Hughes as they have such a short retention. Mr Key moved: “That this House has no confidence in the Helen Clark - led Government because it has failed to make significant improvement in the areas of real importance to New Zealanders because it lacks ambition because it is tired and bereft of ideas because it has lost touch with the people who put it in power and because under its lead our country has become a story of lost opportunities.” 
As time has gone on Labour has concentrated more and more on its own survival and less and less on the issues that matter to the people who put it there. Labour has squandered New Zealand’s economic inheritance by failing to build strong foundations for the future. Here are some questions that Kiwis really want answers to and unfortunately they are not getting them. Why after 8 years of Labour are we paying the second-highest interest rates in the developed world? Why under Labour is the gap between our wages and wages in Australia and other parts of the world getting bigger and bigger? Why under Labour do we get a tax cut only in election year when we really needed it years ago? 
 In fact we reflect back to 3 years ago when we were offered the “chewing gum” tax cut that never happened anyway. Why cannot our hard-working kids afford to buy their own houses? Why is one in five Kiwi kids leaving school with grossly inadequate literacy and numeracy skills? It is even worse in Northland of course. We have the statistic where 56 percent of young male Maori in Northland will leave school this year without being able to read and write properly. That is an absolute disgrace. 
Why when Labour claims it aspires to New Zealand being carbon neutral do our greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at an alarming rate? Why has the health system not improved when billions of dollars extra have been poured into it? Why is violent crime against innocent New Zealanders continuing to soar and why is Labour unable to do anything about it? Those are some questions that New Zealanders ask the Prime Minister. They ask: “Why? Why? Why?”. Sadly there is no answer other than of course electing a National Government. That is the answer. National will focus on the real issues facing New Zealanders; we will not fixate on the old tired political debates of 20 and 30 years ago. 
I mean how silly is it when we talk about something that might have happened in 1990 or whenever it was. For goodness’ sake we are worried about tomorrow. The people of this country are worried about tomorrow. They want to know what the incoming Government and the members of Parliament will be doing not what happened in the past. Unlike Labour we understand why Kiwis are demanding change. They are demanding change because they think it is time for a Government that says no to mediocrity and expects more for New Zealand. 
National will lift wages by driving economic growth. We will create safer communities. Our very good colleague who spoke before me has made comments about that many times. Chester Borrows has made many comments on how we will be doing that. We will ensure our education system delivers real opportunities to young people. We will give Kiwis confidence in the Public Service. We will build a more confident New Zealand with a proud sense of nationhood. Those are some of the things that are goals the National Party when elected will bring to this nation. 
One of the areas the Prime Minister spoke on was housing affordability. I will focus on that for a minute or two. It astounds me that the Prime Minister and her caucus will not accept that they are actually responsible for some of the problems we have in housing. One of the reasons why there is so much compliance and cost in the housing sector is that the Government has passed 68 pieces of legislation shifting responsibility from central government to local government. That has caused huge costs in local government. 
One of the areas in which the Government has caused rules and regulations to be created is the housing area. The Department of Building and Housing in 1999 had 31 ½ equivalent people working in it. Today it has 385 people working in it. Of course local government has had to respond to that. The people in the building sector in local government have to read all of these rules and regulations and apply them. So the bureaucracy in local government has expanded by 25 percent over the last 9 years. 
Let me give members an example of what I mean. Recently Leoni my wife—and for those members who do not know we recently got married in January—and I decided we would extend the deck. This is the sort of stupidity that one has to go through. We decided that we would extend the deck on our house in Waipapakauri. We applied for a building permit. It was not a big extension—it was a 3-metre extension about 30 square metres in all. We applied for the extension. One of the posts which the deck was going to sit on happened to be over 1½ metres high—it was 1.8 metres high. So we had to go and get an engineering design for the whole of the deck extension. That added another couple of thousand dollars in costs. The job itself was a deck and a retaining wall—we had to do some maintenance around the retaining wall—and would cost $16000. The building costs and all the engineering costs etc. were in excess of $2000 to $3000—just to get a $16000 job done. The pole as I said stood out of the ground by 1.8 metres—others were less—but the posts had to go into the ground 2½ metres and be concreted in. I have to tell members if a tsunami hits us up at Waipapakauri beach I will go and stand on the deck because it sure as hell is not going to move anywhere! 
Actually we got the building permit quite quickly—in about 3 weeks—to the credit of the Far North District Council. It took 3 days to get the job done and then we had to get the building inspector to sign it off. The inspector came to sign it off. He looked around and said: “This looks very well constructed.” He congratulated the builders and all that stuff and he looked at the retaining wall and that was all OK. I was down building a set of steps. About 20 minutes later he came back and said that he could not issue us a certificate of compliance. These are the silly rules which I will tell members about that we have to comply with. I asked him: “Why ever not? What’s wrong with the deck?”. He said nothing was wrong with the deck. I asked him what was wrong with the retaining wall. He said: “No that’s perfect.” So I asked him why he could not issue a certificate of compliance. He replied: “You haven’t got smoke alarms in your house.” What the hell smoke alarms in the house have to do with getting one’s deck extension I have no idea. 
As it happened we did have smoke alarms in the house and we were able to tell him that we could have the code of compliance issued so it is—I understand—in the process of being issued. But the stupidity of some of the silly rules we have to comply with is the reason why housing costs have gone up out of all proportion. Quite honestly one of the things we will do when we become the Government is ensure that there is less compliance and less cost as a consequence less bureaucracy and that people in this country who deserve to have their first or second home will be given that opportunity. 
We can if we have the will take a lot of the cost out of these sorts of areas by just applying a bit of common sense to them quite honestly. We can take cost out by removing some of the red tape removing some of the compliance and asking the building industry which is crying out for it to actually take responsibility back for the buildings and constructions it makes. Builders want to do it and we want them to do it. The only people who are in the road and stopping us doing it are the members of the Labour Government who for some reason want to carry on having hands-on control. It does not work it adds cost and quite honestly it is the reason why people will change the Government come the next election.