Dyson Ruth: Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDyson Ruth: Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 13 February 2014. Volume:696;Page:15967. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): Can I just acknowledge the member who has just resumed his seat the Hon Phil Heatley and say that I agreed with probably everything he said which is a rare occurrence. Thank goodness it is the end of the parliamentary week; we cannot have too much of that sort of stuff going on! I also want to acknowledge the work that the Hon Phil Heatley did in this space in his previous role as Minister of Housing. I have worked with the Hon Phil Heatley on a number of issues one of which I just want to alert him to and that is that the Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill needs improvement at the Local Government and Environment Committee. Because of issues I have worked with him on in the past I think he will agree with me that if there is any potential for this bill to move access issues backwards—i.e. making sure that every one of our citizens can get in and out of a building and around it—we should not support it. There is a risk that it might do that so I will come back to that in a few minutes.I just want to say that as a Canterbury member of Parliament I understand absolutely the need for us to have more rigour around the safety of our buildings and have more understanding of the potential for risk to other property or even worse still of course to people’s health and well-being and indeed to their lives. I understand the need to make sure that where we have damage as we do substantially in Canterbury we are able to proceed and that our rules do not hold us back and they enable us to proceed in a timely way so that we can do repairs or we can do rebuilding. That is a big driver behind this legislation.Of course we all want to make sure that our standards are robust. I have been watching with interest the progress that Christchurch City Council has made on its understanding of safety in earthquake issues. When we had the new provisions that a building had to be X percent of the building code the way that it was interpreted by the engineers working for Christchurch City Council at that time was really on a tick-box basis rather than on a sensible application to say that if part of a building is below thecode but other parts of it are up to or above the percentage of code required what the structural nature is of the part of the building that is below the code. If it is not a structural consideration then there are no safety issues at all.That is the point that the Christchurch City Council has got to now under what I think is outstanding leadership from their mayor the Hon Lianne Dalziel a former colleague of ours here. She has been through the regulatory process because she has been a member of Parliament for so long. I think she is using her understanding of making sure that safety is of course of prime consideration and also making sure that rules are not applied in a tick-box way—that they are applied in a way that ensures that safety but also allows for a pragmatic move forward. So I was delighted to hear the announcements that came out of the Christchurch City Council in the last couple of days.I want to move on to the point that I raised at the beginning of my contribution. There is considerable concern amongst people who are experts in access issues that there is a danger in this legislation that with the balancing that is often required between public safety costs heritage issues and the wider interests of our community the requirement for buildings to be accessible will be lost. I know that the original discussion document that was put out by the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment actually pretty well said that. It just said that some requirements to ensure access under the current legislation are quite expensive so we should scrap it. For me the cost of excluding some people from having access to a building is far too high for a civilised society to bear. We should say that every one of our citizens should be entitled to get in and out of public buildings. Of course when you are repairing a building or replacing it then I think that access should just be a given. It should not be a cost-cutting opportunity.Vivian Naylor who is one of the leaders in access issues in New Zealand works for CCS Disability Action as an adviser. She has raised concerns in theManukau Courier recently about the legislation. She says that the buildings are going to be with us a long time and that it does not make sense to make them anything other than accessible. She also points out that ensuring accessibility is not necessarily a cost. If you get smart people on the job it actually can be affordable and of course that is what we would want as well. She also says in the same article that this legislation is “frustrating in the extreme. We start to think we’re making progress and then we’re slipping back again.” I do not think for one minute that that is the intention of the legislation. I think more highly of the Minister and I certainly do not think there is anyone in Cabinet or indeed on the Government backbenches who would be interested in denying people access. But we have to have rigour throughout the process to ensure that the unintended consequence which is clearly a possibility does not come to fruition.The president of Auckland Grey Power Anne-MarieCoury said that accessibility is also a major consideration for people in older generations. Again she was raising these concerns about the potential for this bill to deny people access to buildings. The chief executive of Be. Accessible who is Minnie Baragwanath said: “New Zealand has the chance to be a country that actually thrives with an ageing population because we’ve designed a world that works for everyone not an inaccessible one.” I want her words and the words of Vivian Naylor and Auckland Grey Power president Anne-MarieCoury to be carried through to the select committee. I urge every member of the select committee who receives this bill to reflect on those words—and I am sure they will be put formally in submissions—and ensure that whatever change is needed to this legislation is made after good robust debate at the select committee and that this bill comes back to the House after the select committee process with the potential of thatinaccessibility totally removed. It cannot be left to chance because it would be an indictment on this Parliament if we made that mistake.As I said earlier I am from Canterbury and we have been waiting a long time for repairs and rebuilds to take place in our city. It is really just starting only now. It is another tragedy really that the opportunity has been lost for the Government to provide some leadership to make sure that the Earthquake Commission was operating properly that the insurance companies were operating properly and that everyone used whatever skills passion and talent they had to work together for the recovery of our city and our region. Waimakariri and Selwyn were hit much harder earlier but they got on with the job and you can see significant gains for their populations even with the huge disruptions that they have had.I think that a major barrier has occurred with the invention of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority. I think that the authority has ridden roughshod over a number of other Government departments and agencies. It has certainly ridden roughshod over our Christchurch City Council. Instead of being the enabler and the coordinator the authority has actually driven away a lot of people with its attitude. The recent red zoning in Christchurch has been an utter disgrace. People who have been living safely in their homes since the 22 February quake or who have had their homes repaired or rebuilt got a phone call just a little while before Christmas. Out of the blue they were told that their home was red zoned. Many of them had no idea that that news was coming to them. How would any member of this House feel in that circumstance if you were just living safely in your home and you had no idea that there was a potential for your house to be rezoned? There is no risk to those houses. The people have been living safely in them since 22 February in many instances. People have spent a lot of money having them repaired or rebuilt. For them to suddenly be told that their house is red zoned and that they are going to get an offer from the Government to buy them out at the 2007 rateable value—this is 7 years on from that value being struck on their house—is just a disgrace.I am not surprised that people in our city are turning away from supporting National in droves. They have been treated with disdain by an arrogant Government that has shown that it is out of touch with the real needs of people in our community. I look forward to the debate—