Coddington Deborah: Building Bill — First Reading 
Coddington Deborah: Building Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:611;Page:8434] 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON (ACT NZ) 
: 
 This morning in  
The Dominion Post 
 there was a cartoon and it was a take-off of the television programme  
Who wants to be a Millionaire? 
 Instead it had a contestant saying: “Who wants to be a homeowner?” In future a similar cartoon will say: “Who wants to build a house?” The effect of this legislation as my colleague Mr Brent Catchpole has already pointed out is that it will raise the cost of building a house considerably both for a building industry person—a builder or building business—and for the consumer. Whether that means adding on another bathroom or a garden shed—this legislation does not detail that—it will cost a bomb. Again we have legislation by stealth and we have this Government using an Order in Council to say what the levies will be. 
I asked this Minister a number of questions. In April I wrote asking her what would happen with the $11 million that the Building Industry Authority had collected illegally having overcharged local authorities for building consents. I finally received a reply in July after following it up with other questions. She admitted that $11.5 million had been illegally accumulated over the last 10 years from levy surpluses but that it was “not practical” to return those to the many thousands of building owners who had paid the levy in the past 10 years. It was “not practical” to return to people the money they had overpaid. That just shows members how useless this Minister is. 
I followed that up with another question. I asked: “How much is the single largest levy being held in the reserves of the Building Industry Authority?” Some of the building companies that pay these levies pay over $500000 a year. There could be considerable amounts of money owed back to building companies like Fletcher’s and any of the other big companies. She said she was not able to answer that question because the information was not held “in a way that allowed the information the member requested to be produced”. That is another example of how useless this Minister is. 
By the way the Building Industry Authority will now be dissolved and come under the jurisdiction of some sort of chief executive—of what sort we do not know. I then followed the issue up and asked her what total increase in budget did the Building Industry Authority now require and what specific issues would it be responding to? Well what a coincidence. The increase in budget is almost exactly the amount that was illegally collected from building consents—$10 million. That is $10 million compared with unaudited accounts for the previous year showing Building Industry Authority expenditure of $5.25 million. That is just another example of how incompetently this whole issue has been handled. 
How many new staff will be employed? This legislation is about building a new bureaucracy. The landlords in Wellington will be thrilled by it. Already they are rubbing their hands together with glee as a result of this Government increasing the size of its bureaucracy all over town. They are doing very well out of this Government. I asked how many new staff would be employed by the Building Industry Authority as a result of the “new demands” noted in her letter of 16 July. The answer is that the business plan for the authority includes provision for an additional 21 staff to be employed progressively to reach a full complement of 39 staff during the 2004-05 financial year. I remember that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority started off with about 21 staff. It now has about 250 and is still growing. 
Brian Connell 
: A growth industry. 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON 
: A growth industry. Yes that is what this Government is into—tax and bribe. This Government calls taxes levies but we all know that they are taxes by any other name. 
This legislation takes a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Why did we not deal with the real issues involved in leaky buildings—issues that people came before the select committee and told us about? There were some very nutty submissions but there were some excellent submissions as well. There were submissions on the results of a change to untreated timber. I remember someone telling the committee that the only way people could use untreated timber for framing in New Zealand housing and get away with it not going mouldy was if it never ever got wet. How many times would that happen? They would have to build a house in the desert for untreated framing timber to never ever get wet. 
So what happens?Over the years—not because of so-called laissez faire policies that we have never had in this country; I do not ever remember anyone saying that the market would fix leaky homes. I wish people would get their facts right before coming out with statements like that—if untreated timber is used in framework and it gets wet even if it dries out mould sets in when the cladding and everything else goes on. Leaky buildings are not so much about water coming in from the outside as condensation from the inside. 
Over the years we have become obsessed with health and safety with regulating away any sort of personal responsibility. Because of over-regulation not under-regulation we have buildings all over this country with not enough ventilation and they cannot breathe. Again this Government cannot even keep burglars away from houses; the cops cannot even respond so we have to shut everything in our houses. We cannot leave a single window open for ventilation. That is the problem. 
 What does this Government do? It polls and polls and polls and it has a knee-jerk reaction to the Opposition benches just as it did on the Immigration Amendment Bill. It comes in and punishes every good builder and every good building company by making them license. Compulsory licensing has done nothing to protect kids from schoolteachers because the Teachers Council is so politically correct and so useless that it cannot even license teachers. We will see the same thing with the licensing of every single builder in this country.