Goudie Sandra: Building Bill — In Committee Procedure 
Goudie Sandra: Building Bill — In Committee Procedure 
[Volume:619;Page:14872] 
SANDRA GOUDIE (National—Coromandel) 
: 
 This bill should be called the “Why Would You Build It Bill”. I do not think many people will want to build anything at all because they will not be able to afford to. This bill establishes a chief executive body a building accreditation body a product certification accreditation body a building advisory panel a building practitioners board a building practitioner registrar and independent certifiers. Then at the end of it all comes the territorial local authority. That is all part of the product of this bill. 
One of the matters I wanted to raise during the earlier debate but I did not get a chance to was the consultation requirements for making regulations. Again this comes back to why one would do it. The regulations are made through Order in Council and there is a bit of a reference to consulting. Clause 354(3)(a) states that the chief executive must “consult with the persons or organisations that appear to the chief executive to be representative of the interests of persons likely to be substantially affected by the making of the relevant Order in Council or regulations;”. However subclause (5) states: “A failure to comply with this section does not affect the validity of any Order in Council or regulations made.” So on the one hand the chief executive can do that but on the other hand if he does not do it well hey it does not really matter anyway. 
I really feel sorry for local authorities in all this because they will be caught in the middle. There will be people who are building houses who will not get their certificate of compliance. Effectively they will not have a home to move into until they do. 
 That happens now and does that mean that people will have to wait some time? And what happens if they actually move into their house without that certificate of compliance? Who bears that liability? Is it the builder or is it the homeowner? I would suggest that it looks to me a bit like it is the builder. So if I were getting a house built and it all got finished and the council was waiting to deliver me a certificate of compliance I would move into the jolly thing. I would not wait around for the council. But that means I would be making that builder liable for the fact that I had moved in. I would break a window and do it because it would be my house and the thing that is stuffing around is the council not coming forward with a certificate of compliance. 
So who gets caught in the middle of all this? The council! This is an absolute travesty that the Government is dumping on local authorities. They get to bear the brunt of most of this. 
There is no certainty about business for any of the independent building certifiers in all of this. Territorial local authorities are bound into it. They have to do this—the Government has made it compulsory. They cannot get out of it whether they want to or not. I guarantee that they probably do not want to because they have to do a heck of a lot to actually comply with the provisions of this bill. 
Then I look at the provisions concerning levies and I see that councils have been charged with the responsibility of collecting the levies. They wear the liability of paying the levies to the chief executive or whichever other body is supposed to collect it. One of the registrar’s functions under clause 353 “Regulations: general” is that the registrar sets “(d) prescribing the fees or charges payable in respect of the performance of the Registrar’s functions” and these include an application to be licensed. Is there a payment also for the issue of the licence? Is there also a payment for the renewal of the licence? So suddenly there are three payments—and I have barely started. 
Then comes the levy. Well there are different levies for different classes of licensed building practitioners. I guess that means there is a different levy for an architect who might be licensed as a building practitioner and a different one for a builder who is licensed as a building practitioner. There is a different one for a lawyer maybe who is licensed as a building practitioner. These are the sorts of things that the Government is providing for in this bill. So there are different levies for different classes of licensed building practitioners and as we know it has previously been revealed that a building practitioner can be anybody who wishes to so apply. The amount of levy can be set at any level I guess because that is what the registrar’s function is—to set the amount of the levy and the method by which that levy will be calculated. So that method could be whatever method he or she determines is appropriate and then there are all the other criteria and other requirements. On top of that when someone actually builds a house—