Jones Shane: Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeJones Shane: Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 12 February 2014. Volume:696;Page:15914. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon SHANE JONES (Labour): We will support the Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill which may be in contrast to various other things I have not supported today. We will support this bill largely because we do want to assure thepublic—and I think this is an area where bipartisanship is in order—that the dwellings the buildings and the structures that they occupy work in and visit are moving towards a higher level of compliance.We on this side of the House have been contacted by people fearful that buildings in Feilding Palmerston North and dare I say it Kaikohe may actually be lumbered with a higher cost structure in order to meet the standard. So it is important that those owners do not have a single option which is demolition. I cannot see how that is going to serve the purposes of the community or the owners in our rural townships. I could think of Kaikōura. I could think of areas around Manawatū or even in my own rohe Tai Tokerau. We have other problems in the north. The last time I checked earthquakes were not one of them. We have Hone Harawira but that is another matter. I suppose that in itself could be a threat to a building but that aside it is important that we all join together to strike the right balance and that we get the right submissions to the Local Government and Environment Committee.I actually do have some sympathy for those trusts some of them church trusts that have as their assets on their register these kinds of buildings. If we go ahead and demolish all of our old heritage buildings we are such a young country that I think that is an unwise step. But the reality is that we observed two things in the aftermath of the earthquakes. In one sense we have got to sort of guard against the loss of life or limb and on the other we have got to come up with a pragmatic solution that enables people to economically continue to own buildings use buildings and not be lumbered with a level of compliance of cost such that in some cases I genuinely fear they will just walk away from the buildings. I fear they will walk away because No. 1 the buildings may become uninsurable and No. 2 because of the cost structure associated with upgrading the building they will never get a rental stream that will enable them to cover the costs of the upgrade work.I think that the Minister for Building and Construction has genuinely tried—or at least I am told that he has listened and tried. There is a duty however on the bureaucrats in the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment which is where I think the building department is currently located. There is such a confusing array of planets in Steven Joyce’s solar system otherwise known as “MBIE” but there is a set of onerous responsibilities upon them. I only hope that as this regime is eventually implemented consultation is the hallmark of what the bureaucrats do in dealing with not only the public advocate groups or advocates but also the owners or their proxies of these buildings.The notion that this is one size fits all—popularised by Philip O’Reilly the only member of the National caucus who is not a parliamentarian—I think needs to be dismissed. It needs to be dismissed because there is nothing that that advocate says on behalf of Business New Zealand that does not reflect a view that inheres in the National Party caucus. So when we hear his name or his advocacy it is irrelevant. In fact I am told that Mr O’Reilly is thinking of going to Europe. I am not in a position to purchase him a ticket but he has outlived his usefulness in terms of the way in which he contributes to these debates and I support what the Minister said about Mr O’Reilly. His assertion that this bill—which we do want to support and it will be refined as it goes through the select committee process—is so constrictive that it will not cope with the inevitable differences speaks more of his inflexible mind and quite frankly of the ideological claptrap that we have become accustomed to hearing from that fake representative of the New Zealand business community. I think I have served the Lord’s purpose in describing him so I shall move on.My colleague Mr Raymond Huo has already contributed in this debate and we know in standing with the Minister and shepherding this bill off to the selectcommittee that there will be people who feel that not enough has been done. What will the Crown do? Will it change the tax regime to actually enable the costs to sit as a type of expense that building owners can write off as a cost of owning such capital structures or will the costs continue to sit as a work of a capital nature the cost of which can only be written off over a very long period of time?I should imagine that for the property developers and owners who are advocating that perspective—I guess we will hear from them in the select committee—that could be a very big number. And the slender number of New Zealand owners who are offended by the fact that these additions and these improvements remain as capital additions probably are in inverse proportion to the amount of money it will cost the New Zealand taxpayer base if we accede to their request. But having said that we live in a democracy. They are entitled to come forward—as long as they are giving a balanced and accurate depiction of the situation—because they do fulfil a valuable purpose i.e. the development and ownership of capital assets. But they cannot expect to write off all of that expense if it reflects an inordinately difficult impost on what is probably a sort of strained fiscal situation in relation to how much of that can be written off on to the State.Debate interrupted.