Jones Dail: Building Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Jones Dail: Building Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 13 March 2008. Volume:645;Page:14924. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DAIL JONES (NZ First) 
: 
 New Zealand First supports the Building Amendment Bill which is largely a technical amendment to the Building Act and has special provisions with regard to dams. Various issues about building have been raised during the course of this debate. I just want to make the point that New Zealand First sees the solution to building problems especially with large building projects as being similar to that adopted in many other countries which is to ensure that when any large builder is involved in a large building contract he or she takes out insurance in order to ensure that if anything goes wrong the subsequent buyer will be protected. That is New Zealand First’s policy. I hope Mr Clarkson will care to think about that because obviously there is no one more concerned to make sure that a job is done properly than the insurance company itself. It will make sure that things go through properly and that we will not have leaky homes and the like. 
But of course why do we have leaky homes? I was here in the House when the weathertight homes legislation and the Building Bill were introduced. We have leaky homes because of the sloppy practices that developed in the 1990s when the previous National Government regrettably decided that everything was free enterprise and the market would prevail. We ended up with cheap materials and consequently leaky homes resulted. This bill is an effort to add to the amending legislation that has tried to stop that from happening again in the future—that is what it amounts to. 
I am very interested in the matters that have been raised about council costs. I am sure that Mr Clarkson would be the first to agree that sometimes councils take advantage of changes in regulations to rip off the builder to rip off the homeowner and to add things to the building consent costs that they then blame on the Government but that are really a way for councils to put more money in their pocket for things that are not really related to the actual construction of the home itself. 
For example in a case that I was looking at a young person was told that the council charged a financial contribution to offset the effect of development. Initially that cost was $5000 in 2000 but recently it has increased to $30000. It has nothing to do with the building consent application nothing to do with the plans and suchlike but is a total rip-off in my view on the part of councils right around the country that are blaming the respective Governments of the day. That happens irrespective of whether National Labour New Zealand First or some other party is in Government. Councils do their best to rip off people by saying that the cost is all the Government’s fault but really it is part of the councils’ ruse to put some money in their pocket which they then use on various other council projects. 
I had an example the other day of someone who was trying to put in a granny flat at a place in Takapuna and he had to apply to the North Shore City Council. He informed me that before he had even started building and getting his building consents and suchlike under way the North Shore City Council wanted to charge him $83000 for a granny flat to be put in a home that used to house five people. The home now has only two people in it and there will be only one more person living there the granny. But for some reason or other in order to be able to let granny live there in a granny flat that person had to put in $83000 up front before he could even get into the resource consent and building consent processes required for the building work on the house. 
The issue of costs lies to a large extent in councils’ policies of creaming off money from people and blaming that on the Government of the day irrespective of which party might be in Government. That has to be closely considered by all parties when they look at councils’ budgets and when councillors come up for election in the years ahead. I think that part of the problem is that new councillors on councils just follow the advice of the officials who blind them with science. The councillors go ahead and allow rules to get through without fully appreciating what is happening because all those people with high diplomas in planning—bachelors of this and masters of that—confuse and blind many new councillors and councillors generally in local authorities. 
I was interested in what has been happening in Hobsonville because I lived in Hobsonville for 18 years and I have worked in the area one way or another since 1975. I was very disappointed with the attitude adopted by Mr John Key when he changed his mind on what was to happen in Hobsonville. I will be watching very closely the developments in Hobsonville because I still think that it is an economic disaster to build 3000 homes on some of the prime land in Auckland as is proposed. I think that policy has to be considered closely and I disagree entirely with John Key’s change of view on the Hobsonville area. As a person who goes by that land regularly and who knows the land extremely well I will be keeping a close watch on it as I did before when I was the member of Parliament for the area. 
The Housing Corporation used to love to put State houses in the Hobsonville area. I said to the Minister of Housing one day that I was quite happy to have two State houses in my electorate for every one that he had in his. That actually stopped the building of State houses in my electorate. Sometimes one has to put those issues to Ministers of Housing in a cold blunt way and that improved the situation in Hobsonville and West Harbour. The reason why we do not have so many State houses in that area today is that I really put my foot down on the matter when I was a member of Parliament between 1975 and 1984. 
As far as John Key’s view on Hobsonville is concerned I see that he is agreeing now to have wide-scale housing and housing that is possibly not of the highest quality on the best-quality land in New Zealand. I am also concerned that he may have changed his mind on a commercial airport being built in Whenuapai. I am totally opposed to a commercial airport being built in Whenuapai and I wonder whether John Key has also had a change of heart on that issue. I would hope that the Whenuapai airport people get in touch with John Key to make sure that has not been another change of mind on his part. 
This bill is essentially technical legislation as I have said. Because it touches on such an important issue obviously there is a tendency towards a wider-ranging debate than might normally be the case and I have just taken this opportunity to answer some of the questions that have been raised. New Zealand First supports the bill.