Salesa JennyHon JENNY SALESA (Minister for Building and Construction): It's exam time again and I'd like to wish all of our students the very best for their exams this year.This is a Government that is tackling New Zealand's long-term challenges. The National Government after nine very long years has left us with a big mess which means we have so much to do to address the many many issues we've inherited. I'm really proud of our Minister of Education the Hon Chris Hipkins. He has just announced the plans that we are doing in Government in terms of Tomorrow's Schools. We have an education system that is not fit for purpose and the last Government had nine very long years to address that. They did not. Our Minister of Education within two years didn't just talk about the changes that we need; he is now coming through and implementing those changes and we are supporting our teachers as well.There are many other areas that we're addressing; mental health is one of those. We're investing the largest amount of money—$1.9 billion—to address mental health; cancer care as well. And we're doing all of this work while keeping our economy in good shape despite all of the global headwinds that we're facing.If I can talk now about building and construction this is another area that when we came in we were confronted with so much in terms of shortage of skills. We were actually told by the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment that we were currently short at the time 30000 skilled people in building and construction. We now know that we're going to be short by 80000 skilled people in building and construction over the next five years but here's the thing: we need to build so many houses schools and hospitals and had the last Government over the last nine years when they were in Government trained and ensured that we had the numbers of apprentices and skilled people in this area we wouldn't have so much to catch up on in this area. I do applaud what it is that we're doing in Government to ensure that we are attracting more people into the trades to train.We also have in building and construction the Construction Sector Accord. We know that addressing the issues—the many long-term issues—in building and construction is not something that we can address on our own. So we've reached out to industry and we launched the accord in April. The second part of that accord is going to come through this House very soon and it is where we—Government—and industry are working together to address the many long-term issues that we have.Another area is when we build schools and when we build hospitals—and I'll give you an example: one of the schools that were built a number of years ago now in South Auckland. The Government of the day invested $25 million to build that particular school. Within a few years it was already leaking and so one of the things that the Minister of Education and I went to announce at that school was an extra $20 million just to ensure that that school is actually up to speed in terms of ensuring that it is a fit-for-purpose school for all of our students.One of the things I'm doing as Minister for Building and Construction and one of the things that we're delivering in this Government is we're ensuring that the Building Act 2004 is fit for purpose so that when we're building schools when we're building hospitals they are good quality that we're not focused just on the cheapest price but that we're focused on whole of life that we're ensuring that we build buildings that last a very long time because at the end of the day it will be we taxpayers that actually come through to address those issues if we do not build it right the first time.The other thing that we've done in terms of building and construction is we've changed the procurement rules so that we—Government—adhere to our own procurement rules. This is actually a set of guidelines that was written together with industry. However in the past we were not actually adhering to it ourselves and I'm glad to say that from 1 October Government will be adhering to those rules.The other thing that we've done is we've announced that we're going to ease earthquake strengthening by committing $13.3 million towards financial support for residential building owners. Now there are a lot of building owners especially here in this city who are affected by this. We'll be making further announcements on the details of that pretty soon.In terms of building consent we have seen over 36446 new dwelling consents. This is historical. We have never seen this many building concerns over the last 45 years and it goes to show that there is so much work in this area—that not only are there building consents but we are of course building a whole lot of houses. Some of those houses of course are our own; we've built 2200 State houses. We are a Government that's delivering. Thank you.