Foster AndyANDY FOSTER (NZ First): Mr Speaker thank you. Like my colleagues on the Transport and Infrastructure Committee a very good committee a very hard-working committee I'm also going to focus not so much on the other matters in the Building (Earthquake-prone Building Deadlines and Other Matters) Amendment Bill but on the issues around the earthquake-prone buildings.This bill is good news because it's a pragmatic approach. It gives more time for building owners. As a Wellingtonian I have spoken with a number of building owners particularly people who live in apartment buildings in the central city who are stressed out about the arrangements as they are at the moment trying to work out how they can possibly afford to do the strengthening that needs to be done especially when their insurance costs are also going through the roof. Also those issues of certainty around regular changes which we've already heard—as my colleague Cam Luxton has just said—it's not just the confidence about the rating of a building whether it's 33 or 34 or some other number it's whether the standards will change over time. They're compliant at this point in time and then they're not compliant at some other point in time. So there are huge stresses that are involved there.Not only that the other point I might make is that if we want to densify our cities if we want to have more people living in our central cities one of the worst things we could possibly do is to undermine the confidence of the very people that we want to be living in those cities because that message will go out to other people who might think about living in central cities and they will say No I don't want to live in an apartment building." So we have to fix this. This bill gives four more years to strengthen those buildings and potentially another couple of years. "Four more years"—it sounds a bit rugby-ish doesn't it? Not a good thing to remember. That is not a good thing to remember.I want to give a lot of credit to the Minister the Hon Chris Penk for this. Also it was really good in seeing some coverage of this to see the "credit where credit is due". They were actually the words that were used by one of my former Green colleagues on the Wellington City Council. So well done to the Minister. But let's be clear as we heard from the Hon Julie Anne Genter: this does not fix the problem. There is still a problem; it just gives more time to fix that problem. We live in a shaky country. In fact some of us went down to the Crisis Management Centre earlier in the week and we were reminded of the likely frequency of some major earthquakes in this country. We cannot just bury our heads in the sand and say "This will go away." It won't.We have somewhere between 5500 and 7000 buildings listed as earthquake-prone nationally. And I was interested to see that in fact while we're very very conscious of it in Wellington City—the rest of the region is added to that—Wellington City only represents about 10 percent of those. There are three times as many in Auckland which surprised me but that's the way it is. It's a much bigger city of course. Wellington City has always taken this very very seriously. In fact as a council the council started doing assessments of earthquake-prone buildings way back in 2006—obviously before all the Canterbury earthquakes—and in fact I can remember at one local government conference Wellington City had just about finished its work when just about everybody else had barely started it on that particular score. And Wellington had done more assessments than every other territorial authority in the country put together so it shows that it's an issue which is taken seriously.But I do want to use Wellington as an example and also one other jurisdiction if I have the time to do so because it underlines the importance of this extra time. Wellington City has some 572 buildings on its earthquake list. For 229 of them their yellow sticker turns red in 2027—229 of them—and if you include the ones between now and 2027 it's 305. So nearly all of them or the vast majority of them are in the next three or four years. It's not only a stress and a pressure and a financial pressure on the building owners but it's also a question of the capacity of the market of the industry of the experts to actually be able to do the work that needs to be done in that short period of time. So the extra time is really really important.I said that more work is needed to be done. So it's really great to see the Minister's review which is being done. And I'm sure—the Minister said it's absolutely fine to hear this as well—we will hear many out-of-scope submissions which are talking about things which are more than just the time table but they will be valuable. There will be valuable information because they will all be related to the issues around the earthquake-strengthening regime and what the challenges are what can be done to make it better and I think that those will be very very valuable. So I'm looking forward to that work.If I might finish off with just one other area which I've also seen I know how important this legislation will be to some of our rural and provincial towns towns like Feilding because giving more time changes the economics and allows people to get on with strengthening their buildings. I commend this bill to the House."