Hague Kevin: Building Amendment Bill (No 3) — First Reading 
Hague Kevin: Building Amendment Bill (No 3) — First Reading 
[Volume:669;Page:16060] 
KEVIN HAGUE (Green) 
: 
 I begin where the previous speaker Moana Mackey left off. I support the comments that both she and her colleague Phil Twyford made about the broader context of housing and the New Zealand building industry in which the Building Amendment Bill (No 3) is being advanced. 
A recent Government task force report entitled  
Home and Housed: A Vision for Social Housing in New Zealand 
 found that there is a shortage of 70000 homes in New Zealand and that 8500 to 2000 New Zealand households have extreme housing issues. That is extraordinary. The Government’s solution has been to make vague comments about working with the community sector more and that is simply not enough; we need action and we need it now. 
The Government has cut money for upgrading and acquiring State houses from $120 million to $18 million in this year’s Budget. It is actively going backwards on supporting vulnerable Kiwis who have the right we would say to be guaranteed a roof over their heads. This cut is occurring at a time when over 10000 families are on the State housing waiting list. 
The Green Party has suggested some solutions that would address those needs for housing and also address the plight of the building industry. Our Mind the Gap package and our Green New Deal package have proposed a comprehensive State house building programme to increase the stock of State houses by 6000 homes over 3 years. It would create 28000 jobs. We also proposed that a further $200 million should be spent in community housing to build a further 500 homes over that period. 
That is the broader context. I also make a comment that builds on something that Chris Auchinvole said. He thought that the debate on this bill would happen at the Local Government and Environment Committee. I think it is evident that that is the only place that it can happen. Even though this is a complex and technical bill I am sure we would have all benefited from Government members taking some time to explain their proposals more and I think the New Zealand public has a democratic expectation for the Government to do that in a first reading. The first reading debate is not about satisfying the needs of only the Government itself; it is actually about satisfying the needs of the New Zealand public to know more about the bill being proposed so that they are in a better position to make informed comments and submissions as part of the select committee process. I think it is unfortunate that Government members have chosen to take cursory calls on this bill because it robs the public and important stakeholders of the opportunity to know more about the bill and therefore to make the best submissions they possibly can as part of the select committee process. 
The bill’s aims of making builders more accountable and simplifying the building process seem superficially good on the one hand but on the other hand they sound like code for more deregulation and a higher risk of the kind of debacle that we heard about earlier this evening in this House: the catastrophe of the leaky homes disaster which has befallen so many New Zealand households. Once again it is one of those issues where there is debate between regulation and deregulation and striking the correct balance. 
It is worth repeating the conclusion of the Hunn report about leaky homes which in 2002 found that the deregulation of the building industry undertaken by the National Government in the 1990s represented a major systemic breakdown across the whole industry. That cannot be allowed to happen again. We cannot compromise environmental safety and quality standards in order to fast track building developments and satisfy National’s obsession with free-market economics. In the long run that approach will lead to problems such as the leaky homes debacle the repercussions of which we are still dealing with today. 
We realise that the building industry and the systems we have around the industry are not perfect and we certainly welcome some of the provisions in the bill. There is room for improvement and we agree with objectives such as holding people to account for their work. Indeed part of the problem with the leaky buildings fiasco was the loss of the accountability chain and accountability mechanisms. It is important to remember that all of that fiasco happened in the context of deregulation. 
I raise another problem that we hope this bill will address—that is the problem faced by people who want to build different or eco-friendly buildings. Very often councils seem ill-equipped to deal with those kinds of applications and they fall back on the tried and true systems that they know. That is anathema to the kind of innovation that we need in order to overhaul the style of New Zealand buildings and to address some of the challenges that we face in this century. On the whole the 2004 reforms to the building code have been an improvement but there is still a way to go. 
With all that said the Green Party has an open mind and is keen to hear the submissions from the public and from stakeholders on how the Building Act can be improved. We are also keen to hear from experts about how we can safeguard the environmental safety and quality standards of the building industry and to see whether there is scope to make the processes easier to comply with. It is fair to say that we are sceptical about National’s record on building regulation and more particularly deregulation but we want to hear the arguments. With that said we will support this bill at the first reading.