Williamson Maurice: Building Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Williamson Maurice: Building Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 28 February 2012. Volume:677;Page:637. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (Minister for Building and Construction) 
: 
 I move  
That the Building Amendment Bill (No 3) be now read a second time 
. This bill was considered by the Local Government and Environment Committee chaired by the superb member Chris Auchinvole. That committee did a lot of hard work. I thank all the members of it. I know they all worked very assiduously to bring the bill to a better state and it did refine and improve the bill dramatically. I know that Labour members and I think even a Green member gave some very good contributions to the bill. The committee received 55 written submissions and heard 23 oral submissions and as I said made some quite extensive changes to the detail and also some clarification. So we got what I think are improvements and clarifications out of it. 
I want to take a very brief call to say the bill is just a very small part of an overall package of things we are doing. This bill also has a successor called the Building Amendment Bill (No 4) which will have a whole lot of the consumers’ rights in it. There is also another bill coming in later on which adds some more to it. The licensed building practitioners regime becomes mandatory the day after tomorrow which is another regime that is part of the building industry. So do not let anybody think that the Building Amendment Bill (No 3) is it in a nutshell.  
Basically this No. 3 bill is purely about trying to move to what I think is risk-based consenting. One of the worst things we have had about our building sector for just about ever is that the consenting regime has always been one size fits all. So the bill tries to move away from that and allow for various levels of consenting based on how difficult the design is and so on. The select committee did some really good work in trying to align what our policy intent was with some of the actual details of the wording in the bill. I know that a lot of the submissions said they were concerned the bill was not clear on it. Now the bill is finally amended and being reported back to the House it has fixed that up. 
Quite a few other practical submissions were made which reflected a lot of things that parties out there wanted to raise. What I am delighted about is the level of support that our package of reforms is getting. The Registered Master Builders Association the Certified Builders Association the Building Industry Federation—let me see; there are about five or six others—the Construction Strategy Group and so on are all very strongly supportive of this stuff. 
I will not go into all the detail but the bill has had some of the documents clarified where some of them are going to be now called “certificate of work” rather than “record of work”. As I said all the recommendations that were made by the select committee have been incorporated into this bill and I thank the committee for that. I again move that the Building Amendment Bill (No 3) be now read a second time.