Cunliffe David: Weathertight Homes Resolution Services Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is subject to correctionCunliffe David: Weathertight Homes Resolution Services Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 10 February 2016. Volume:711;Page:8906. Text is subject to correction.]Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn): It is salutary to be back in the Chamber talking about weathertight homes. I thank Minister Smith for his contribution. Of course we are supporting the bill. In doing so however I think it behoves us to recall the folly that led to the situation how this bill then impacts the legal situation and how we might go forward. I want to concur with what my colleagues Dr Megan Woods and Phil Twyford have offered and to remind the Committee that “leaky building syndrome” was a phenomenon that occurred from around 1994 to 2004. Weathertightness was primarily an issue that derived from two things: the approved use of non-treated framing timber; and various changes to building techniques that compromised weathertightness through the combined use of things like mono-cladding and the lack of cavities and various technical changes that cut corners around window flashings and roof flashings and practical things like that.But what all those things have in common is that the building industry was deregulated during that period under pressure from for-profit enterprises with massive lobbying power. We all know who the largest companies were—I do not need to name names—but I do not think that there is a single member in this Committee who is not well aware with the painful lessons of history that we must never forget that it is the right and proper role of Government in order to have a healthy and mixed economy with a thriving market system to put boundaries around enterprise in the name of public safety and the sustainability of enterprise. In this case—and we are not blaming individuals or naming names—the reverse happened. With some recurrent naivety a kind of market malaria we thought we could trust the building industry to regulate itself. Self-regulation—have we heard that phrase before? The tragic thing about this particular tiptoe through the self-regulatory tulips was that the results have been manifest in broken homes and broken lives.I think every constituent MP in the Committee will have had the most tragic heart-rending cases come to their door. Families have been ripped asunder by the stress of not being able to deal with a leaky home but then not being able to afford to either sell it or fix it. Parliament—again accepting probably shared responsibility for this; I am an old dog and I can do that now—did not bankroll the solution. What it did do was sponsor a legal process that was as fair as we could reasonably get it but it was imperfect. Iteration by iteration by iteration we are back in the House on various occasions to fine-tune that process and I commend the Minister for the changes that are in this bill. They are limited but they are good. They make it fairer because they allow more claims to proceed. That saves 70-odd cases having to go to court—claims which this bill deems to qualify. It means that cases that are currently in progress rather than having reached a particular stage—and the Minister is taking the broad view and good on him—can continue through the legal process even though the expiry date of the legislation has been received and that is the right thing to do.We have no argument here about the content of the bill and we are supporting it all the way but it is a bit like Anzac Day—lest we forget. It would be a deviation to say that there are a number of other industries in the past where a halcyon view of self-regulation came a multibillion-dollar cropper. Telecommunications was one that I had direct experience with. Remember Telecom New Zealand Chief Executive Officer Theresa Gattung saying that confusion was a weapon that it used to keep prices up? It kept customers confused. Remember that? Do you remember the massive lobbying effort that that company put in place to prevent the public interest which was the removal of monopoly rents and the investment in faster and cheaper broadband from occurring? I want to commend Maurice Williamson and successive Ministers on both sides of the House including Amy Adams who have continued a drive towards the pro-competitive regulation of that industry.Sometimes in this House we get lost in a right/left dynamic where we think that either all intervention is good or no intervention is good. Usually as in most parts of life the truth is somewhere in the middle and regulation that sets clear boundaries for private enterprise can help everybody. It is like the rules of a sport. You know what the rules are and if you have got a good ref everyone can get on and play the game and have a good time. If either the rules are unclear or the ref does not know what he is doing or the Government stays on the sideline—or God forbid as in the leaky building crisis it removes the rules and says “Oh you guys just sort it out yourselves.”—then billions and billions of dollars later suicides and divorces later we are back in the House fine-tuning the solution.Have we learnt the lessons of history? Well I do not know but here are a couple of theories and I want to now acknowledge my former colleague Shane Jones. Have we learnt in the supermarket industry? My goodness me food prices are expensive in this country and yet we have really really high levels of production and a small population. We have got only two players in the industry. I wonder how competitive that really is and I wonder whether the Commerce Commission is going to take a close look at it.Closer to home on this one is building products. There are really only two companies that matter in that industry and we have per unit prices for building products in this country that are so much higher than in Australia. I would really like to see the regulators strip that down. That is the 21st century manifestation of the same market malaria that caused this mess—the blithe ignorance of commercial strategy and the abdication of the Crown’s role to be a good and prudent referee. I am not naming names. I am not casting aspersions. I am not pointing the bone.But I am saying that we have a shared public interest in fair rules of the game and good value-creating market behaviour hard work and enterprise.Labour stands for work. We are focused on the future of work so that we can all get on and build a better country. You know the divisions across the House are not that wide. Most of us would agree with that.Most of us agree that pure capitalism like in The Wolf of Wall Street ends in tears and most of us do not want to live in the Soviet Union either. We want a system that works for ordinary Kiwis. As the year unfolds we are going to be exchanging ideas in what is usually a robust but pretty decent sort of a process about how we do that.This is a great bill small but perfectly formed—nothing like the Minister.Hon Members: Aw!Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE: He is big and perfectly formed.