Woods Megan: Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 17 February 2016. Volume:711;Page:9138. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): It is my pleasure to take a call on this piece of legislation and to make it very clear as the Minister for Building and Housing indicated that Labour supports the passage of this bill through the House. I would like to acknowledge the words that the Minister just said and I would also like to acknowledge the work of the Local Government and Environment Committee. But most important as the Minister has alluded to I think it is incredibly fitting that we are debating this legislation 5 days out from the fifth anniversary of the Canterbury earthquakes. I would most of all like to pay tribute to the 185 people who lost their lives in those earthquakes and their families and their friends who are still living with that loss 5 years on. I would also like to pay tribute to the 35 people who were killed by unreinforced masonry and the four people who were killed in the street in Christchurch and I will come back to those reasons throughout this speech.I think that what we saw 5 years ago in our country—in Canterbury—probably changed many of our views of what we needed to do around making sure that our buildings were above all safe and that they were not going to put people at risk. The other person I would like to pay tribute to here where the Minister also finished his speech is to Ann Brower and her incredibly tireless efficacy in making this a better piece of legislation that we are seeing in the House tonight. Ann Brower was the only survivor of a bus on Colombo Street that was crushed by unreinforced masonry. The 12 other people on the bus that she was on were killed. Ann suffered horrific injuries and she came and spoke to us incredibly movingly about how it is that we could avoid the fate that she had been through and what she had witnessed. Ann never gave up on her quest to improve the piece of legislation that first went to select committee so I commend her for that effort that she put in and I am very pleased to see that her efforts have paid dividends in our having a much stronger piece of legislation that we are here debating in this House tonight.The piece of legislation that was first referred to the select committee is vastly different from the bill that we have before us here. If I can speak personally for a moment this has probably been one of the most productive exercises that I have been on as a parliamentarian in terms of working in a very non-partisan way to genuinely improve a piece of legislation and work for a good outcome at the select committee. So I would like to acknowledge the way in which our committee worked and to acknowledge the chairmanship of Scott Simpson and the willingness for us to be flexible and to listen and to be responsive to what people were telling us.I think that what we have before us is an incredibly sensible piece of legislation. Instead of saying that we should treat the whole of this long land of ours as one risk zone we have divided this up and this is a piece of legislation that is about the evidence. First and foremost it is based on the science. It is based on the advice of GNS Science scientists telling us what the actual seismic risks in actual parts of New Zealand are. Once we know that risk we can make assessments as to the risk that is posed to people by buildings and dwellings in that area. As Minister Nick Smith has described the country is divided into three bands with time lines that are commensurate with the band depending on whether they are at low medium or high risk of seismic activity and the time frames around that are different for different places. So if you are an owner of an earthquake-prone building in Auckland your time frame for fixing that and getting it up to the code standard is entirely different from if you are a building owner in Christchurch—although I would hazard a guess that most buildings in Christchurch are now above well above code because they have either been repaired or rebuilt to that standard—and other parts of the country that are identified as areas of high seismic risk.But the contribution that Ann Brower made was that we needed to look beyond just the seismic risk in taking this very pragmatic approach to how it is that we carved up the country and that we really did need to reach right across the country for the lowest-hanging fruit—that lowest-hanging fruit being unreinforced masonry in verandahs and the risks that this posed to people. As I alluded to in my opening of the 185 people who lost their lives in Christchurch 5 years ago 35 people lost their lives either in the street or inside a building and I think this is incredibly important for us to remember. Ann as I said has been a tireless campaigner for this and I would like to just enter into the Hansard some of the words that she said that I think are incredibly important and that we should always take into account as regulators. She said: “There was nothing natural about the disaster”—that being the Canterbury earthquakes—“that befell the 13 of us. It wasn’t the earthquake. It was the building decisions made about the building and the failure to enforce those decisions.”We as regulators have a responsibility. We have a responsibility to ensure that we put in place laws and regulations that are going to keep people safe. That is why we are elected to positions of responsibility. All too often we hear shrieks in this House about cutting through red tape. We hear shrieks about what a burden regulation is and how it is that we have to be more pragmatic and more sensible about these things. But I think that this piece of legislation stands as a very poignant reminder of why it is that regulation matters and why it is that when we actually take off the ideological blinkers about the role of regulation we can come up with very sensible very pragmatic and very bipartisan or cross-partisan solutions. As the Minister identified in this kind of area we have to give regulatory certainty to the building owners. People need to know that the repairs they are going to embark on with their building are not going to change with a changing Government. This is a piece of legislation that is going to span a wide of period of time and we have to give people that certainty. So I would like us to remember that.A further comment from Ann was: “Regulatory failure at its most murderous made Colombo St run red that day.” I think that is a sentence that we should always remember: that it was regulatory failure that cost people their lives—the failure to put in place standards that would have kept people safe. This legislation is doing that. This legislation is taking a very sensible approach; it is balancing out the risks in the real sense that they are risks and measured risks and putting in place solutions to address those. This is the kind of model of legislation that I think that we can all take heed of because the piece of legislation that was first introduced into this House—not by the Minister who has just given the second reading speech Nick Smith but by his predecessor the Hon Maurice Williamson—was a piece of legislation that did not take heed of the Royal Commission of Inquiry intoBuilding Failure Caused by the Canterbury Earthquakes.A royal commission was rightly set up to find out why it was that people died as a result of building failure in an earthquake. A royal commission made recommendations and there was a Minister who did not heed those recommendations. There were some quotes where the Minister was saying things that were essentially that the Government’s decisions were “broadly in line with the recommendations in Volume 4 of the [Canterbury earthquakes] Royal Commission’s report”. When it comes to putting people’s lives in the hands of regulation and making sure people are safe “broadly in line with” is not good enough. So I commend the current Minister for realising that the piece of legislation was not strong enough—the legislation that was referred to the Local Government and Environment Committee—and for giving the committee the latitude to fix the legislation and to bring back to this House a much stronger bill that we can be discussing here tonight.Debate seems too strong a word because I get the feeling there is going to be a lot of congratulating each other for the good work done; because there was a tremendous amount of work. The changes that were made were the result of a collaboration really between the submitters and the committee members. We have come up with a piece of legislation that not only balances the risks—and that is the kind of rhetoric we often hear—but also takes the safety of people first and for that I am happy to commend this bill to the House.