Dalziel Lianne: Building Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee 
Dalziel Lianne: Building Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee 
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Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 I too am grateful to the Minister for Building and Construction for traversing the history of the bill because of course he is absolutely correct. All of the preliminary work that led to the introduction of the Building Bill that passed as an Act in 1991 but which was a bill in 1990 was certainly done under a Labour Government. The reason that it came under the purview of the Minister of Internal Affairs was that in those days that was where our building industry regulatory framework sat. And that actually says a little bit about the history of where we came from and why we have got to the point we have got to today. I cannot find it in my heart of hearts to support this bill because it does not bring together some of the elements that others have talked about in terms of the need to take an overarching perspective on this legislation and not to regulate in this area in a piecemeal way because we have already paid a very very big price for doing that. 
I think what is also useful from the Minister’s comments is that he said that there were a number of people in this House who were not in the House when this bill had its first reading and was referred to the Local Government and Environment Committee which means that there is a lack of knowledge and understanding. I believe that that is actually quite widespread in this House and I want to urge this House to think very carefully about passing legislation in this area at the moment while today we have sitting in Christchurch the royal commission of inquiry into building. Today one of my own constituents was pleading for certain matters to be inquired into. At the end of the day I think it is really important that we learn the lessons that we are going to learn from that particular set of disasters and listen to some of the warnings that have been made year in year out ever since we did go down this track and we did go down this track together. 
I picked up the February version of the  
North and South 
 magazine and I assume that the Minister has read the article on the leaky building crisis. Although I was not a Minister for Building and Construction like everyone else on this side seems to have been I was the Minister of Commerce at the time we decided to rewrite the Building Act 1991 and I in fact was the Minister of Commerce at the time that we put a discussion document out to get feedback from the industry. Despite what some members of the Government have said we actually have respected the industry and worked with the industry in order to get a legislative framework that would actually meet the modern environment and the fact that a number of different products were coming on to the market without the adequate regulatory regime to support them. But where I disagree with the Minister is that it was not just the untreated timber that gave us the leaky building crisis and any builder worth his salt who understood about flashings and understood about the cavity systems that are required when putting monolithic cladding systems over the top of frames that were untreated will know that that was never the intention of the standard that was implemented at that time at the behest of the industry. And that is also a point that I think is worth noting—that the way standards have to essentially be paid for by the industry itself and that there is no public-good funding in order to get a standard established allowed a situation where monolithic cladding systems were able to be introduced into our country without an appropriate standard for their application. So there was a multiple layer of reasons that gave us this leaky building crisis but it is not the only crisis that they have given us. 
I just want to quote from an email that I got after an appearance on television a couple of weeks ago. He has been writing to Ministers year in year out for a number of years around the non-performance by territorial authorities over building control and the negligence and incompetence of practitioners within the discipline of building control—not the builders themselves but actually the supervision of the industry. He said: “The greatest of these tragedies has been the leaky house syndrome and now the devastation wreaked by ongoing earthquakes in Christchurch. Much smaller unreported yet no less tragic disasters are happening in people’s lives every day as a result of this culture that is endemic in our ‘she’ll be right’ nation. Every non-compliance that is left unrectified by a building inspector is a disaster waiting to happen in somebody’s life.” I think that is absolutely right. Every single non-compliance potentially can be the disaster that nobody expected to have. 
As I say I do not have the background in this that others have; I did not sit on the select committee. But when a bill says to me that we are shifting the responsibility a little bit away from the building consent authorities and a little bit towards the building owner I start to fear a mismatch of knowledge and a mismatch in terms of the responsibility. The major problem back in 1991 was that the market would essentially look after everyone but otherwise people would be able to look out for themselves. I do not know whether the Minister has read the  
North and South 
 article from February but it is an extremely worthwhile article and I would really recommend that he reads it. In fact I recommend that every member of this House reads this article because what it tells us is that we moved away from a more than adequate system of building regulation into something totally unknown. The fact that both National and Labour were guilty of moving into that unknown together does not make it any more right. 
I will quote from the article because it refers to Peter Mumford’s 2010 PhD thesis. He was the guy who was working within the Ministry of Economic Development on the building legislation the Building Act 2004 and he said: “Effectively New Zealand moved into an unknown future while burning its bridges to past practices.” And the article comments: “In other words the 1991 Building Act was a massive reckless nationwide social and economic experiment with a radically new and unproven building-control system for which the public will continue to pay dearly even though the public never asked for it.” We know that leaky buildings were still being built after the issues were exposed in the media and after we became the Government. It is actually only recently that some of the final issues have been closed off so that those buildings are not being built today. They go on to say that if the building code had been a building it would have been a leaker it was that full of holes and the biggest hole was the lack of accountability. That brings me directly on all fours to this bill—the shifting of accountability. If we are going to shift the accountability what price is somebody else going to pay for that decision sometime in the future? 
I actually am making a serious plea to the Minister that this bill ought to be deferred. There is time because there is another piece of legislation on the Order Paper that is going to go to a select committee and we will be happy as a caucus to support the Building Amendment Bill (No 4) going to a select committee. We would be more than happy to have these issues addressed within the context of that particular bill and I believe that as a result we would end up with stronger legislation. Because that royal commission is sitting in Christchurch right now and because we have paraded every day in our news media stories like that of an engineer breaking down in tears as he had to take responsibility for what he felt had led to the death of somebody we owe it to our constituents from one end of this country to the other to get building regulation right and that is why we are opposed to this bill. This bill is a piecemeal approach and bringing it back into the framework of the whole of the building review will go some way to give some assurance to the people of New Zealand who are looking to us for some leadership in this particular area. 
I do not like using the words “red tape” when I talk about this form of regulation. In fact sometimes the language actually takes away the real purpose. This is about protecting people’s health and safety and we have got to get it right.