Woods Megan: Building Amendment Bill (No 4) — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Woods Megan: Building Amendment Bill (No 4) — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 01 May 2012. Volume:679;Page:1834. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram) 
: 
 I am happy to take a call on the Building Amendment Bill (No 4). Labour supports sending this bill to the Local Government and Environment Committee. As many of my colleagues have said we would like to thank the Minister for Building and Construction for the collaborative approach he has taken with regard to this legislation.  
I think that what we are seeing here tonight during this debate is that Labour supports the broad direction of this review but can see that there are some problems that need to be ironed out. My colleagues who have spoken previously have pointed to the fact that New Zealand First has raised some real issues that need consideration. The reason we are supporting this bill at its first reading is so that it can go to the select committee and be heard in this forum.  
What it is for us is that we see that this is a piece of legislation that is looking to fix and unpick a period of our history throughout the 1980s and 1990s when we removed many of the regulations around our building industry that were there to protect consumers and the people who were living in those buildings. As we have heard tonight many times over it was the removal of these regulations that gave us the leaky homes situation and it is also this situation that has made people feel unsafe in terms of the Canterbury earthquake and the surety of a house. Like my colleague beside me Lianne Dalziel as someone who lives in Christchurch the need to have good regulation around housing and home has become more apparent to us in the last 18 months.  
This is not about protection just in terms of whether the architraves in your house are right; this is about protections in terms of whether your house is going to hold up and you are going to be safe within the building and whether you will trust that that building is not going to be part of your demise. So we consider that this really does need to be given a good chance for these issues to be considered. We cannot just think about regulation in terms of building in terms of red tape and as something that needs to be skirted around. We cannot think of this as something that we have to remove to make an industry more efficient when it comes to something as fundamental as buildings in which people’s lives can be put at risk if we get this wrong. We have heard tonight over and over again that if we as legislators in this house get this regulation wrong then we do put people’s lives and we do put people’s livelihoods at risk and we need to ensure that we get this right. This is not consumer protection in terms of whether or not your television is going to work 6 months after you bought it. This is consumer protection in that you are protecting the biggest investment that anyone is going to make in a monetary sense and an investment that people are making in terms of their safety.  
We need to send this bill to the select committee as my colleagues have said. We need to give people a chance to give their feedback and talk to us about how it is that we can get these regulations right. It is our duty as legislators in this House to do this. We have to get these protections right. So I am happy to stand here in support of Labour sending this bill to the select committee. Thank you.