Williamson Maurice: Weathertight Homes Resolution Services (Financial Assistance Package) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Williamson Maurice: Weathertight Homes Resolution Services (Financial Assistance Package) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 07 July 2011. Volume:673;Page:19923. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (Minister for Building and Construction) 
: 
 I will not do this all the time but I think Darien Fenton has raised a really interesting element of this bill that I want to cover and that is the 10-year limitation. I need to make it clear to people who have a leaky home—and we made this clear when we announced it a year ago in May of last year which is about 15 months ago—that if they have a leaky home and they are coming towards the end of its 10-year cycle all they need to do is to register with the Weathertight Homes Tribunal and the clock stops. 
The reason there is such a limit is simple; it is the numbers. The dollars make one’s eyes start to water if it is left open-ended. I fully understand that as soon as we draw a line in the sand there is always a person just on the other side of that line who will feel aggrieved. If we said that we will make it 11 years then the person who is at 11 years and 1 month will feel aggrieved. It would be the same if we made it 12 years. If we do not make any limit then we start to basically gut the intention of the original Building Act which states that there is a period of 10 years—it is actually in the Act—within which a building must be fit for purpose and so on. I am sure members of this House will know that a lot of their constituents and maybe even them will seek to do renovations after 12 or 14 years. They may redo the bathroom and so on. So we cannot leave it open-ended and if we did it would simply be fiscally not achievable. Therefore we decided to keep the 10-year limitation that is in the Building Act to make sure that people can stop the clock. I repeat over and over for anyone out there today who is listening that if they are worried that they are coming near their 10-year time frame they should go and get registered. It does not take much and once that claim is registered whether or not it is valid whether or not it comes to fruition and whether or not this package is accepted the clock will stop for that person and they will be through the gate. 
There are a number of other things about the package that I would have loved to do differently. One of them was that for a number of superannuitants their concern was that if they have to get a 50 percent loan from the bank it will be very hard for them to make that repayment. I fully understand that and we explored an option of allowing for the Crown to pick up the 75 percent not the 25 percent—the local authority does the remaining 25 percent—then the Crown would get back its 50 percent from the estate on the death of that superannuitant. But again that just becomes numbers that go into the billions. Let us remember that PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated that there is $11.3 billion of damage known and it is estimated that over time in places with a slower rainfall and moisture level this number could end up being double. We could see $22.6 billion of damage. It puts it into perspective relative to the Canterbury earthquake which is about $15 billion. It is a ginormous sum of money. 
I make no secret of the fact that 101 different combinations and permutations were looked at to try to get this through. We looked at one-third one-third one-third; we looked at the Crown doing only 20 percent and putting local authorities in the gun for 30 percent which gave 50 percent but in the end this was the best we could get to within the fiscal restraints that the Minister of Finance and the Government’s budget could withstand. I repeat two things: first it is voluntary; and second the Government could have stood out and said that it was not taking part in this at all. We could have done that. I heard John Gray say last night: “I don’t think the Minister has looked in the eyes of people with a leaky home.” Boy is he wrong. What made me do this more than anything else in my life is that I have looked into so many faces of people with a leaky home. I have never been to so many meetings where everybody at the meeting was crying. My colleagues may suggest that I have that effect on a meeting when I go to it at any rate but these people were crying because they had nowhere to go. They had no way out they could not get loans and they were sitting in rotten damp smelly unhealthy homes.  
Stachybotrys 
 can actually kill people. 
I felt there was a moral obligation to come back and say that we have to do our bit. I have to say from the outset that if anyone thinks this is simplistic and we can blame the Crown for some of these things or poor-quality builders or untreated timber or local councils or poor inspection it is not. It is a systemic failure of the whole lot across the board from whoa to go. We could spend the rest of our lives going into the blame game. I really want to move on. I really want to get some houses fixed and boy in my retirement will I feel good about it if I know that some people came out of this getting that result.