Brownlee GerryHon GERRY BROWNLEE (Acting Minister of Civil Defence): Can I first acknowledge David Parker and thank him for bringing that matter to our attention. There are some who would say it is probably more belt and braces than anything else. I personally think you have found a problem that could have occurred. So it is appropriate that it is fixed and I acknowledge the vigilance of the member in finding that.Grant Robertson: Ha ha! There are other words.Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: Well I am not in that caucus so I do not know those words.But can I just answer the questions raised by Jan Logie. Firstly in Christchurch we had the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Act and that Act gave not only the Minister but also the chief executive of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority very extensive powers inside a defined geographical area. So you also had a very large number of very obviously dangerous buildings and that is why the CBD was put into a cordon as a whole and then gradually that cordon was let out as buildings were demolished or remediated. The point here is that you also have the Building Act which makes it very clear what happens in the event of a dangerous building being evidently so. The gap we are trying to fill here is perhaps that there may not be an outward physical manifestation of something that does make it dangerous. So we are trying to ensure that there is a way of finding that out in this particular bill and I think it is not unreasonable to give people that level of comfort. The other point was this. Clayton Mitchell raised the issue about the absent landlord and therefore defying it. Well there should be an address for service in New Zealand for every building and that presumably would be the agent who has some authority in this case and who would certainly have an ability to receive the demand. Defiance could well lead to the council also reverting to the Building Act and slapping a section 124 notice on the building in which case every tenant would be notified that it cannot be entered. What we are trying to do is put in a halfway house. Mr Mitchell spoke also about the overly zealous person who gets the clipboard etc. You could take care of that latter problem in which case you would be a little more lenient on the person who might be in the defying position. So we are really trying to get a bit of a middle ground here. But once again if that building was—if they just said Well no we're not doing it." and the council believed that there was a problem and it would be asking remember under the terms of this bill only if it believed there was a problem then it could put that section 124 notice on all tenants would be notified and automatically evacuated and the cash flow on the building ceases at that point. So there is quite a bit of incentive on landlords to play ball.I want to say again that I think landlords will. It is just where you get the one or two who might not be willing to face the reality of what they are dealing with. I think the gentleman who is the owner of 61 Molesworth Street has set the pace by being very very cooperative with the council absent of all this provision simply because he could see that there was a greater need and he presumably had arrangements with his insurers which recognised that as well.The other point was post-inspection: what if the inspection is done on a Friday or is completed—because it would be a long assessment several days—on a Friday and the tenants are not notified until the Monday. Well if the building was found to be on the Friday afternoon in a bad state once again it would be red-stickered and evacuated. So those are the provisions that exist in current law. Just remember that this little bit that we are putting in here fixes a little gap in the whole thing. I think it goes far enough to prevent the overzealous approach but makes it very clear that there is a high level of expectation that those who have big buildings where human life could be at stake if there was some sort of catastrophic event should play ball.There was also a question raised about the tenants' rights to receive the information. [Bell rung] I will not be much longer. I think it would be interesting to know what the provisions are in each lease deed on any building but I would expect that there will be responsibilities outlined in that lease around the maintenance and care of that building and the delineation between what a tenant will do in that building and what the expectations for the landlord will be. In any event there is the wraparound of the health and safety legislation which means that if you own a building—and you may be a body corporate doing this which I think will challenge a lot of bodies corporate throughout the country on this. We may even discover as we did in Christchurch that many buildings should have had bodies corporate but did not and I hope that that will get remedied in a relatively short period of time. But what you then have is the duty of care to all those who are occupants of that building under the health and safety legislation. So to repeat we have got a lot of Acts that sort of go around the edges of this. What this bill tries to do is pull it all in so that there is that strong expectation that strong requirement that legal requirement that if you are asked to deliver something you have to. We now have these amendments coming in from David Parker which mean that once you are asked you have got to comply. You can go off and appeal if you like and look at your costs and you might be awarded costs because it may have been unreasonable but you must comply and I think that is the strength of where we have got to today."