Mark Ron: Weathertight Homes Resolution Services Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is subject to correctionMark Ron: Weathertight Homes Resolution Services Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 10 February 2016. Volume:711;Page:8908. Text is subject to correction.]RON MARK (Deputy Leader—NZ First): Thank you Mr Chairman and welcome back to you too sir. It is my first opportunity to say that to you the Hon Chester Borrows. I want to say that in this moment—and it is quite an interesting little moment that we are enjoying here in the Committee—we are seeing admissions from the right and from the left that everything that is done in this House in the name of good government policy is not always right. I think we need to just hold on to that thought for a minute. I appreciate that this debate has gone a little bit wide ranging so I am going to take the opportunity to add a little bit to that from New Zealand First’s perspective. I appreciate Minister Smith’s—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): We are going to keep it narrow.RON MARK: Well we talked about supermarket prices over here. That is pretty broad—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): And the member was pulled back into line so we are going to keep it narrow.RON MARK: I appreciate the Hon Nick Smith’s contribution but I have to say from New Zealand First’s perspective we have got a saying “Red or blue there’s nothing new—you’re both the same Labour and National in so many so many so many ways”. This matter probably reflects that. What I would say in contrast is that in the 13-odd years I have spent in this House the times when we think that Parliament works best is when the Government has taken time out to listen to opposing views and has accepted openly that it does not have a franchise on the font of all knowledge that it does not own the formula for the elixir of youth and that actually there are times when it needs to work across parties. We would like to think that that moment would have been here with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement but clearly not. Despite the Prime Minister’s speech the other day it is going to be rammed through the select committee so why have a select committee process? It is pointless we would say.This piece of legislation smacks of the same things. It is a very—[Interruption] Mr Macindoe it is a very pertinent time right now to reflect on this. We are talking about the history of a piece of legislation started in Labour’s time when we had Roger Douglas running the country and the ideology which was Labour’s right-wing moment of “the market knows best” became the fashion. It bequeathed this—the deregulation era. Taxis were deregulated. There was a whole mass of sectors that were deregulated and up until that time I actually think National was opposing some of those steps. This is the consequence.Subsequent to that as the Hon David Cunliffe has just said this country saw an era of tragedy. People were committing suicide families were broken up and people were driven to bankruptcy. Small businesses small builders and small building companies were liquidated and folded and running away from the problem. Who bore the brunt at the end of the day? Well it was the taxpayer and the ratepayer. It was probably rightly so that Parliament should have been held to account because it was Parliament—the Labour Government of the time—that pushed through that move to deregulation.What were we talking about? Funnily enough at the time that this was all happening there was a whole bunch of people who were probably considered a bit old and a bit fuddy-duddy—small builders. There were a lot in provincial New Zealand. I can name a couple in Rangiora and I can certainly name a few in the Wairarapa who said: “Oh no no this is nonsense.” They took one look at this monolithic cladding the Mediterranean-style houses and the way in which cowboy builders—and it was mainly in urban metropolitan New Zealand that it happened. Apartment blocks—that is where it happened. The funny thing is that when you go to rural provincial New Zealand—go to Whanganui go to the Wairarapa and have a look at how many leaky homes there were. The Wairarapa—Alistair Scott knows do you not Alistair Scott? No he does not actually. He does not live there. Two—there were two in Carterton and I think probably half a dozen in Masterton. Why? Because the building practices of those tradespeople over there did not buy into this nonsense of small eaves monolithic cladding and Mediterranean-style houses. They did not buy into the cowboy style. They carried on building houses the way they had always built them. I guess you could argue that deregulation in the Wairarapa and in rural provincial New Zealand did not affect them because they stuck to tried and true practices.One of the other things that also changed—I am just reading back on a bit of history here—was the methodology behind the training of apprentices. Who did that? Oops—share the blame. Those things combined to give us a problem that was a multibillion-dollar problem which as we have just discussed here various Governments—firstly Labour and then National—have attempted to address in this piece of legislation we would all hope. New Zealand First is supporting it. Hopefully it will be another step and I hope it is the final step in the right direction to delivering justice to those people who own homes that were caught up in this. Many were driven to bankruptcy. Many have died and been buried over the years. There are many who never recovered their financial position. I can name right now people living in Auckland who are still to have their apartments repaired. These are bodies corporate that are still locked into the bureaucracy of trying to negotiate and fund the repair of those apartment blocks in Auckland right now. I know so because we have a family member stuck in one of them. And that is tragic.I would just ask at this point in time when we are all going back over the history and accepting that things were not done right that going forward we apply the same sort of thought the same degree of openness to ideas from across the House when looking at legislation and just for one moment consider that maybe we as the Government or you as the Government do not have all the answers and that maybe just sometimes there are people on the other side of the House who have something valuable to contribute and who do have some experience that is worth noting and listening to. I would like to think it would happen.There is one question that popped up when I listened to the Minister speaking. He quite rightly said that these changes specifically do not include landlords who are running commercial operations. This is specifically about homeowners—and rightly so we believe. But it does beg the question under the Warm Up New Zealand: Healthy Homes initiative where the Government is giving out funding to people to assist them to have their homes insulated why are we funding landlords to do that? Why do we have a system that allows a landlord to take the community services card of their tenant and book up and get the subsidy in the name of the tenant for the home that they are renting out? Why are we doing that—especially when it debars that tenant if they move on and rent another house or if they move on and buy a house from accessing that subsidy for themselves later on?I know of landlords in the Wairarapa who are real estate agents who have their own portfolio off to one side who regularly buy properties and access the healthy homes funding for home insulation from the Government to insulate their property portfolio. They pick up the capital gain on that. We have people in Carterton who have questioned that and they have just simply been told that that is the way it is.I just ask the Government to reflect on that. If the leaky homes legislation we are passing right now is not to be to the advantage of property investors why are we assisting property investors with subsidies for insulating their property portfolios?Hon Dr Nick Smith: Because the benefit is to the tenant.RON MARK: It would be good to hear that on the record Minister. We know and we accept that if a landlord insulates a home it helps a family in a low socio-economic bracket that needs that home insulated. But if it then stops that family from accessing that subsidy later on down the line when they have saved enough money to buy their own house the question is: is that fair? Is that the way it was intended? I do not think it would be and actually I do not think the Government would realise that that was probably the implication.New Zealand First will be supporting the legislation. We are happy to have worked on the Local Government and Environment Committee towards its conclusion. Thank you very much.