O'Connor Damien: Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Connor Damien: Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 30 March 2016. Volume:712;Page:10069. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Labour—West Coast - Tasman): Indeed it is an honour as a neighbour of Canterbury to get up and speak on this piece of legislation the Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill and acknowledge I guess and respect the terrible tragedy and the loss that that region incurred.This piece of legislation of course is a somewhat pragmatic approach to dealing with the issues of earthquake risk. As is said here “The intent of the bill is to balance the protection of citizens from earthquake-prone buildings:” keeping in mind the primary objective of protecting life. But we do hang around in buildings quite a bit and so we just have to make sure that we are in reasonably safe buildings.The legislation does differentiate what it calls high-risk or priority buildings from others and I want to make reference to priority buildings because in my particular case the West Coast is where indeed it has always been forecast to be the centre of the biggest earthquake that is about to come. In fact we have many reports saying that our sitting on the fault line means that we are probably more likely than other places in New Zealand to have the big quake. So what we have is a hospital which is a priority building by virtue of this piece of legislation and in 2012—in fact I think it was July—the National Government Minister Tony Ryall sent out a press release saying that there was a section 124 notice on Grey Base Hospital. That means that it did not meet 34 percent of earthquake standards.Indeed this legislation goes to address those tricky issues around existing buildings. Indeed many parts of Grey Base Hospital meet only 12 percent—12 percent—of earthquake standards. By any person’s measure it is not safe. Indeed it is somewhat ironic that when people go to a hospital for safety they walk into a building—and in fact the emergency department at Grey Base Hospital meets about 12 percent of earthquake standards. So you kind of toss up if you are in a car accident whether you stay in the car on the side of the road or you go to the hospital. That is perhaps a little bit extreme—the point being though that the Minister and others have acknowledged the need. They have said that bringing the buildings up to meet the requirements in this piece of legislation and previous legislation to ensure personal safety cannot really be done and so they are going to have to build a new hospital. We welcome that initiative.The question is—and I want to ask the Minister in the chair the Hon Judith Collins to say although I am talking about a new building whether the principles and precedents laid down in this legislation around priority buildings mean that in building a new Grey Base Hospital we should have a priority building standard? That is Importance Level 4 or IL4 which means that the building will stand up and protect life in a big earthquake. But in fact the bureaucrats in the National Government have said: “No you can have an IL3.” Well what does that mean? That means that the building will stay intact but you had better get out of it after the first earthquake because there is no guarantee it will stay up after the next one.Indeed what is going on in Greymouth is that we are building a new recreation centre with two basketball courts—quite a big building. That is built to Importance Level 4 standards. So what is going to happen is that in spite of our best intent here to protect life in existing buildings the Government is building a hospital to Importance Level 3 standards which are less than what we would expect through this piece of legislation. This is because the legislation identifies priority buildings and says that it is up to the local councils and others to work out risk assessments—and I think that is very very fair. But what we have got is territorial authorities and in this case the Grey District Council will have to report on Grey Base Hospital as it is now and as it might be built.Aside from all the other buildings that will be caught up in this legislation I accept the wisdom and the general purpose of it. But we have to accept the precedents that this will lay down and indeed if we do have hospitals as priority buildings then I would expect the West Coast people to be able to get an Importance Level 4 hospital the same as the people in Canterbury—