Mackey Moana: Building Amendment Bill (No 3) — Third Reading 
Mackey Moana: Building Amendment Bill (No 3) — Third Reading 
[Volume:678;Page:929] 
MOANA MACKEY (Labour) 
: 
 It is actually with great disappointment that I have to stand to speak against the Building Amendment Bill (No 3) because of course this work started under the previous Labour Government. With the greatest of respect to the member who just took his seat Paul Goldsmith who said that we have learnt from the experience of the leaky buildings saga I say to him that I do not think National has. That is one of the core reasons that Labour is opposing this piece of legislation. It is because those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Once again we see the kind of ideological knee-jerk reaction to regulating this area that actually led us into this territory in the first place. 
I want to make some general comments first about this pattern that is emerging under this National Government which is to push as much as possible into regulation. That means that when we are passing primary legislation we cannot really ascertain the full impact of it because it is going to be in the regulations and that is where the rubber hits the road. It has become common practice under this National Government. I spent the last 3 years on the Regulations Review Committee and we saw it time and time again particularly in areas where there was any controversy. Everything was pushed to regulation because that meant you did not have to get votes for it in the House it did not go through a select committee process and it did not come to this House to be debated and amended. The only protection is the Regulations Review Committee but even the Regulations Review Committee—as important and as wonderful as it is—is limited in its ability to change regulations. It can review regulations in terms of process it can hear from people who are unhappy about certain regulations and it can hear from people who think they are unfair but it is limited in its powers to change them which is something we saw on many issues—like folic acid for example. It seems to me that more and more the more controversial the issue the more likely it is to be dealt with by regulation rather than primary legislation. That is a bad precedent that is being set in this Parliament. It is not good parliamentary practice and it is something that should be reversed. And here we see it again with an issue that is undoubtedly controversial and that is the Building Amendment Bill (No 3) which is trying to address some of the structural issues that led to the leaky building crisis. Again everything is being pushed into regulations. 
The second pattern we are seeing emerging—and I saw this again today when I sat on the Health Committee—is also limiting people’s ability to challenge decisions limiting people’s ability to question and to challenge when something has gone wrong. I want to come back to issues of liability in this legislation later on but that is certainly another thing that we seeing. When you move towards putting the onus on the builders themselves and on the consumers and away from putting it on the building consenters you are removing an entire level of appeal and those processes that are available to consumers and to those who have been affected. Again we are seeing this more and more often. We are seeing it in the exclusive economic zone legislation right now which is removing appeals to the Environment Court and heading them straight to the High Court and they can only be on points of law not on points of substance. I subbed on to the Health Committee this morning and we were talking about the Natural Health Products Bill. Again appeals are allowed to go to the High Court only on points of law not substance. Again all the guts of it is in regulation as with the exclusive economic zone legislation as with this legislation and as with the Food Bill. A pattern is emerging that is actually reducing the power of this Parliament to pass good legislation reducing the power of this Parliament to stop bad legislation and shifting it all into regulations which can be changed by a Government with very little notification. They are just gazetted with no public input. And unless someone happens to catch it— 
Hon Maurice Williamson 
: Shock and awe. 
MOANA MACKEY 
: —and speak up on it then it is shonky lawmaking—shonky lawmaking Mr Williamson. He called it shonky law maybe. 
Hon Maurice Williamson 
: Shock and awe. 
MOANA MACKEY 
: Oh shock and awe—shock and awe. Well I do not know whether I would go so far as to call it shock and awe but it is bad parliamentary process. 
The third pattern we are seeing emerging is this constant reliance on future legislation. Again this is like shifting everything into regulations. If you are constantly saying “Trust us because the next piece of legislation is going to fix it.” that is not good lawmaking process. What Labour members throughout this entire debate have been asking is why are we doing it in such a piecemeal fashion. This is too important for us to get it wrong. Work is ongoing at the moment on other areas around liability. The Law Commission is doing some work. Let us slow this down let us get some idea about what the draft regulations are going to look like let us get some idea about what the next building amendment bill is going to look like and let us make sure that we have all the ducks lined up so that we do not end up in the same situation we were in before. 
You often hear when people talk about what went wrong with the leaky buildings issue that it was the Swiss cheese approach. Just enough holes were lined up for homeowners to fall through that gap. It was not that any one particular piece of legislation was to blame for what happened; it was that there were enough holes that unfortunately when they lined up the consumers fell through the gap. We are in danger of that happening again if we continue to pass law in this fashion where we do not know what the regulations are going to do where we do not know what the future legislation we are being told to rely on is going to do and where once again we are restricting people’s access to appeals. 
The issue of liability is incredibly important as you can see if you look at the case of Pepperwood Mews in Auckland and the ongoing fight those people have about the role that the Waitakere City Council played when it issued the certificate of compliance for Pepperwood Mews. 
Hon Maurice Williamson 
: I want it changed. 
MOANA MACKEY 
: But this is why it is so important to get it right. This shift away saying that the councils are going to have less liability makes it even more— 
Hon Maurice Williamson 
: No it doesn’t. 
MOANA MACKEY 
: Well no one knows. I mean this is the problem. We have not addressed the issue of liability. It is no clearer now than it was under the previous regime. The Minister for Building and Construction might not like it but he or the Minister of Housing should have bothered to spend some time with those people to talk through from their point of view what happened. When someone from the council says “This is code compliant. This is code compliant. We signed off on it.” as a consumer you do not have the level of knowledge to be able to know whether they are right or wrong; you just hope that your elected officials and the people who are paid from ratepayers’ money to make those decisions and provide advice are doing so in a proper fashion. When it all goes pear-shaped the consumers come back and say “Well surely the council had a role to play in it because it is the one that said it was all OK.” 
Those people also say that surely the Housing New Zealand Corporation had a role to play in it because it promoted the mews as a really good investment because it was going to tenant it for 10 or 15 years. So there was going to be guaranteed income but the Housing New Zealand Corporation bailed the minute it all went pear-shaped. It got out as quickly as it could. The Pepperwood Mews owners—these are 32 mum and dad investors; we love talking about mum and dad investors—have lost just about everything they had in this investment. They say that they were not told about problems with the building before the unit titles were signed off and that had they been told they might have reconsidered their decision. Issues of liability go to the very heart of when things go wrong so it is important that we get them right and do not do them in the piecemeal fashion we have been seeing happen today. 
A lot has been made of housing affordability and how we need to do this legislation to reduce the cost of homes. I suspect that Government members are over-egging the impact of this legislation on housing affordability. There are so many aspects to housing affordability none of which the Government is really doing anything about. The issue that my colleague Shane Jones raised I think is a very interesting one and one that has been relatively unexplored in New Zealand and that is the cost of building materials here relative to other countries—the cost of actually building the home. I do know that for example before the Auckland super-city was formed when you talked to developers up in Auckland about building houses you found that their one complaint was that all the different local authorities had different rules. They said that actually some local authorities were very very good but some were not so good. I am not going to say which local authorities were which but developers said that if for example they had a development of 60 houses some councils would put all of them through in one process but others would make them file for each individual house. There were different practices from different councils and that could have been dealt with without our completely removing levels of protection for consumers—the kind that we are seeing removed here. 
The Government really needs to play a much more active role in housing affordability across the board rather than picking and choosing rather than using housing affordability as an argument when it is useful to it to use it but then doing other things that completely undermine what it is doing about housing affordability—like for example the fact that it has done nothing about the community housing sector trusts losing charitable status under the Charities Act. That is something that is costing the Queenstown Lakes Community Housing Trust millions of dollars a year that it could be spending on building affordable houses. The Government sat on its hands and did nothing. Phil Heatley was told about it miles in advance of it happening. It went through the courts. The Government could have made a simple amendment to the Charities Act that would have meant that those organisations would be able to keep money earmarked for affordable housing and spend it on affordable housing but it has done absolutely nothing. So to say that this bill is going to be a panacea for affordable housing when there are so many other things out there that the Government could be doing such as properly investing in community housing organisations advertising the products that are available—unlike what it did with shared equity which was refuse to advertise it then complain— 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch) 
: I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. Her time has expired.