Williams Andrew: Building Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Williams Andrew: Building Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 28 February 2012. Volume:677;Page:644. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
ANDREW WILLIAMS (NZ First) 
: 
 I am very pleased to stand here on behalf of New Zealand First to discuss the Building Amendment Bill (No 3). New Zealand First does not support this bill for a great many reasons. I am on the Local Government and Environment Committee but I was not on the committee when these recommendations from last year’s committee were made. I certainly am somewhat aghast at some of the recommendations contained in this bill.  
As one of the very few people in this Chamber who have been involved in local government— 
Nicky Wagner 
: Oh excuse me! 
ANDREW WILLIAMS 
: —as one of the very few—and certainly one of the very few on the current Local Government and Environment Committee can I bring to this Chamber some of the experiences that I know of in relation to this. In introducing this I would refer to John Scarry a structural engineer whom Raymond Huo referred to and a comment he made recently in Christchurch when he referred to depraved indifference. This bill is very much one that reflects on depraved indifference from this National Government.  
In fact it is a “ 
Back to the Future 
 Bill” in my opinion. It is a “ 
Brideshead Revisited 
 Bill”. It is going back to the 1990s. It is almost Maurice Williamson the Minister for Building and Construction reverting back to his time in the 1990s when the then Government destroyed the building code when it ripped the building code apart when it changed the Building Research Association of New Zealand building research rules and the building code and allowed air-dried timber in this country to be used after pressure from some of the corporates—its mates in the building industry. The then Government allowed monolithic cladding from Australia to be applied here in New Zealand in a climate where we have a lot of rain unlike Australia and where we have the likes of Waitemata clay and moving soils which are quite different from the conditions in Australia. That combined with the air-dried timber and the monolithic cladding and the movement of the houses ended up as our leaky house problem.  
I can recall 18 months ago when the Minister Maurice Williamson slammed the phone down on me and five other mayors during a phone call when we were discussing the leaky home situation. It was at the time the Minister was offering a 10 percent offer on the table for full and final settlement from the Government to solve the leaky homes issue. I said that that was an insult. I said it was an insult to New Zealanders who had been left in the lurch with their leaky homes for the Government to offer 10 percent. The Minister said: “Take it or leave it. That’s all you’re getting. If you don’t take it the Government will walk away from this.”  
We the North Shore City Council at the time commissioned a Covec report and the Covec report by independent financial analysts showed that the $11 billion - plus rebuild of leaky homes in New Zealand was going to return the Government in excess of at least 25 percent in taxes in the way of GST PAYE and other company taxes. The Government essentially was going to get its $2 billion or $3 billion back in taxes from the rebuilding exercise of over $11 billion in New Zealand homes.  
It was interesting that as a result of giving that report to the Minister at the time within 30 days the Government turned round and offered 25 percent on the table. Suddenly the deal went from 10 percent to 25 percent. It proved then that the Government really did not know what it was doing with leaky homes and it really did not understand what it had created back in the 1990s with deregulation and the lowering of standards.  
And here we are seeing it all over again in this bill. Do we really want to see a situation where $100 window companies can be responsible again for what is going on in our building industry? Do we want to see our homes revert to being built with builder’s bog sealants and jerry-building standards and with self-policing of such standards by constructors and consumers alike? We do not want to see that. The only way we can stop this is to ensure that the local authorities the local regulators and the local people with responsibility have a good input into how our homes and our buildings in this country are built. 
 I was recently at a major college on the North Shore and I was aghast to find also that it has something like between $20 million and $30 million of rebuilding of buildings to fix its leaky school buildings problem. My understanding is that that is just one of something like 500 colleges in New Zealand that are going to have to go through the same exercise. 
We heard from the Prime Minister just recently that the Government is planning to sell $5 billion to $7 billion of State assets to help upgrade our schools and bring them into the 21st century. I put it to you that perhaps it is having to sell the $5 billion to $7 billion of assets in actual fact to get money in to fix the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of leaky school buildings throughout this country.  
I think we might be getting sold down the river on this particular one and I would be very interested to see this again. Just as we are looking back 20 years now—back to the 1991-92 period when this happened 20 years ago—it will be very interesting at the end of this decade to look back and say: “What happened to our schools? Did they get all that money reinvested in them for supposedly improvements? Or was it just to fix the National Government’s leaky building problem?”.  
This bill shifts responsibility and accountability away from the authorities and it puts it back on the builders and consumers. It puts it back on those $100 window companies. This is an all-care no-responsibility approach by this National Government. Have we not learnt from the leaky homes saga which was a national disaster in the 1990s? And it is about to create another disaster in this decade.  
Also—and I particularly am concerned about this having watched the royal commission in Christchurch and heard about some of the problems there with the building standards in Christchurch and perhaps some of the questionable designs and building methods used in Christchurch that have resulted in some of the major failures of those buildings. Do we want to have a situation where our building industry is self-regulated to the point where builders can put up structures where they can put up buildings and supposedly be self-policing and self-complying? Do we want that situation? And then in years to come because we are in an earthquake zone because we are in a zone of movement of land in this country do we want to look back again—like the leaky homes situation like the leaky school buildings situation—and say: “How on earth did we let that National Government allow this sort of thing to go through and allow the lowering of standards of our building code and of the building of our premises and corporates and our housing and our schools and every other structure in this country?”.  
New Zealand First does not support this bill. We believe this bill is just another case of the National Government pandering to some of its corporate mates and assisting the building industry as it did in the 1990s with the air-dried timber and as it did in the 1990s with the monolithic cladding. The Minister is smiling but the Minister was there in the 1990s when the Government allowed it to happen.  
This is  
Brideshead Revisited 
 this is  
Back to the Future 
 this is bringing back the 1990s all over again. This Parliament should be ashamed if it puts this bill through in this form because we all will be individually held to account in years to come if we go back to a situation of having inferior building standards inferior housing inferior school buildings and inferior commercial buildings all as a result of this building Minister and this Government allowing the building standards to once again be lowered. Thank you.