Ardern Shane: Building Bill — In Committee Procedure 
Ardern Shane: Building Bill — In Committee Procedure 
[Volume:619;Page:14857] 
SHANE ARDERN (National—Taranaki-King Country) 
: 
 Part 5 of the bill is where the offences are taken into account—where people start to implement their muscle where the Government gives bureaucrats muscle over the ordinary Labour voter and where the Government comes down with the full weight of the law against that poor little Labour voter who lives in Otaki and wants to get on and do some work. There is nothing in here that is probably more offensive—[ 
Interruption 
] Mr Smith should listen so that he can check and see that this section is not one that has been struck out. New by majority is clause 317A: “Offence for residential property developer to transfer household unit without code compliance certificate”. 
 On the surface that does not sound too bad but the question is: what happens when a person does not have enough money to build the house to completion? Let us say that some Labour voters from Otaki or down south have enough money to build two-thirds of the house. They have one room to live in and one room to sleep in and the rest of the house is left unfinished. The builder cannot not go away having issued a code of compliance—that is against the law—and the owners cannot not take possession and shift into the house simply because the law will not allow that to happen. So how do we overcome that? How will the member over there give us an explanation tonight as to how to overcome that problem? 
Does it simply mean that those people cannot not shift into the house and still have to pay rent? Let us say that they are paying the mortgage on the half-built house and want to move in. They have a place to sleep in and a roof over their heads but they cannot move in simply because the builder will not allow it. The builder cannot get paid. The builder and the owners could have come to an agreement about what they want to do and the owners may want to finish the house as and when income allows them to do so from that point on. But no according to the socialists in this Parliament they cannot do that. The Government will not have a bar of that. I say to members opposite and to the Minister—[ 
Interruption 
]. Mr Smith will get his chance. The member interjecting should take a call and point out how the owners could get around that problem—I am sure the lawyer will figure something out. 
My reading of the bill—and most builders’ reading of it—will be that those owners cannot not move in. For every lawyer who says they can there will be another lawyer who will challenge that view and the territorial authority will say: “No you can’t do it.” I say that it will not be able to happen. So I ask the Minister to take a call. He should get some advice from his officials and clear this up for members tonight. He should clear it up also for those poor Labour voters up in Otaki who employ a builder to part-build a house and who cannot shift in and get their house finished because they run out of money—maybe the owner loses his job in Parliament as a result of the election—and cannot carry on. 
Further the bill introduces a whole raft of abilities to prosecute and chase people through the court system run them through the legal system and cost them heaps of money. The payment of infringement fees is mentioned right throughout the bill. Mr Tamihere should take a call about that—I am sure it would frighten even him. This bill is the sort of thing that one could design only if one decided that everybody in the country was a villain. We are taking the worst possible case and developing law around it. One thing we learn very early when we come to Parliament is that bad cases make bad law and this bill is a classic example of that. The Government is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The old legislation which had 100 pages was prescriptive in some areas—and obviously not prescriptive enough in some other areas which is why it was found wanting—but this bill overdoes it overwhelmingly. The Minister should take a call to clear up a number of issues that have been raised tonight. 
Clause 338 “Liability of principal for acts of agents” may well be useful but I suspect that it is not good enough. I have another question for the Minister. If as has been stated in the Chamber tonight a developer were to come in employ a lot of subcontractors including building contractors on an hourly or weekly basis slap up a development in central Auckland not comply with the code and then disappear into the sunset because he did not have to be a registered builder or comply with all of the detail in this bill—he just put his name up as the investor the developer the entrepreneur the former MP or something—then I presume that the subcontractor who of course has to comply with this legislation would be left holding the baby. But I do not know. This clause is about the liability of the principal for acts of agents.