Flavell Te Ururoa: Building Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Flavell Te Ururoa: Building Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:641;Page:10845] 
TE URUROA FLAVELL (Maori Party—Waiariki) 
: 
Tena koe Mr Deputy Speaker tena tatou katoa e kare ma. A i a tatou e hoki mai ana ki roto i te Whare nei me tuku nga whakaaro ki te hunga e rongo nei te ahuatanga o te pa pouri i tenei rangi. Ko tera te pepe e takoto mai ra ki roto i a Ngati Raukawa otira tera aitua i pa mai ki a au ki roto i te Waiariki. Me penei rawa te korero waiho ratou kia moe. Anei tatou e hui nei i tenei rangi tena koutou kia ora tatou. 
[An interpretation in English was given to the House.] 
[ 
Greetings to us all fellow colleagues. As we return to this House our thoughts are with those grieving a loss on this sad day that baby lying in state among Ngati Raukawa and the one in my electorate of Waiariki. Allow me to say this: leave them there to rest. Here we are meeting today; greetings and thank you. 
] 
The stated policy objective of this bill as stated in its explanatory note sounds pretty good: “to improve the clarity and effectiveness of the regulatory framework.” as it is currently. The Maori Party of course supports such a worthy goal. If there have been problems identified in the “workability of the Building Act 2004” it seems pretty sensible to address them with this new bill. 
But then we read on: “The Act’s purpose” as stated in section 3 was to “address the systemic issues that led to major building failure from the mid-1990s to 2001:” and to “significantly reduce the risks of building failure in the future.” 
This is where we start to get a little more interest up—“systemic failure” states the korou. Perhaps this is the bill that will finally do something about substandard housing and the major building failure that has led to low-quality high-maintenance homes falling to bits. We are talking about the type of housing that the Auckland District Health Board has described as affecting physical health through allergies pest infections poorly functioning heaters or stoves and toxic chemical exposure. Its 2005 research identified that the numbers of Auckland people living in garages and caravans are likely to be severely underestimated. The type of housing we are talking about from the research of the Building Research Association is identified as having one in four buildings in poor condition and one in five with serious defects. This is the type of housing that my colleague Hone Harawira talked about recently—an ongoing reality of housing stress for Maori: overcrowding substandard housing and poor heating and all further impacting on Maori health. 
There is enough evidence to confirm that housing is an important determinant of health. Indeed the Building Act and code of 2004 administered by the Department of Building and Housing made explicit its expectation that quality housing would be “free from nuisance and unsanitary conditions”. We know that a number of current pieces of legislation give voice to that same expectation so that any risks to illness or injury are minimised. 
When I think of systemic failure I am thinking of the following: the Housing Improvement Regulations of 1947 the Health Act 1956 the Residential Tenancies Act 1986 and the latest the Building Act 2004. If all those Acts give their commitment to quality housing how can it be that far too many New Zealand homes are still affected by dangerous conditions dampness poor light and ventilation inadequate drainage insufficient disposal of waste a lack of heating and so on and so forth—the list goes on. 
The answer it seems lies in this whole notion of systemic failure—of the very Act we are talking about today. In the Building Act a distinction is made between new and existing buildings. New buildings are required to meet much higher standards of health and well-being than existing ones. There are some limited provisions in sections 121 to 123 of the Act to investigate sanitation dangerous conditions and earthquake safety in existing dwellings but these provisions are seldom called on. 
In the Social Policy Journal’s March edition this year Chris Cunningham along with Sarah Bierre Philippa Howden-Chapman and Louise Signal summed up the current limitations upon the legislation. They stated: “Existing housing is rarely subject to the regulatory provisions of the Building Act except in extreme cases.” They continued: “The cost for local authorities in taking a case to court is high and uncertainty of the outcome of a hearing can influence the decision to prosecute. The lack of alternative accommodation for the occupants of a house can also influence the way that housing quality regulations are enforced.” 
 So what we are really talking about today is the fact that building failure in the future can be avoided if we concentrate on the houses we build today. Although this all seems pretty logical of course the Maori Party cannot help but ask about the building failure that has characterised Maori housing forever—the building failures of yesterday and the days before that. We know that over two-thirds of the current housing stock in New Zealand was built before standards requiring insulation in new buildings were introduced in 1977. Minimal housing regulations low spending on maintenance an over-reliance on the weatherboard style of housing and inadequate consideration of energy-efficient heating means that housing quality is likely to be a problem of national concern for years to come. 
Sixty-four years ago the Minister for Native Affairs Rex Mason stated: “Maori housing is the worst blot on the administrative system of New Zealand.” How much has changed today? Well it may well still be the case that Maori can be expected to be excluded from the mainstream of Government administration and housing as has happened again and again in the past. A study released by the Centre for Housing Research and Te Puni Kokiri last year called  
Maori Housing Experiences: Emerging Trends and Issues 
 highlighted a distinctive feature of being Maori that may account for the disproportionate rates of substandard housing. The study pointed out that Maori often accept substandard housing and living as a result of their wishes to be closer to whanau. 
I am struck by a new term that is introduced in this bill “the significant building project” to facilitate a whole-of-building concept. Well for Maori every project is considered through the eyes of whether it will facilitate a whole-of-whanau concept. In practice it means that our cultural assets the values and strength we place on whanaungatanga are having explicit economic and employment costs. 
Taking responsibility for caring for one’s whanau contributing to community development and restoring the cultural strength of a people should not mean that Maori have to put up with inadequate lighting ventilation provisions for disposing of wastewater hot and cold water supply and wall and floor lining dampness and so on. 
We cannot leave the Building Amendment Bill without also making some reference to the traumatic impact that adverse weather conditions have had on so many homes in rural areas where Maori are living. The bill introduces changes in consent requirements for culverts small dams plumbing and drainage work. We believe that it is very important to explore the implications of those changes given all of the recent flooding disasters that have confronted Aotearoa. We know that disasters will be more likely to occur with greater regularity as we experience more and more impacts of global warming. We have seen some of the warning signs about people potentially being forced to leave areas that have been caught out by flooding—much like the forced evacuation of areas that Work and Income has instigated with its creation of “limited employment locations”. 
We have raised issues in this House about the concerns tangata whenua have and their desire to seek to continue to live where they want to live—around our marae our rivers our mountains and our lands despite the suggestion from the Minister of Local Government that they be relocated. We hope the Building Amendment Bill will consider options to ensure that building consent processes certification and building practitioners are all committed to acting against systemic failure across all levels of building failure today and tomorrow. Kia ora tatou.