Genter Julie AnneJULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): The Green Party will be supporting these bills to select committee. We have had a look at them; of course we received some of the legislation only at the very last moment yesterday so it has been difficult for us to delve into all of the implications of the minor technical changes. On the surface of it it looks like they are OK. I want to speak specifically to the Regulatory Systems (Building and Housing) Amendment Bill which makes changes to the Building Act. It fixes a number of cross-referencing errors and removes a redundant provision. There are over 40 changes to the Unit Titles Act 2010 ranging from fixing grammatical errors to updating body corporate operational rules. I suppose that this would be an area where we would say we have not had sufficient time and will be interested in the select committee process to ensure that the changes that are being made particularly to the Unit Titles Act are all in line with the Green Party's values. Obviously there are a number of challenges that exist particularly around urban development in Auckland. Although we are very supportive of providing more homes and more complete communities within the existing urban area in Auckland so that we have affordable housing access to jobs and good transport options—walking cycling and public transport—for communities we are somewhat limited in our ability to deliver that in part due to the current nature of development that is there. Some of the provisions in the Unit Titles Act make it very difficult for there to be the type of redevelopment that you would normally expect where land values are very high. That is something that we would like to have a bit more of a look at and we will have to see what the select committee process brings up particularly in the interaction between the Unit Titles Act and the Public Works Act. One other interesting proposal in this legislation which I am a bit disappointed about is the changes—this is in the Regulatory Systems (Commercial Matters) Amendment Bill—to the Construction Contracts Act. Many years ago now we had the meltdown of Mainzeal which led to a number of subcontractors being completely out of pocket unable to access their tools and unable to be compensated for work that they had already undertaken. It took ages for the Government to act on that. I remember sitting in select committee hearings about that in 2013. We heard from a whole range of subcontracting associations that were saying that they were being hard-done-by by primary contractors. So this was a very public issue and it was something that eventually in 2014 the Government announced that it was going to act on. Then finally we did have the construction contracts amendment bill come back to the House with some proposals that in fact were very similar to what the Green Party had proposed—what I had proposed as a Supplementary Order Paper—amending the Construction Contracts Act to provide protection for subcontractors to ensure that the money that had been set aside for work that they had done could not be used for other projects and other purposes so that if the main contractor was to go bankrupt their money would still be protected and they could be compensated for work that they had undertaken. That seemed only right and fair. The disappointing thing for me is that although we had the changes to the Construction Contracts Act—and that was a big win—the change proposed in this legislation is amending that legislation and is requiring retention money to be held in trust only from March 2017 which is several years after we amended the Act. Certainly main contractors should have known that this was coming and should have been protecting the money that they were paid for subcontractors in the first place—and finally that law was changed. The law was well-signalled. I think that it is unfortunate that this law is not going to be protecting contracts that are currently being undertaken that we are waiting until March 2017 to give that protection to subcontractors when they have already had to wait so many years to have that rightful protection of their money in law. So that is something that I am disappointed about in this proposed legislation. But on the whole it looks like there are a lot of minor changes that are mainly fixing cross-referencing errors grammatical errors and redundant provisions. And I suppose it does raise the question: why is it that our legislation is being passed in a form that has so many errors in it? Was there a time perhaps when this Government first came in that we were passing bills under urgency and we did not give them proper scrutiny and now we have to go back and fix all these minor problems? Perhaps we should be taking the time to pass legislation that is not full of grammatical errors and cross-referencing errors in the first place. That would be nice. That is something that I am sure the Green Party and other Opposition parties would like to see. Thank you.