Mackey Moana: Building Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third Reading 
Mackey Moana: Building Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third Reading 
[Volume:655;Page:5132] 
MOANA MACKEY (Labour) 
: 
 I intend to take a short call on this legislation. Labour is happy to support the third reading of the Building Amendment Bill (No 2). This bill was drafted by the previous Government and was picked up by this Government. It is always good when we can get consensus between the two main parties on issues as important as these. In that respect we also wish the Government well with the work being done on further reforms in this area. 
Hon Lianne Dalziel 
: It is building consensus. 
MOANA MACKEY 
: That is a nice little late Thursday afternoon quip. I think we have all been here too long. 
This is never an easy area in which to change regulations or legislation simply because we never really know what the impact will be until it is enacted until the rubber hits the road and we see what the consequences of the changes will be. In this country we have seen the pendulum swing wildly in this area from complete deregulation—which caused a number of problems—to the changes that were implemented after that. The previous Government acknowledged that the changes went too far: that they put far too much compliance on the building sector. For that reason and because it recognised that the legislation had gone a bit too far it drafted this legislation and made the reforms. 
It is important to say that the legislation was written in response to the leaky homes crisis and a number of New Zealanders were calling out for far more regulation in this area. I certainly hope that this legislation proves to be a good balance between the need for quality homes to be built and the need not to put too much cost on to those who are building homes particularly with the housing affordability issues we have in this country. 
As the Minister has stated the bill aims to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the building consent process whilst ensuring that quality homes and buildings are being constructed. It extends the functions and powers of the Department of Building and Housing. It will allow the department to issue national multiple-use approvals for dwellings and buildings that are replicated on a substantial scale. This is an important point and it will make a large difference. As we know 40 percent of all new homes built in New Zealand are built by volume builders. So if we manage to get this right and I hope that we have—and I join the Minister in congratulating the Local Government and Environment Committee on the work it has done—it will make a significant difference to the level of compliance in this area. If we get this right I think that we can achieve enormous efficiency. I was the former chair of the Local Government and Environment Committee. It is now under the careful stewardship of Chris Auchinvole who was one of my little grasshoppers on that committee in the last Parliament. I feel very proud of him and I am sure that he has taken every care to ensure that the legislation will stand the test of time. 
The legislation also reduces the statutory time frame for processing a building consent application from 20 working days to 10 working days where the application uses the national multiple-use approval. That will be an efficiency that the building sector will be very grateful for. The bill differentiates between major and minor variations to consented building work to support best practice in managing amendments to building consents. It makes it voluntary for an owner to obtain a project information memorandum from a building consent authority that is a territorial authority. 
I know that during the select committee process the Historic Places Trust in particular was a little bit concerned about the move to make project information memoranda voluntary. It is important to say that its use has not been adequate even though the idea was very good which is why it was supported in the first place. Project information memoranda were meant to be a one-stop shop for all the information relating to building work that required consent. It was envisaged that they would save time and money—that is why they were put in—but only a minority of them were applied for prior to the building consent which undermined the entire point of having them. It did impose a cost on the owner or the developer. The benefit of them was not being realised by the advance warning process so it seemed sensible to move along the path that the select committee recommended. Even though we acknowledged the concerns of the submitters who were opposed to this move on balance we have to acknowledge that it was the right thing for the committee to do. 
I will finish by saying that this is an important move in terms of addressing the issue of affordable housing but it will not be a silver bullet. Any reduction we can make to the cost of homes is important so that New Zealanders can afford to purchase their own homes. We hope there can be an accrual effect with a number of different changes adding up to a significant difference. However I believe that we need see more movement in the area of affordable housing. 
I think a lot of people expected that during the course of this recession housing would become more affordable and there would be a natural correction to the housing bubble that was created in the past few years. In fact that has not been the case. What we have seen across most of the country is that housing prices have not dropped significantly and certainly not as much as people thought they would. Interest rates have dropped but at the same time more people are unemployed. Fewer people are getting pay increases or even cost of living increases so that their pay is keeping pace with the cost of living. 
Darien Fenton 
: Pay cuts! 
MOANA MACKEY 
: People are getting pay cuts. So the ability of people to save for a deposit and to purchase their own home is dropping and it is doing so faster than the interest rate cuts which are not being passed on in full so that homeowners can see the benefits of those cuts in their bank balance. 
I implore the Government to please show some leadership on the issue of affordable housing. This bill is good. Every little bit is good. But what we have also seen and it was indicated in the Budget is a number of cuts across areas like Welcome Home Loans and the shared equity scheme. It was an underspend. They were cut simply because those mechanisms were not deemed to be necessarily appropriate for the time even though the number of applications for Welcome Home Loans has increased in recent months. In the area of affordable housing we need constantly to be looking at what the best mechanism is to assist people into their first homes. Labour and National had a similar policy at the election which looked at using Government-owned land to get people into their first homes. The only difference between our two policies was that in Labour’s policy the Government retained ownership of the land so that the house was affordable in perpetuity—it would always be affordable because when it was sold on only the cost of the house was sold—whereas National’s policy was to have the homeowner buy the land after 5 years. Apart from that the policies were very similar. National’s policy did not get funding in this year’s Budget and I was disappointed with that because I believe that it would have been an important tool particularly to help New Zealanders to get into their first homes. 
I reiterate that we will be supporting this bill. We think that the select committee did a really good job. We certainly hope that the legislation strikes the balance that this Parliament has been striving to strike for a long time but we do need to see more action from the Government on affordable housing.