Shaw James: Weathertight Homes Resolution Services Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeShaw James: Weathertight Homes Resolution Services Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 10 March 2015. Volume:703;Page:2070. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAMES SHAW (Green): I rise in support of the Weathertight Homes Resolution Services Amendment Bill. I would just like to start by noting that this is a bill to finish the clean-up of a problem that started half my life ago with due respect to those who were involved in that at the time. We all know people who have been heavily affected by this. In my electorate in Wellington Central there are both individual houses and also apartment buildings where people have lost almost the entire value of their house and where they have had to negotiate with all of the other apartment owners in their apartment buildings to get those fixed and it is a colossal problem.The PricewaterhouseCoopers report that Paul Foster-Bell referred to earlier mentioned that the cost to New Zealand is about $12.4 billion. I just want to compare that with the cost of the Christchurch rebuild which is about $40 billion. So the cost of repairing after an earthquake that levelled our second-largest city was only four times the size of the cost of this problem and this was an entirely human-made problem. It was made by people in this Chamber. It was a Government-created problem so I am pleased that the Government is cleaning up the mess that it created in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I would like to note that the Greens were not present at the time and perhaps if we had been we might have been able to do something about it.This is a problem of market failure and of relying too much on the market to sort out these kinds of things. I want to say that in spite of this failure it seems to me that we are on the verge of creating another generation of poor housing. There are three basic things that we need to do to create good housing. One is the orientation of the building—does it face the sun; does it optimise the sun? Two is insulation—is it dry and is it weathertight? Three is ventilation—in other words can air move through the house and stop it from going mouldy? These are not hard problems to solve but with the current round of Resource Management Act reforms that the Government is looking at it is just going to make it easier for developers to continue to ignore these basic rules. Why? Because it is cheaper and easier for a developer to go on to a site and to create a building that ignores those three basic rules of orientation insulation and ventilation and to pass the cost of those on to the occupiers of that building whether it is an individual house or an apartment building.That is something that we are in danger of going through again despite the fact that we are now nearly 25 years after the original legislation that created this problem about to introduce another round of legislation that it seems to me will do something quite similar. The Greens fully support the idea that the victims of this crisis be given the financial support that they need to be able to get themselves out of the situation they have found themselves in from this entirely human-created problem. The Greens as my colleague Kevin Hague said earlier believe that we have not gone far enough. We need to look at the whole body of legislation and regulation in relation to the housing sector and also at the role that Government has played in the past and can play again in the future. It would be very easy for us to create a new generation of houses that generate more energy than they consume because they have got solar panels on the roof; that are warm dry and healthy; and that use the scale that Government purchasing can provide to drive down costs across the whole sector. So we really believe in an active approach and we are disappointed that Government after Government just refuses to step up to the plate.In the meantime we do fully support this bill and we commend it to the House.