Williamson Maurice: Weathertight Homes Resolution Services (Financial Assistance Package) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Williamson Maurice: Weathertight Homes Resolution Services (Financial Assistance Package) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:674;Page:19952] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (Minister for Building and Construction) 
: 
 I move  
That the Weathertight Homes Resolution Services (Financial Assistance Package) Amendment Bill be now read a third time 
. I have to say this is a very very exciting day for me as Minister for Building and Construction to be doing the third reading of this legislation because it is the culmination of a huge amount of work by officials and teams of people working with local bodies banks and a whole lot of others to get to finally a package that could be agreed on and that would allow people to get out of the traps they had been caught in having found themselves in a leaky home and unable to do anything about it. I will traverse some of the history of how the leaky homes syndrome came about as I give this speech but today I will pay tribute to some of the people who were involved. I say to David McLellan and to Adrian Regnault and to a number of other people in the Department of Building and Housing a very big thank you for the long hard work—difficult work at times—of getting to a resolution. 
Just quickly I will go through some history because I often hear the history of this thing misquoted. First of all I often hear people say it was the National Government that put the Building Amendment Bill through in 1991. Well it would be worthwhile getting on record that that bill was introduced to this Parliament by the Hon Margaret Austin a Labour Minister in the Labour Government of 1990 and it passed through every one of its phases until the election of 1990 was completed and then the National Government with the total support of Labour finished the third reading. I will make it clear that National was supportive of the legislation but it was not the National Government that put up that bill and moved to deregulate the industry. 
The second big myth—and I must say I actually believed this myth myself—was that it was politicians who had moved to allow untreated timber in the mid-1990s which is one of the key ingredients of the problem. But actually no politician was involved in the decision to go to untreated timber. It was a decision made by a subcommittee of Standards New Zealand. The proposal was put up by a number of the timber companies saying they did not need to keep treating timber. Interestingly if members were interested in reading the document they would find that the whole debate at the time was about borer. It is really interesting that no one raised the question about rotting timber if it got wet. The question was whether we needed to keep treating timber because borer no longer really existed in New Zealand. The standards committee decided that untreated timber would become acceptable under the Building Act and the building code and not a single politician was involved in the decision. What speaks quite loudly that it was not the Government or Ministers of any flavour that was involved is that every time someone has tried to join the Crown in litigation and blame the Crown for this dreadful dreadful fiasco the courts have thrown it out and said there was no responsibility on the part of the Crown. 
I want to make this clear to everybody in the House because this is something I have looked at for a long time: there is no one thing to blame here. This was a systemic failure across the entire industry. This was designers this was builders this was materials this was construction methods this was consenting this was inspections this was homeowners not doing relevant maintenance—this was a systemic failure. Monolithic cladding was used with no cavities in the building design and actually non-treated timber was a recipe for a disaster. 
Well when we came to Government in 2008 we came in at the same time as the global financial crisis. I have to say it was a really difficult ask to go to the Minister of Finance who was struggling based on what was going on right around the world with an economy the worst we have seen and say to him: “I’ve got a new expenditure item that’s bigger than just about anything you’ve ever seen on your books.” I have to say that the Hon Bill English sat down looked at it and said “Wow” and worked through it. The Prime Minister got involved and finally this Government decided that something had to be done unlike the previous Labour Government which had for 9 years said this was not its problem and it was not going to offer up a solution. And they are the facts: Helen Clark said she thought it was media beat-up—I have the quotes. We decided something had to be done and we began a process of trying to negotiate. The local authorities wanted a settlement of one-third one-third and one-third; the superannuitants wanted to have no money borrowed and have it all paid for by the Government. Over time we gradually got to the package we have today. 
The package sees the Crown paying 25 percent of the cost of the work required. The local authority if there was one involved—and in some cases there was no local authority involved—will pay a 25 percent share. Then there is an underlying loan which we call a loss-sharing arrangement with the banks—between the banks and the Government—which will be made to the homeowner to pay for the repairs. This is money that will be paid on receipt of work done and that is vitally important. We will not hand out large chunks of money to people who own a leaky home who could then take the money and run and sell the leaky home on to someone else so that the problem has not been fixed at all. This money will be paid on the actual receipt of the work done to fix the leaky homes. 
I have to say I found Mr Twyford’s view on this a little bit puzzling. When Labour for 9 years said it was not the Government’s right to be involved and would not be Mr Twyford then chose to attack me last week for saying the package does not include apartments. You know Labour would not have included anybody even those in single dwellings yet somehow he said that the National Government’s package would not include apartments. Well he was wrong. This package does allow apartment owners to make an application for financial assistance. The only difference between those in apartments and a single dwelling is that apartment owners have to get the agreement of their bodies corporate. But that is the same for apartment owners even if they want to do just a general renovation. If owners want to paint an apartment block or put new tiles throughout the common areas they have to get their body corporate’s agreement. We changed the Unit Titles Act and made it that owners did not have to get 100 percent approval for changes because one of the worst aspects of unit titles in recent times was that in a 100-unit apartment block just one absentee landlord who was a stand-out from a collective decision and said he or she was not signing was all that was needed to stop the other 99 owners from making progress. So last June we passed the Unit Titles Act which means that a 75 percent majority is enough. I make it clear today to anybody out there listening that if they are in an apartment block the block is entitled to make an application but it has to be agreed across the block. That is quite sensible. It would be nuts if units 3 17 and 29 were fixed and made not leaky any more but all the other units that joined on to them and had common walls were not fixed. Everybody has to be signed up and if such apartment dwellers do sign up they have just as much right to apply for the package—25 percent from the Crown and 25 percent from the local authority—as anybody else. 
The presenter the other night on the television programme called  
A Rotten Shame  
said: “I don’t know whether Maurice Williamson has ever looked into the eyes of a leaky home owner.” Well does he ever know how to get something wrong! I have spent the last 2½ years looking into the eyes of hundreds if not thousands of people with leaky homes and I know that that is one of the most ghastly blights on the landscape of this nation. Someone could not help but feel for people who through no fault of their own—they have done nothing wrong—have ended up with their biggest asset in life rotting before their eyes and have no way out of it. People cannot have any compassion in them if they say “Well it’s not for us to be involved. We’ve been found by the courts not to have a responsibility here.” So the Crown is stumping up with a billion dollars. It will probably be more than that because 75 percent of these homes are in Auckland—with 4 percent in Christchurch 4 percent in Tauranga and 9 percent in Wellington; I think those are the numbers—so it is mainly an Auckland-type problem. But it could be as much as a $22 billion issue based on what PricewaterhouseCoopers has said. 
I am proud of a Government a Prime Minister and a Minister of Finance who even in the toughest times economically have said that we cannot just let these people sit in a rotten home that is going nowhere. This package offers an absolute option. It is voluntary; it is not mandatory and nobody has to accept this package although I bet there will be a lot who do. If some people want to pursue the legal aspects and go through the litigation path they still can; it has not been closed off to them. But let me just tell them that I have seen so many cases of litigation when even if the claimants win they lose because their legal bills can often be more than the settlement they got. So I advise people to look at this carefully. I believe that this option that people can take from the Government is very fair and balanced. It is a very proud day for me to be in this House speaking on the financial assistance package for weathertight homes.