Weathertight Homes Resolution Services (Remedies) Ammendment Bill
Incommittee, Speaker Recalled
Hansards Direct Link: Click Here
NATHAN GUY (National) : Following on from Katrina Shanks’ very, very good and informative address on clause 3, I was thinking about her mentioning the people sitting in traffic jams in Auckland. I was also thinking about the building inspectors who occasionally work in Wellington, trying to get to the Kapiti coast, where I live, but who are snarled up in traffic as we speak. Those building inspectors, who have been listening to their radios in their cars this afternoon, will be having a quiet wee smirk at the Government over the shonky process we have seen in the Chamber in the last day and a half.
Nick Smith has done extremely well to expose that here this afternoon. Those building inspectors will be thinking that this is the third attempt to change the Building Act. They are sick of heading off to conferences and seminars. They are sick of having to carry around all this bureaucracy and these large documents. They just get au fait with something, and then the Labour Government brings in yet another change. So what do they have to do? They have to get in their cars and head off to another seminar down in Wellington, and then turn round at 5 to 6 in the evening and get in the terrible traffic jam and head back out to the Kapiti coast.
This legislation is a shambles. We have exposed the fact that the Government wanted to dismantle the 402 Standing Orders yesterday, and Nick Smith and his team of Katrina Shanks, Phil Heatley, and Bob Clarkson have done extremely well in exposing the Government. What we need to be aware of is that in 2002—and I am speaking to clause 3—when the Building Act was amended by the Weathertight Homes Resolution Services Act, it was meant to provide homeowners with a speedier, more flexible, and cost-effective alternative to the courts. Well, I want to tell all those building inspectors who are quietly smirking in their cars as they listen to their radios that since 2002, when that Act was passed, only 16 percent of those cases have been concluded. So 84 percent of people