Herald commentator Brian Rudman has come out in heavy support of Mayor Andrew William’s stance on the leaky home scandal.
Mr Rudman said Mr Williams reaction to the Government 10% “take or leave it” offer “derisory” – and he’s dead right.
“Mayor Williams says the [Mayoral Forum] talks broke down after he said the miserly 10 per cent of repair costs the Government was offering to contribute – was less than the 12.5 per cent it would get back in goods and services tax.”
“The Building Act 1991, passed during the Jim Bolger-led National government, was naively based on the premise that developers could be trusted not to cut corners. The government is also responsible for the failings of the inept Commerce Act, which allows shonky builders to slide out of their responsibilities when things turn nasty,” Mr Rudman said.
“In March last year, National’s assistant building spokesman, Bob “The Builder” Clarkson, stood up in Parliament and summed the situation up clearly: “The main cause of the problem was the Department of Housing and Building telling builders what to do, which turned out to be wrong. How can we blame tradesman carpenters for using kiln-dried timber, overlaid with Harditex cladding that had a moisture leakage of 7 per cent, when the department said it was OK to do it that way?”
Seven weeks ago, Mr Clarkson told the Bay of Plenty Times that government must accept its share of blame.
He said 40 per cent of the problem could be blamed on poor workmanship, but 60 per cent of the responsibility lay with the government’s Building Industry Authority, which set the building controls.
He said: “The use of kiln-dried timber, which soaked up water, and windows installed without sill trays or flashings – approved by BIA – created the problem.”
Builders could nail the exterior cladding to the untreated timber studs, and “when the moisture migrates though the cladding and hits the kiln-dried timber, you are in deep trouble”.
He says that before he retired from Parliament last year, he left a proposal in which the government and councils paid 25 per cent of the cost of leaky home repairs.
Homeowners would qualify for a 10-year interest free, government-backed loan for the remaining 50 per cent of costs.
The Clarkson formula is different to the local government-advanced proposal in that it halves the government responsibility, but at least it fronts up to the fact that central government was wrong to introduce the lax building standards of the early 1990s.
Auckland Mayor John Banks is perfectly placed to make this point as a negotiator.
He was a member of the National Cabinet that introduced the flawed Building Act. And he is also a victim of its flaws. A year or so ago, he had to pay $1 million for repairs to the leaky home he then owned in exclusive Paritai Drive.
Fortunately, he was wealthy enough to cope with this financial bombshell. Many of the other 80,000 victims of this national disaster are not.
Mr Williams says he spoke to Mr Key on Friday, and claims the Government has now backed away from its miserly 10 per cent offer.
If upsetting Maurice Williamson over the phone achieved this breakthrough, then congratulations are due to the North Shore mayor.
