Drowning in a leaky wonderland

KENT BLECHYNDEN/The Dominion Post

A PROBLEM THAT WON'T GO AWAY: Campaigner John Gray says leaky homes are treated as though they are New Zealand's dirty little secret.

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OPINION: Promises come and go but the suffering caused by leaky homes continues. North Shore City Mayor Andrew Williams urges the Government to do the right thing.

As the country moves  towards Christmas and the  shopping malls load Jingle  Bells into their sound  systems, about 44,000 Kiwi  families prepare for another festive season camped in their  rotting, toxic homes fearful of what  another year may bring, and wondering why their Government has  abandoned them to their fate.

The weeping sore of the leaky homes disaster that has caused misery to so many hard-working families throughout the country is now too hot for the Government to handle.

Despite all manner of soothing promises before the election, the reality of an $11 billion repair bill and advice that doing the right thing by these people may affect the country's credit rating signals the end of half- hearted attempts to reach a workable solution.

In a sad and worrying irony, the Government's tough and unbending take-it-or-leave-it stance on its derisory offer to local councils and owners of leaky homes of a $37 million a year rescue package came around the same time as legislation was being rammed through Parliament under urgency that the Treasury says will rack up a $110 billion debt to give big polluters a free pass on their carbon emissions.

It would seem that suffering families are easily trumped by corporate heavyweights, many of whom made millions from selling the very building products and systems used in the very leaky homes the Government is now washing its hands of, and are strangely silent on their own contribution to the rescue package.

Hope for leaky-homes owners was rekindled this year when Building and Construction Minister Maurice Williamson called the mayors of the six cities most affected by the disaster to a meeting in his Beehive office to sketch out a possible rescue plan. This was later revealed to be the infamous 64-26-10 deal, whereby the homeowners would sign away their legal rights in return for a 64 per cent contribution from themselves, 26 per cent from local councils and 10 per cent from the Government, toward fixing their decaying homes.

Unsurprisingly, the homeowners rejected the deal, with long-time leaky homes campaigner John Gray saying the deal was bitterly disappointing, would not solve anything and treated the victims as the country's dirty little secret.

It is not rocket science to work out the Government would make a profit on the deal, raking in more from GST on the building materials and services, and labour payroll taxes necessary to fix these homes, than it was prepared to put in.

In July last year, as Opposition building and construction spokesman, Nick Smith told Parliament that an Otago University report estimated more than $474 million would be spent on health costs associated with leaky homes.

Adding insult to injury, it is now revealed that settlements out of the Government's much-lauded faster and cheaper Weather-tight Homes Tribunal are short-changing victims by hundreds of thousands of dollars, forcing them to head off to the High Court and spend even more money they do not have on lawyers and experts, and adding years of anguish to the process.

Councils are comfortable with their 26 per cent contribution, which roughly aligns with their liability under agreed settlements. North Shore City Council resolved last month, reiterating its position, that central government needed to make a significant contribution to the resolution of weather-tightness issues at a level that was at least equal to the contribution from local government, and to work to progress this matter with central government.

It may not be legally liable in the strictest sense, but the moral responsibility on central government to come up with a genuine rescue package is overwhelming.

So we are now in a stalemate. The homes are still rotting. The councils are still willing. But the prime minister seems reluctant to meet mayors to thrash out a meaningful deal to allow leaky home owners to repair their homes and their shattered lives.

Perhaps he missed his own former associate building and construction spokesman, Bob Clarkson, when he revealed on Newstalk ZB a few weeks ago that National in opposition had a policy which bound the Government to meeting 25 per cent of the repair costs for leaky homes, matching the council contribution dollar for dollar, and offering owners 10-year interest-free loans to make up the balance.

So what went wrong? For a decade, an army of Wellington bureaucrats in an alphabet soup of agencies have spent thousands of hours and millions of dollars advising successive governments to regulate, then deregulate, then re-regulate or set up this inquiry or the next, or set up this resolution service or that tribunal. We cannot be certain what they are now telling ministers as they refuse to release the papers, but insiders suggest it is an all-care-and- no-responsibility approach, and not so heavy on the care.

I guess they can get away with such an approach as they do not have to stand for election.

But the Government does. Currently riding high in the polls, it can afford to cut leaky-homes victims adrift and wear the backlash by playing the grinch. But as rough- and-tumble former Australian treasurer and prime minister Paul Keating once said, government is not just about doing what is popular, it is also about doing what is right.

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