Removing barriers to overseas building products, one subclause at a time

BUILDING MINISTER CHRIS PENK IS surely mistaken (or misled) if he thinks he is going to see a quick remedy to high
building costs from his announcement, already signalled, that building products from overseas may now be used in New Zealand.

The problem, you see, is that regulations here around our approvals process make it prohibitively expensive to obtain official approval for any materials, local or imported, so that most would-be inexpensive imports just don't happen. (Why pay upwards of $250,000 to have your Euro-widget approved here, when it's already selling like hotcakes in your Euro markets.) 

So Penk's idea is that materials or systems already approved by the grey ones in similar jurisdictions and standards environments to ours (such as Australia, Canada, UK, US and Western Europe) can be cited in documentation to the grey ones here— and then, with some fingers crossed, be approved for use in buildings here without the otherwise burdensome cost of obtaining formal approval upfront.

Cheaper materials: cheaper houses.

Nice idea. Shame if a bureaucracy somewhere were to ruin it.

The programme will be run by MoBIE. 

I attended a webinar run by MoBIE dicks recently outlining how they intend to run it. They called it 'Removing Barriers to Overseas Building Products.' Try not to laugh as I relate their intentions.

First of all, they've started a committee. And several working groups. Large ones. Large enough, I imagine, to fill at least one floor. It will be these newly-appointed bureaucrats that will decide which standards/regulation of which similar jurisdictions will be considered for approval by these bureaucrats. And this will of course take some time. 

First of all, of course, they have to meet to define regulatory criteria. And to issue new acronyms (things like BPS, BPIR, 

This is how bureaucracies work.

The committee/working groups will then make recommendations to the CEO of MoBie which standards/regulations he may recognise. May. 

Following which, MoBIE's dicks will then publish a "Recognition Notice" detailing which standard/regulation has been recognised. Once a standard/regulation has been so recognised, it will then be added to something called Building Product Specifications — a "new regulatory instrument."

They hope ("always hoping, hope is vain") to issue their first "Recognition Notice" by year's end. That will be for one regulation/standard from one jurisdiction for one building material or system. For which the Notice will be once piece of "evidence of compliance with the New Zealand Building Code."

Still, once that Notice is published, building importers may then decide to bring in a building material or system; builders and building designers may offer the imported product in plans and specifications based on it being "Recognised" as evidence it complies

Did you follow all that?

Note the process here: it's MoBIE who decides to decide. Not builders, not building designers, not building materials scientists or building materials importers — all of whom have a large interest in the process — and nor is it the building minister. No. It's MoBIE's dicks who decide to initiate the process,  and it's they who will grind slowly through all the world's standards, regulations, codes, guidelines, approval systems, benchmarks and norms, deciding which of them they might like to spend time taking through their process and (eventually) recognise.

So we can see how this is good for bureaucrats employed within MoBIE.