Government launches plasterboard taskforce to investigate shortages

Tuesday, 21 June 2022

A ministerial taskforce will troubleshoot the regulation of alternative plasterboard products, including whether legislative change is needed.

The Government will establish a ministerial taskforce of industry experts to investigate plasterboard shortages, Building and Construction Minister Megan Woods says.

The taskforce will look for solutions to the current plasterboard supply crisis, including, potentially, legislative or regulatory change.

Woods said the taskforce’s aim was to increase productivity in the plasterboard manufacturing sector as quickly as possible.

“My top priority is to ensure builders, from big companies to single tradies, have the materials they need to do their job with confidence,” Woods said.

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Members of the six-person taskforce include key players from the construction and supply industry and The Warehouse founder, Sir Stephen Tindall.

The taskforce will troubleshoot the regulation of alternative plasterboard products, including whether legislative change is needed.

Woods said the group would be looking for “quick wins” – longer-term issues would be dealt with as part of the market study undertaken by the Commerce Commission.

It will also look at how to streamline bringing new products into New Zealand, and explore new distribution models.

Woods also wrote a letter to Fletcher Building, which asked them to reconsider its trademark of certain plasterboard colours, which has been said to be halting supply. Woods said it had undertaken not to enforce its trademark on certain colours of Gib until at least May 2023.

She said 28 containers of plasterboard on their way to New Zealand would help supply but might take two or three months to arrive.

Woods said it would be important that alternative products were certified so that people knew that they were safe.

Fletcher Building subsidiary Winstone Wallboards supplies 95% of plasterboard to the New Zealand market.

But the Government has signalled it is unhappy with the way the company has allowed a supply crisis in the key building material to occur.

A spokesperson for Fletcher Building said it sympathised with the difficulties customers were facing and remained focused on getting plasterboard to customers as fast as possible.

Last month, Fletcher Building asked builders across Aotearoa not to order Gib plasterboard until their site was ready for it to be installed, to ensure orders could be fulfilled where needed amid the national building materials shortage.

Also included on the taskforce was Simplicity Living managing director Shane Brealey, who earlier said it was “crazy” New Zealand builders did not have access to a crucial, and domestically produced building product.

“How is it that we have concrete, framing, doors, windows, roofing, hardware and everything else required - but we have a problem with the simplest of products - Gib board?”

In what is likely to be interpreted as a sign of the level of government frustration over the Gib crisis, Woods has included maverick competition campaigner and 2degrees founder Tex Edwards on the taskforce team.

During his campaign to reform the telecommunications market, Edwards lodged a “deposit” with the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment for 4G radio spectrum in the form of bread and sim cards.

He later amused and confounded fellow executives, and regulators, by including his grandmother's chocolate chip recipe in a submission to the Commerce Commission.

Last year, Edwards lobbied for supermarket groups Countdown and Foodstuffs to be forced to sell off more than 100 of their large stores.

Edwards said the Gib taskforce would require professional processes and procedures and that crises required creative thinking

He said earlier on Tuesday, prior to the Government's statement, that he believed Fletcher Building should be forced to sell its Placemakers retail business and split off its Gib board business.

He also called for building standards research body the Building Research Association to be 'abandoned' and replaced by a new organisation.

Edwards said 'all eyes' would be on the Commerce Commission's draft market study report into the building supplies industry which is due to be published late next month.

National Party building and construction spokesperson Andrew Bayly said the Government had been slow to address the Gib crisis.

He said a taskforce was not a necessary step and the Government should instead move straight to putting measures in place to ease the supply problems.

Bayly is proposing a law change that would let builders use imported plasterboard that conforms to 'Australasian standards' and that would prevent future building consents from specifying that any particular branded product, such as Gib, be used.