If the Government is to be commended for finally coming up with a proposal over the long-running leaky homes saga, there will be those puzzled by or resentful of its logic.
Even those directly affected - that is to say those unfortunate owners of leak- and rot-ridden buildings - may be in two minds as to the value of the arrangements, for what the Government gives with the one hand, it appears to take away with the other.
It is proposed the Government will meet 25% of the cost of repairing or rebuilding affected homes, local councils will meet a further 25% and the owner will bear the cost of the residual 50%, with the Government underwriting loan guarantees to appropriate borrowers.
There will be a 10-year liability age limit; and, importantly, in return for the Government and council contributions, the applicant would forfeit any future right to sue.
The problem for many homeowners, faced with ruinously leaking homes, is that the developers, builders and designers responsible melted away into the ether of bankruptcy, or sheltered behind the complexities and expense of long-running suits.
These owners purchased properties built to the requisite standards required by the law of the land, and signed off by local council inspectors, in good faith.
From whom might they now seek legal recompense? The problem for local councils was that, having supplied and charged for building consents, cases could be, and have been, made against them on negligence grounds - with subsequent costs inevitably to be levelled against future rates.
And the issue for central Government was a question of its culpability for the relaxing of building industry standards which it had allowed in the early and mid-1990s and, despite ample and repeated warnings in the late '90s and early 2000s, failed adequately to address.
Although court cases to date absolve the Government of any technical liability, there was, and remains, a difficulty in denying moral responsibility.
Furthermore, with the last government refusing to budge from a 10% contribution level, this debilitating economic and political problem was only getting worse.
Many homeowners facing ruinous costs are unimpressed by the latest plan. Some might still prefer to seek full legal redress.
Many ratepayers, and taxpayers, will view the latter as the appropriate course: why should they help fund a remedy to essentially private property transactions, many of which may have been entered into for purely commercial reasons? (Although the costs to ratepayers of councils defending claims cannot be ignored either).
Building and Construction Minister Maurice Williamson, in promoting the new plan earlier this week to address what has been estimated to be an $11.3 billion problem, said the New Zealand leaky homes fiasco was akin to a "natural disaster of huge proportions".
It was having a negative effect on the health and wealth of many New Zealanders. The same, of course, might be said of the recent great finance company reverses.
There are considerable differences between natural and man-made disasters - the latter arguably foreseeable and thus preventable.
When the building legislation was amended in the early '90s in line with a general push to ameliorate compliance costs and diminish bureaucracy, problematic short cuts might have been predicted.
When, subsequently, large numbers of builders, particularly in the North Island, moved from the traditional weatherboard and brick constructions to the more Mediterranean-like "monolithic cladding" styles, with their reduced eaves and ineffective flashings, the new regulatory regime was found wanting; likewise, history now tells us, when kiln-dried timber - pushed by the large timber merchants - was touted as a cheaper and more environmentally sound substitute for the boron-treated standard, following further regulation changes in 1995.
It proved much more susceptible to rot. In all this, industry bodies - the Building Industry Authority, for example - had a part to play, but so did the politicians, including the forerunners of the present Government.
As much as every one hates a seemingly officious building inspector, the laissez faire regulations of the 1990s proved a disaster for the country's leak-proof housing stock. Whether today's tax and ratepayers should be sharing the burden, however, is quite another matter. The case for that is less than watertight.
