Bayly AndrewANDREW BAYLY (National—Port Waikato): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's a pleasure to be speaking on this Natural Hazards Insurance Bill and first of all I just want to acknowledge the former Minister responsible for the Earthquake Commission Dr David Clark sitting on the other side there because obviously under his watch this bill progressed through the House and as a member of the Finance and Expenditure Committee he was very much involved in that process. I just want to acknowledge him because we did make some changes and in fact the Minister and the other members of the committee agreed with National on one of the particular aspects about delaying the implementation of this bill. So I think this is an example of a bill that shows bipartisan or actually cross-party support in the House and a select committee that worked proactively to achieve a good outcome. Time has actually shown even in the recent months since we finished talking about this bill in the select committee that this was a good piece of legislation to put through obviously with the cyclone and the floods over anniversary weekend. So obviously this increases the monetary threshold from $100000 to $300000 but the more important thing is—and this was the debate that we had at select committee—what should be a natural catastrophe? What should be the hazard that the cover should cover? Under the old rules the Earthquake Commission (EQC) arrangement for the $100000 was just restricted to land damage to residential land from storms and floods and it used some inane terminology. I'm just looking my notes here about how it described an earthquake—gee I don't know whether I can find this here. But it was just unbelievably overcomplicated terminology. So things like definition of a storm an earthquake—all those sorts of things. We actually tidied up the wording around that to make it much clearer but this bill extends the cover to a loss or damage from earthquakes volcanic eruptions—that was another one where we had to redefine it because they obviously had some scientific guru but I'd say another word who came up with some description that no one would understand—landslips hydrothermal activity tsunami and natural disasters. Widening that definition was very much part of it so that not only do you have a higher amount but you have a wider definition. We also extended the time period for an earthquake from 48 hours to a week so that was another important thing. The other bit and this is something we discussed quite significantly during the select committee stage which was the issue around—obviously you'd want a house covered in terms of residential property but often things like retaining walls aren't and are subject to a lot of issues. So we picked up some of the other structures that are not directly part of the house but are related to the house and that's also covered. So where we ended up: the big debate as I said at the beginning was around the implementation date. That got pushed out from 1 December 2023—so that's in a few months' time—to 1 July 2024. That really reflected what industry wanted and there's a practical dimension to that and why we did that.The other big part of this bill is having a dispute resolution clause because it's vital that things get settled in an appropriate way. Obviously we've seen what's happened during the Christchurch earthquakes and obviously what we're now about to observe with some of the claims that will be coming in. It is essential that there is a good dispute mechanism and an independent dispute mechanism in a clause that's built into the bill. The big thing of course is the extent of cover sitting inside the EQC—although it's been renamed now. But the equity of the entity is only about $250 million. They have reinsurance which is where they go offshore and get insurance of roughly about $7 billion but when you think about the scale of the natural disasters that have just happened recently and the quotes of $13 billion it shows that we need money in the account. The EQC generates about $500 million a year and we need to build those reserves up. But it's a good bill and we worked well on it. I think it's going to be a great outcome for New Zealand and New Zealanders especially having regard to what's happened recently.