Leary IngridINGRID LEARY (Labour—Taieri): Thank you Madam Speaker. The Christchurch earthquakes touched everyone in New Zealand I think. On 22 February 2011 Dr Dominic Bell father of three 45-year-old larger-than-life character who happened to be my brother's best man at his wedding went into the CTV Building to his surgery there and never came out alive. A few years later I was shooting a documentary in Christchurch and I was just noticing the devastation at the red zone and the higgledy-piggledy roads the paint on the roads that still went everywhere and to me they were a visual metaphor of how people's lives had changed and become higgledy-piggledy. Certainly after that second earthquake I knew a couple of sisters who were very close. They wanted to get out of Christchurch. They threw a dart and they moved to the city where the dart landed. They had a little boy with them who stayed at the noho marae with my children. A happy little boy during the day; at night time we could hearing him crying thinking another earthquake would strike. He actually went on to become a very good scholar and athlete. He was resilient but others weren't so lucky and really that trauma was incredible.On top of the trauma of the quakes came the trauma of the insurance claims. We've heard various numbers in this House—half a million; I think 700000 was mentioned by the Hon Gerry Brownlee last night; I've seen between those numbers in media—and it just shows actually the complexity that the earthquakes caused which speaks to what this bill is trying to help to resolve.And then of course after that came the royal commission and Dame Silvia Cartwright's work. Amongst the almost 1000 submissions there were some positive submissions from people who were deemed vulnerable; they got their claims dealt with quickly and they were lucky. But there were many many others as we've heard who spoke of the lack of operating procedures; poor communication; the repeating of details of their case over and over to different people which was re-traumatising; and the delays in getting things resolved. One person in their submission said The earthquake didn't break me. EQC almost did".So there were high stress levels reports of suicidal feelings and post-traumatic stress—the effects of living in quake-damaged homes for months or as we've heard from Nicola Grigg even for years and ongoing injuries that happened. There was one claimant who said that they had experienced asthma for the first time in their life by living in a damaged home; another one who sustained a serious injury from slipping on cracked floor slabs.The inquiry heard about the pressure on assessments of quantity over quality that assessors sometimes had to assess up to five dwellings per day and people admitting that they had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers and sometimes given up trying to get the claims that they were entitled to because they had given up the battle with the Earthquake Commission (EQC).So what this bill does is it tries to change all of that and really this is about changing the culture of claimants and putting claimants back at the centre rather than the process which was so damaging to so many people. It simplifies and clarifies the Earthquake Commission Act. And as we've heard it incorporates many of the recommendations that Dame Silvia Cartwright made.There are three main streams of work: it's the claims management; the fund management; and the education research and information that goes with that process and also keeping that up to date as things move on as the country experiences climate change and the different types of disaster and the different challenges that they present.We can see a significant change in the title. EQC has become Toka Tū Ake—or the Natural Hazards Commission. So it covers not just earthquakes now but volcanoes tsunamis landslips geothermal events also fire as a result of any of these and land damage caused by flood or storms. We've heard some discussion tonight about the need to have more thinking done around flooding in particular and I'm very interested in this as the MP for Taieri having seen people in my electorate traumatised by the floods of 2015. So I look forward to a public conversation where we can look at climate change adaptation and social insurance for flooding as we move into the new climate-adaptive future.What the bill does is it has clarified mixed and multi-use buildings; it clarifies the regulations around landslips—it simplifies calculation the excesses and certain structures around that—and very importantly it introduces a standing dispute resolution service.I'd like to just focus on the claims management because what it does do is codify the commission's participation in a code of conduct and dispute resolution process which is something that was clearly needed after the Christchurch quakes. It codifies a process for independent reviews of unresolved complaints. And it also extends delegation of claims to private insurers and that's about speeding up the process for claimants because as Nicola Grigg has said 11 years on there are still people churning through the system.So I'd like to commend Minister David Clark who comes from the best part of the country—Dunedin and South Otago; just a little Facebook joke we've got going on—for his work on bringing the Cartwright recommendations to life.This bill it won't bring Dr Dominic Bell back to life and it won't bring back lost time or undo the stress for those who had to deal with the EQC after the Christchurch quakes but I do hope that it brings reassurance to them that others won't experience the same thing. Therefore I look forward to hearing the submissions at the Finance and Expenditure Committee and I strongly commend the bill to the House."