Simpson ScottHon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. It's been an interesting debate and I want to thank members from across the House for their contributions—well most of them. This is as I said in my introduction to the bill a small bill. It's a very small change to an old principal Act that dates back to 1979. No one least of all me would pretend that it is anything remotely close to being a silver bullet in terms of solving the litter issues that confront our nation but it is a step in the right direction. So I commend members of the Green Party and the Labour Party for supporting it through to select committee and I'm sure that when we get to select committee we'll have a good discussion.I was particularly heartened by the contribution of the Hon Nanaia Mahuta who indicated that in fact select committee could be a place for a wider discussion about litter and litter issues. That's a good thing. I'm very happy for that discussion to take place. But what did disappoint me was the contribution from the select committee chair. She's new to this House. Deborah Russell has potential I think as an MP but she will soon realise that sarcasm in a speech of the sort that she gave tonight is a very poor substitute for substance. If she is to make progress in a parliamentary career in this House then she would do well to have a little look at the legislation consider it carefully and not revert to mere sarcasm as a way of debating in the Chamber—or indeed actually leading the select committee.Labour have come late to this discussion on litter and they're making up for lost time. What we didn't hear in the debate was a commitment at all from the lead party in the coalition Government about their commitment to reducing litter. We heard talk about waste minimisation and that's fine. No one would object to waste minimisation proposals. In fact the previous National Government made great strides did more than any Government in the history of New Zealand in terms of providing for our natural resources and our natural spaces. So that's a very proud record.But Labour come to this debate about litter particularly late and they're in catch-up mode. There was an obscure member whose name I don't remember but I think he came from Hamilton somewhere and he clearly has much to learn. My colleagues at some stage will probably tell me what his name was but he needs to go back to Hamilton where he comes from. He spoke a lot about Christchurch and for someone who comes from Hamilton that struck me as very very strange. Angie Warren-Clark gave a much better contribution and what Angie Warren-Clark may not know is that immediately prior to me coming to this House I was chief executive of a children's charity—Make-A-Wish—and we also ran shops of the sort that she described. So I'm very familiar with the situation and very au fait with it. Certainly on the Labour side of the House they don't have any monopoly on that kind of background or history.So this is a small bill. It's a bill that will be discussed in detail by the select committee. I'm looking forward to submissions from around the country. I hope that local government will take the opportunity to submit because there are a range of levels of enforcement for litter. Many local territorial authorities have their own regimes their own structures their own ways of dealing with litter but in my part of the world in the Coromandel and the Western Bay of Plenty it is an issue as it is in many other parts of the country.This bill is a good bill. It's not a silver bullet but it's a step in the right direction. It's a bill that will I think help send a message—a message to New Zealanders that this Parliament takes litter seriously and that we have a real challenge in terms of changing our cultural approach as New Zealanders to litter and actually just not dropping litter. So I want to conclude my contribution on the first reading by just going back to my original call to support this legislation: to remember those slogans that we knew when we were growing up in the 1970s and 1980s of doing the right thing being a tidy Kiwi and that only lazy people litter. I'm very happy that this bill appears to have enough support to go to the select committee and I endorse it to the House.