Roche DeniseDENISE ROCHE (Green): E Te Māngai o Te Whare tēnā koe ki a koutou huri noa i Te Whare tēnā koutou katoa ngā mihi o Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori ki a tātou katoa. Ka tū au mō ngā Kākāriki ki te kōrero i te pānuitanga tuatahi o tēnei te pire te Fire and Emergency New Zealand Bill.[Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker and acknowledgments to you collectively throughout the House and salutations of the Māori Language Week to us all. I stand on behalf of the Green Party to speak in the first reading of this bill the Fire and Emergency New Zealand Bill.]The Greens will be supporting this bill. There are some things in the bill that we are a little bit cautious about. However we are really quite keen to hear the submissions during the select committee stage and we look forward to the discussion around the intricacies because I think we do have to acknowledge that it is a fairly complex bill. One of the major things that this bill does is that it brings together many of the different organisations that currently deal with fire services in Aotearoa into one Crown entity. Currently there are the New Zealand Fire Service and the National Rural Fire Authority and 52 separate rural fire authorities. Within this there are more than 400 volunteer fire brigades around the country and around 13000 volunteers who comprise about 80 percent of the workforce. I just want to take this moment to express my gratitude to these volunteers who provide this essential service. In my own community on Waiheke Island we have got two volunteer brigades—we have got the Oneroa one and the Onetangi one—and both of them are staffed by skilled trained volunteers. Over the summer the Onetangi brigade was actually called out to our place when a passer-by noticed smoke coming from the back of one of our houses. Although we lost a bit of equipment the quick response from our volunteer brigade essentially saved our house. That fire was the result of a bottle lying in the grass over the summer so it was a good reminder that we should actually mow the grass. I just want to record here my thanks to the committed men and woman who have devoted years—years—of their lives to this work. They are the people who come when they are called any time of the day or night. They leave their homes and their jobs and they respond to the emergencies in our communities. Those emergencies of course include car crashes house fires bushfires and civil emergencies as we saw during the Christchurch earthquakes. No doubt my colleague Eugenie Sage will touch on that more.I particularly want to note for the record and in Hansard my thanks to Ron Leonard the fire chief on Waiheke Island who retired in May after 29 years as the fire chief and a total of 48 years as a volunteer firefighter. I want to congratulate his deputy Bruce Sciascia who has taken on the fire chief role. Again he is not inexperienced—he has been a volunteer for 20 years. I just think we need to recognise that we have these amazing people who continue year after year to provide a service for free. Anyway this bill has been a long time coming as others have said. There have been two reviews one in 2012 and another in 2015 and this bill acts on many of the recommendations from those reviews. I want to acknowledge that the process around the reviews was very inclusive and there was quite a large number of submissions. Under this bill there is the new Crown entity Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) where all fire services in New Zealand—rural urban volunteer professional—will come under that one overarching piece of legislation. So it replaces two pieces of legislation: the Fire Service Act 1975 and the Forest and Rural Fires Act 1977.It is hoped that it will lead to more consistency across the service and hopefully better coordination between the urban and rural fire services. This lack of consistency was kind of referred to in the regulatory impact statement (RIS) which said basically that because there are so many of them there was a lack of data. It said For example there is no single national incident reporting data for the fire services" which means that "a lot of specific information of the work undertaken in the rural fire sector is unknown." including around the use of cost recovery under section 43 of the Forest and Rural Fires Act. It also said: "Further each of the … Rural Fire Authorities would have to collect data in a way that could be shared in order to effectively analyse the activities of all of them." The RIS does say that it expects that the reforms in this bill will actually lead to better monitoring analysing and reporting—and I suspect it probably would—so that there is best practice right across the services. But there is a similar statement around this lack of information lack of data in the regulatory impact statement which deals with the new funding arrangement as well. FENZ will be funded principally by levies as others have referred to and they are levies that are basically paid on insurance for property and motor vehicles. That funding replaces the variety of sources that have funded the rural fire service—for example things like the cost that it was able to charge and recover under the Forest and Rural Fires Act. How the levy system will work is one area that we would like to know more about. The RIS disclosure statement notes that one significant remaining question is the impact of the proposed funding reforms on the private sector. It states: "Any change to the levy will have an effect on … [the] private sector and not for profit entities. Due to commercial sensitivity and privacy we are unable to access … data and therefore cannot model the … nature and extent of this impact." So there is a bit of a gap in some of the information around how this will have an impact but I can imagine that this is something that we are going to discuss more and find out a lot more about during the submissions process. I would like to note as well that the levies will be reviewed every 3 years but I do think we should note that as a result of the reforms in this bill it probably will cost levy payers—people who have insurance—a bit more. Aside from the creation of Fire and Emergency New Zealand—FENZ—and the outlining of its services its objectives and functions and its operating principles and powers and aside from the reform around the levies the bill also looks at other parts of the whole fire operation. It states in the bill's purpose clause that this bill will be about reforming "the law relating to fire services including by strengthening the role of the communities … in the provision of fire services … provide for local committees to influence and advise FENZ; … improve support for volunteers and enable them to communicate directly with FENZ; … provide new offences and penalties to improve fire safety." I just want to note as it says in the explanatory note of the bill itself that "The Bill provides that the existing paid and volunteer workforce will retain its existing entitlements. Volunteers will move into a direct relationship with FENZ and there is provision for independent advocacy ...". We support the emphasis on community and community engagement and the support for volunteers and I am keen to hear from the firefighters union how this will impact on its workforce and those firefighters' working conditions although I understand that the union was involved in the review itself. However we look forward to a robust discussion during the select committee process and we commend this bill to the House. Nō reira tēnā koutou tēnā koutou tēnā koutou katoa."