McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Madam Chair. It's a pleasure to take a call on Part 2 of the Earthquake Commission Amendment Bill and I want to make a couple of comments before getting into one or two of the details I want to talk about. Obviously we support this bill. It's a piece of legislation that gives a little bit more power to the Earthquake Commission (EQC) and it certainly will ensure it's shored up in there for future generations. The EQC is unique by world standards of insurance and because of the nature of our geology and the way this country's shaped it's a pretty essential part of the protection of our citizens basically or our citizens' privilege to live in New Zealand and to both borrow money and ensure that they can house themselves. Obviously when you're borrowing money to house yourself these insurance factors are very important and given that a little like Australia with their fires we do have earthquakes as a challenge for our insurance industry it's most essential that we have a very secure and sound insurance base to ensure that those people can continue to borrow money and continue to own houses and to carry on with their businesses. I just want to talk about a couple of things. One is the lift in replacing the $100000 monetary cap with $150000. In my view that's a very good move and I think it's essential really. It's also sensible because it basically sets us a level of guarantee I suppose—for want of a better word—and the other one that I want to speak positively about is removing cover for contents. I don't think there's ever any need—and hindsight's a great thing of course—for cover for contents to be covered by the EQC. You can insure for that anywhere pretty much under any circumstances. So I think that those two moves are both good ones. I did want to spend a little bit of time just on Mr Stuart Smith's Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 156 because I think—like he does—that it's a very sensible way of dealing with this stuff. When you think of the challenges that the first Christchurch earthquake caused with respect to the inspection of damage and things like that it was a massive challenge for the EQC to put insurance assessors on the ground and insurance companies are equipped for that. They weren't entirely equipped for that prior to Christchurch but many of them—well many of them were actually. Since then they've all basically got themselves up to speed and can deal with these disasters very quickly and Kaikōura to some extent proved that. I think that the eminently sensible thing about that SOP is the fact that if you use the complementary strength of the private insurance sector they could manage all of this stuff pre-EQC very easily and EQC then just becomes effectively an administrator and I suppose to some extent a bank—well an insurance company in this case I guess. But I just think it's so sensible and I don't understand why it's not included in this bill. I'm sure that if it doesn't get proposed today it will be included in the very near future because of the sensibleness of it. The opportunity it provides for the rationalisation of the industry and consistency as well—because those insurance assessors that are out in the street every day are very good at their job. They do things very quickly. They understand it well and they don't have to be retrained every time another event comes along. So the industry now—it didn't before Christchurch but it does now—has the capacity in my view to support this type of activity. It would mean that the EQC could concentrate on their core business which is basically to effectively—and I'll use the term bank" again—use it to run a bank that then underwrites the ability of New Zealanders to get insurance and that's its key role. Its key role is not to then inspect and worry about the damage that's been created as a result of a disaster because that's always dealt with by the insurance company concerned. The other issue I want to touch on briefly is the fact that there are a large number of New Zealanders who don't insure and that's a major challenge not only for this piece of legislation but for almost every piece of legislation we put through this House because it doesn't matter whether you're levying the industry or what you're doing if you've got a percentage of the people that aren't participating it becomes a major challenge for the Government and for governing bodies because someone's then got to prop up that damage. Someone's then got to support those people that don't get to the post. So that's really my contribution to Part 2. Madam Chair thank you."