Faafoi Kris: Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeFaafoi Kris: Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 09 February 2016. Volume:711;Page:8803. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KRIS FAAFOI (Labour—Mana): Can I just join the member who just took his seat Todd Barclay in wishing you a very happy New Year and to the rest of the Speaker’s team and also to all the members from around the House. I can guarantee that we will argue bicker and get to the stages where it got to at Seddon Park in Hamilton last night but I do wish you all the best for the year.As some members on this side of the House have said we will be supporting the changes that are contained within the civil defence legislation. There are some reservations which we will take to the select committee where we will take the opportunity to ask some of the officials some questions. But on my first look at this piece of legislation I think it will be very useful especially to those people who do the hard graft when the small to medium events happen in our community to be able to I think as the previous speaker says give them more options as to what to do when you are moving from the response stage to the recovery stage.As a number of speakers have said no two events are similar and you can find yourself moving from the response stage to the recovery stage very very quickly. In some instances you may be doing those two functions at the same time.I have certainly had the privilege of being within civil defence emergency centres when events have been happening where I think this piece of legislation will help. I do not think there was confusion—because I think that would look unkindly upon the people who are running the operations—but I think that they have got some constraints upon them that say “We can do one thing here but we can’t do one thing in another area.” I think the proposals that are made in this piece of legislation will I guess give those people the options now and some flexibility to be able to do what they need to do when they are moving from one phase to the other.I just wanted to make a couple of practical examples of things that have happened in my area in Porirua. If we can cast our minds back to June 2013 there was an almighty storm. A number of households were cut off with their power. I think that some were also cut off with their water because trees were down. At first we thought things would be returned back to normal pretty quickly and certainly the response was: “OK most people have got their power back.” But there was a group of about a 150 to 200 people in and around pockets of Porirua who could not get their power back for days. Certainly as an MP and working with our local mayor Nick Leggett and some of his councillors in his civil defence emergency team there was uncertainty as to who could push in which directions and how hard to make sure that those people got their power back.There is one story I remember very vividly. We turned up to an area of Titahi Bay which is the community that I live in. These people had been without power for 2 to 3 days. Thankfully the council had made its arena available so they could have showers or charge their phones but many did not take up the opportunity because they simply did not know when their power was going to come back on. So they stayed just hoping that their power would come back on—an absolute vacuum of information.So we turned up and as you can imagine the locals were not happy. It did not matter whether or not we were from the power company or from the council or were the local MP we were a target. It did not matter that we had no authority or ability to get their power back on; we were there we were the target and we got it in the ear as to why their power was not on. And fair enough; I think that is fair.But I think this piece of legislation will enable those who are dealing with these incidents a little bit more leeway and a little bit more influence to deal with the likes of power companies and to be able to say: “OK 2 to 3 days is enough when there are 200 or so households that haven’t had any power.” In the end we went and spoke to the linesmen who were working down the road and said: “If you don’t get this power back on before the end of the day there is going to be potentially some violence on the street and potentially targeted towards us if we stick around much longer.” Thankfully the power did come back on but I think that was an instance where those people who were responding and moving to the transition of recovery especially for those families could have done with a bit more power.I think that this piece of legislation does that because as other speakers have mentioned the proposed recovery powers that are within this legislation will allow those who are dealing with incidents to carry out works clear roads and other public places and remove dispose of secure or make safe dangerous structures and materials. Some of that may already be happening but it may be on an ad hoc basis. It will also provide for the conservation and supply of food fuel and other essential supplies such as water.It will also allow the dissemination of information and advice to the public which in the instance I have just talked about did not happen very effectively. So it ended up being myself and the mayor with a loud hailer on the street corner which was the only information that some of these residents had had in the last 2 or 3 days. It will also allow agencies to evacuate premises and places; exclude people and vehicles from certain areas; to get on to premises which is also very important to perform assessments of any damage that might have been done; to close roads and public places; give directions to stop activity or to limit the consequences of emergency potentially for the purposes of coordinating recovery efforts; and require information for the recovery e.g. from lifeline utilities such as power companies in the instance that I mentioned there.So all in all I think this piece of legislation does deal practically with a number of practical issues that the people who are dealing with the small to medium emergency issues face when they are asked to respond. I do not think it takes care of some of the major issues that we saw come out of Canterbury and I think that will come in the wider part of the review of civil defence legislation that is to come which is one of the criticisms that we have with this piece of legislation—that maybe perhaps it could have been part of a catch-all review of civil defence legislation as reviews happen. In this instance it has not happened and I guess something is better than nothing. We will have the opportunity to also question the merits of the approach in the select committee hearings.I guess it will make a positive difference. It will give hopefully those people like Trevor Farmer in my area the power to do some things that they have not been able to when we do have flooding or storms which we also saw up on the Kāpiti coast late last year. Hopefully that will make the lives easier for the people who are affected and also for the people who are responding and helping with the recovery to some of these incidents.Bill read a first time.Bill referred to the Government Administration Committee.