Sage EugenieHon EUGENIE SAGE (Green): E te Māngai o te Whare tēnā koe. I'm pleased to take a call on the Emergency Management Bill—which the Green Party is supporting—having come from a part of a very good seminar by The Aotearoa Circle and a presentation by Dr Rob Murdoch of the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) this morning highlighting the increasing risk of severe weather events and also noting the comments of Dr Nicholas Stern way back in 2006 who said that the benefits of strong and early action on climate change far outweigh the [economic] costs of not acting." We know that we're getting more severe weather events as a result of a changing climate. That is having a huge impact on people communities and the economy and I acknowledge those personal impacts that a lot of people have felt to their homes property and their communities this year. This bill in seeking to modernise the emergency management system draws on the work that was done by the technical advisory group set up by the Hon Gerry Brownlee back in 2017 and then the Government's response to that. It is about making that system better placed to respond to these severe weather events and other emergencies like pandemics. There is a change in the language. I think from now on rather than civil defence it will be known as emergency management. Speakers from National and ACT have both been critical of the provisions that provide for greater recognition of Māori participation in the emergency management system. The Green Party sees that as strengthening that system because of the huge role that marae have played in emergencies in hosting so many people. In Tairāwhiti at the moment the marae there are still accommodating people who have lost their homes because of weather events. So it is just ensuring that it happens everywhere not just in those communities which have already done this such as Tairāwhiti. Similarly there are requirements in the bill that each emergency management committee must identify and engage with communities within its area that may be disproportionately affected by emergencies. In the past civil defence hasn't always thought carefully about people with disabilities and what services needed to be provided to support them in quite challenging events where mobility may be limited for some and then what happens when there is flooding? I think too that it's useful to make the roles and responsibilities across the whole system at that national regional and local level clearer and to have an explicit rule-making power for the Director of Emergency Management. But what I would like to comment on most is the requirement in the bill that requires critical infrastructure entities to establish and publish their planned emergency-level response because we saw in Cyclone Gabrielle one of the most destructive storms to ever hit Aotearoa that we had at the height of the crisis more than 660 cellphone towers which were offline. That led to huge stress for communities. People were unable to contact loved ones in the region and find out if they were alive or if they were OK power was cut to more than 250000 people and entire regions were cut off from telecommunications for extended periods. People had to wait days to hear news of their families and even the fire and emergency services were cut off from their own control rooms because of that lack of power. Where you get essential services disrupted that does increase the impact on human health and welfare and on mental health. So the requirement in this bill and the setting out in places like clause 54 of the duties of critical infrastructure entities is I think a very welcome improvement. ACT has been critical of it for raiding the private sector but we have seen—and you will be well aware Madam Assistant Speaker Williams—that in Christchurch after the earthquakes it was because Orion had had a proactive strategy of investing in seismic resilience and ensuring that its substations which were often small brick buildings were strengthened over a period of years that it did enable Orion to restore electricity services much more quickly after those big quakes than it would have been able to if they hadn't had that proactive foresighted response. Being a bit of a geek I looked up a 2011 report that the Kestrel Group did in reviewing the resilience lessons of Orion's 2010 and 2011 earthquake experience and that report said that a driver for those improvements and that investment in resilience had been to avoid major outages. Orion coined the term "MOCHED"—major outage causing huge economic disruption. That term and that culture was embedded within the organisation so their investment strategy their work was around that and it led to Orion being one of the most reliable electricity suppliers in Aotearoa. It's that same focus on resilience that this bill is set to embed in the emergency management system by requiring people like the telcos to have much more of a plan to publish what their emergency level of service will be and to report on how they meet the obligations in the bill because it seemed that the big telcos in response to Cyclone Gabrielle said "Well it wasn't really our fault. It was because there was a power outage." So rather than thinking "OK we're going to get power outages in a major storm. How do we provide against that? Do we have diesel generators?"—which we wouldn't necessarily want at every cell phone tower. But how do we cover for that? So I think this bill is quite important in the responsibilities that it is going to put on those big infrastructure providers the lifeline utilities in just ensuring that their resilience planning is really up to scale with the size and impact of what we are facing in the current climate emergency with the increased likelihood of more severe storm events. With droughts come a much higher fire risk. We saw the huge impacts of that both in Nelson and the Port Hills fire in Christchurch. With increased storm events there are more risks of flash floods—as we've seen in Tāmaki-makau-rau—and rivers flooding and how the emergency services actually respond to that. So I think it is modernising the emergency management network but one of the critical parts is the requirements that it will have on infrastructure providers and getting them to really invest in future thinking and perhaps following the example of Orion which had looked at seismic resilience having recognised that that was a key issue for it in Canterbury even though at the time earthquakes were not common in that region. We do need to plan ahead and the Green Party is pleased to support this bill."