SpeechIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Madam Speaker. At the risk of becoming a little biblical which I don't normally do there is a time and place for everything. This is not a time in my view for cheap political point-scoring and certainly the committee stage of this bill tomorrow will not be a time in my view for again cheap political point-scoring. It's time for constructive debate constructive discussion—and I think there's time for that and I'll get on to that in a moment. So I was very disappointed to hear that sort of thing going on in response to what I think is the reason we came to Parliament. We came to Parliament to make a difference to people's lives and to do it in some cases as quickly as we possibly can and that's exactly what this bill is endeavouring to enable. We can't go out and fix the things that have been broken—that's not our role; we can't do it—but we can enable those things to get fixed and those people's lives to be put back together as quickly as we can. That's the whole aim of this type of legislation. I think as a Parliament we should be very pleased to be part of that and I think we should constructively work our way through in the next 36 hours to make this bill as good as we possibly can. I'm very pleased to be involved in that and have the opportunity to chair the select committee that's going to run that process through.And just as another point before I get into the things I want to discuss I was really interested in Debbie Ngarewa-Packer's point about iwi. They certainly have had and will have the opportunity to submit on this bill and numerous iwi organisations have been written to and offered that opportunity; I'm sure they will take that up.So I think that the feedback we get tomorrow in the course of those discussions will be very constructive. I realise the time constraints are significant and some people won't be able to submit simply because of that. But none the less I think we'll get a very good amount of feedback and I think it will work really well.The whole aim of this bill—and it's been mentioned plenty of times in the House tonight and I don't really need to go there but I will very briefly—is to make things much easier for people to put things back together to pull things apart and to repair the damage that's been done.I think as we go through this there's been enormous trauma on a large number of people right throughout New Zealand and I think we should acknowledge that. I know Meka Whaitiri did acknowledge that in her speech and I think that's a very important part of where we get to with all this stuff.I was the mayor of the Manawatū at the time of the 2004 floods and would have dearly loved a piece of legislation like this. We didn't think quite as forwardly in those days as we do now. A piece of legislation like this would have enabled things to happen probably much quicker in the long run. In response to some of the comment that I've heard tonight I've never seen a farmer reluctant to come forward and fix things. Whether they were legally allowed to fix them or not they'll fix them and they'll worry about the response later. I have seen pretty big tractors come out on the road and clear the road in five seconds and worry about the consequences later. I think on the whole New Zealanders are pretty much like that. I think interestingly our legal system has got more tolerant of that sort of behaviour because when you live in remote parts of New Zealand isolated you don't have much choice. Some of you would have seen the picture of grapes coming through a river today on the back of a massive great big tractor—well they've got to get them out somehow. I think that's exactly what this piece of legislation is about: enabling that sort of thing to happen legally and allowing them to get on with life and do what they need to do to make it happen.I was very interested in—Louise Upston actually raised the issue of a piece of legislation like this becoming permanent so that Governments have access to it in the future for future events. Clearly this piece of legislation can't become permanent; it's not designed in that manner at all. But it would be really interesting for the Parliament of the future to look into a piece of legislation that could be plucked off the shelf at a day's notice because this is very similar to the legislation put in place—with different wording around the fact that this of course is a flood not an earthquake—to deal with the Kaikōura-Hurunui earthquake. I think it's well worth considering for future parliaments the potential to put in place a piece of legislation that could be plucked off the shelf instantly and it would have alleviated some of the challenge that Louise Upston was talking about in her discussion on this issue.I want to acknowledge Minister McAnulty and all that have contributed to getting this piece of legislation to where it's got to. As I said earlier the select committee will give it a great deal of consideration. I think the legislation itself as has been mentioned is not all that complicated; it's quite a small piece of legislation relatively simply but none the less there are some improvements that may well be made to it and hopefully the submitters will put those to the select committee tomorrow and enable us if there is reason to change some small bits of this legislation to do so.There will be many people who can't be helped I guess by this piece of legislation. One of the things that I've noticed in the top end of my electorate and certainly in Louise Upston's electorate is the massive damage to forestry that's been done—literally thousands of hectares of forestry just smashed up as though it doesn't exist. There was no rain of significance in that area but the winds as a result of the storm have done immense damage to those forests. That's going to take ages to clean up. There will be some recoverable out of it but not much. So there's many many people that have suffered damage in the course of this event right throughout New Zealand that will never recover all of what they've lost and we can't hope to put that in place in this House either. We heard from Minister Wood about his plans to repair roads and infrastructure and to get those operating as quickly as possible. Whilst it seems sensible to attempt to build back better—as we've heard that terminology a little bit in the course of this—it's almost impossible to build back better instantly because the urgency is to get the road open and to get the house fixed and to get all those things fixed so that people can get on with their lives as quickly as possible. The interesting thing about building back better is that we as a country have got to do a whole lot of work on that because we've never really done that work. I'd urge again Governments of the future to get on with that job pretty quickly; we can't do it in the course of recovering from an event like this. That's got to come later.I think the really interesting issues that are going to come out of this—and this legislation will again help with that—are decisions around what houses you do fix and what you don't what rebuilding we allow and what we don't and the other really interesting thing I think is when you start to rebuild flood banks or stopbanks to what level of protection you want to rebuild those to and what the long-term prognosis of rebuilding those stopbanks is going to be. After the 2004 floods in the Manawatū Palmerston North decided they would run their stopbanks up to a 200-year return period for floods—pretty significant. Interestingly the recent rain tested a fair bit of that so we know it works. The problem with that of course is you end up like the challenges they had in America where the stopbanks get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and then where do you go? So there are some big issues like that.But there are all sorts of solutions that can be put in place to I guess alleviate those problems. One of the really big challenges that particularly Hawke's Bay has—and I know that probably better than the other areas because I have a daughter some grandchildren a brother and a sister all living there; fortunately not badly affected by this—is that it has some of the most fertile land we've got in New Zealand; some of the most highly productive land we've got. We can't really afford to lose it. So we've got to find a way of mitigating those challenges. We certainly can't afford to lose them nor can the people that live there. So it's really important that we not only put the legislation in place to enable the quick recovery which is what this legislation will do—and some of it might be quicker than necessary. Michael Woodhouse touched on some dates earlier that I think we'll probably need to look at as a select committee—or may well need to look at as a select committee as well. But it's important that we get that in place but it's equally as important that we get the longer-term planning done as to where we go in the future with this stuff because there's no question that all this has happened before we just didn't have the built environments we now have around these areas. So when the floods in the 1930s and the 1920s or whatever happened we didn't have that massive built environment that then caught the water and created a lot of the damage that's happening now.So there are some big challenges for all of our regions that are affected by this. There's certainly some big challenges for our cities that have been affected by it and particularly Auckland and of course Scott Simpson's very beloved Coromandel. But I think this piece of legislation is really good. Hopefully tomorrow we can put it in a slightly better place than the Minister's brought it to us—but who's to know that? But that's all I've got to say on it and I look forward to what we get through in the next couple of days.