SpeechNAISI CHEN (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker. As with all of these bills that are passed under urgency I understand that it's about achieving balance and we have to weigh up between being able to help those who are now recovering from the devastating weather events of Cyclone Gabrielle or the floods in Auckland on its anniversary weekend or having enough adequate scrutiny of a bill and going through the full legislative process. I know that a lot of these points have been traversed in this House throughout this afternoon. So I thank all of the previous speakers for acknowledging that point. As we always do we strive to find that perfect balance. This time actually I was very honoured to be able to participate in a very unique select committee process which was that one-day select committee process. During that day—and I completely agree with my colleague Rachel here—we did see the best of our Public Service. We saw public servants and we saw our advisers and our officials probably not even having the chance to sleep for very long but they came out to Parliament the next day still smiling and still ready to answer all of our questions no matter how interesting or ridiculous they were. They have definitely gone above and beyond their call of duty in this instance.Being able to traverse all of the points in very fine detail was exactly what we could do and what we did during the select committee process. Some of them that especially come to my mind are ones around the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act but also the Resource Management Act (RMA). Especially with the RMA we were able to talk about things like how we're going to deal with the silt; how we're going to deal with all of the forestry slashes that had come down; where we burn these things; how we in the best way in terms of the environment and the community get rid of all of this—I would call it—organic rubbish" that has been caused through the flooding and through all of the slips.We were able to look at the Local Government Act as well and that actually raises a really good point and I think it's been one that has been discussed out there in the community for a very long time: the fact that local government bodies cannot meet through audio or visual links on platforms like Zoom and other technologies and have to meet physically to count towards the quorum. So this is 2023 and obviously there are a lot of bills that we need to be updating to make sure that the law that we make in this House is kept up to date with the technology that's available to us to be able to participate in decision making and democracy. So while we completely support this bill and we completely support the temporary changes that we can make for those in the affected areas I think there was also a question raised during the select committee process as to whether we would look at further extending it to modernise it but I understand that is a point for another day. But thank you to all the submitters who had raised that point.We also spent a lot of time looking at the Food Act and the Food Regulations 2015. That was one of the Acts where I personally was actually very concerned that food safety would still be upheld in those affected areas while we gave what we call an extension of these permits. I was worried that while they were recovering food poisoning would become an issue. We know that in the eatery industry in the restaurants and cafes some of them are serial offenders and we know that some of them have been put on plans and short notices to be able to keep getting the inspectors to go back in short amounts of time so that they can actually be kept at close supervision. So I have asked the officials whether or not by extending that time to renew the supervision of I would say some of the bad players would actually weaken or loosen. I had a really good answer back to me and was really reassured that no all the local agencies would still be able to schedule different inspections at different times if they saw the need as well.So Madam Speaker you can hear that we've actually really traversed all of the details in this bill. I thank all of the officials I thank all of the clerks of the committee and I thank our Parliamentary Counsel Office drafters—they really have worked so hard. I thank the committee members. I commend this bill to the House.Motion agreed to.Bill read a second time.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Poto Williams): In accordance with the determination of the Business Committee this bill is set down for committee stage immediately. I declare the House in committee for consideration of the Severe Weather Emergency Legislation Bill."