Williams PotoPOTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): I just want to add a bit of a contribution to this discussion on financial assistance for live organ donors. I want to congratulate the member Chris Bishop on having this bill pulled from the ballot and on the bill now actually having traversed through all stages of the House. It is an important aspect of a parliamentarian's life I guess to have a bill in your name actually pass through the House. Congratulations to him on that.In my past contributions on this bill I have referenced a friend of mine Kathleen Jacob who was actually on a waiting list for a kidney several years ago. Unfortunately she was not able to take advantage of having a transplant and she passed away some years ago. We had many conversations about why it was that our donor rates in this country are so low. One of the things that she told me about and I thought it was a really interesting aspect was that as the safety of our vehicles improves—as we are more compliant around wearing seatbelts not driving drunk and keeping to the speed limit and as we have better-quality roads and such—when we have accidents of course we are not dying. Our death rates on the roads have reduced. That is one of the reasons why there are not a lot of donations from people who are deceased. It is perverse I guess in one way but it is an aspect of our increasing safety on our roads—it has partly contributed to the need to have live organ donors as opposed to those who are deceased.The other thing is that on the driver's licence that you get there is an indication of your availability to be an organ donor. Many of us have indicated that that is what we want but it does not guarantee that when you do pass away your family will actually live up to those wishes and do that. I know that that happened within my own family. When my grandfather passed away there had been a conversation at that time about him being able to provide for someone on a waiting list and his daughter—my mum—actually overrode that decision. The family does have to actually live with that decision and mine could not continue with it. That was sad for the person who might have received that organ but decisions definitely happen once you are deceased that you have no control over.As has already been suggested this legislation when it came to the Health Committee was vastly different from the piece of legislation that is now going to pass its third reading. Although some members have been a little critical it was actually a great exercise in being able to look at all the aspects of this particular scenario and make sure that we covered off as many of them as we could. We did not want to place any barriers in the way of this proceeding—for people to actually be encouraged to be donors. Given the low numbers of donations anyway we knew that in terms of financial implications to the Government it was not going to be huge. It gave us an opportunity to really craft a piece of legislation that covered off many things. It has already been touched on but I want to reiterate some of them.This legislation will often apply to people who are on low and medium incomes—not people with a lot of money—for whom the loss of income over 2 or 3 months actually has a huge impact. So that was one of the things we looked at—the recovery period for somebody who donates an organ. We set that at about 12 weeks. We felt that most people I think recover in about 6 to 10 weeks but there are some times when you might need a little bit more time to help yourself recover and there also has been built in a certain amount of discretion should the recovery not go as well as you expect. There is a certain amount of discretion within that.The other thing that we looked at was that we took a lot of our references from what happens within the ACC legislation because that is a good model to start from. But we also looked at those people who may be on benefits and their ability to transition from having a benefit back on to ACC or on to other benefits so that they would not be disadvantaged by this and they would not have to go through the process of having to reapply because that often has implications with regard to stand-down or with regard to having to reconnect with Work and Income for example with documentation or certificates or the like.The other think we looked at was ensuring that anything that happened before the donation took place such as tests such as appointments with doctors—anything that needed to happen beforehand that took time and therefore possibly cost the donor some money—was actually also able to be compensated for and that discretionary earnings that that donor might then forfeit might by application to the director-general be able to be compensated for as well.We looked at things like who is actually a qualifying donor. Strangely enough we did have to include that in the legislation because this actually applies in the New Zealand health system. If you are entitled to a service in the New Zealand health system then you qualify as being someone who can receive a donation as well as someone who can provide a donation. We looked at as I said recuperation periods. We looked at entitlements under the job seeker benefits and made sure there was no impact for the loss of earnings. We also made sure that there was a process within the legislation to challenge any decisions particularly around revocation or revision.This is a good bill. I think it warranted the amount of time and effort that the Health Committee took to make sure we got all those aspects in there. I am pleased for Mr Bishop to have this bill passed and I am sure he will enjoy putting his name to that and will celebrate this afternoon. On that note I commend the bill to the House.