Dyson RuthHon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): Mr Chair thank you for that excellent choice. My apologies to my colleague Damien O'Connor. I hope he is able to make a contribution soon. Can I just say that during the time since this bill was first introduced to the House we have seen the Kaikōura quakes; we have seen the Wellington quakes and then the Wellington floods. We have seen the fires in Christchurch and then the fires in Hanmer. I do wish they would stop doing those natural events just after we have—it is pretty horrific. And of course in the last week or so we have seen the floods in Coromandel and then more recently in West Auckland and they are not the only horrific natural events; they are just the biggest ones that have captured the media attention and obviously our attention. But every day we have events that occur in our communities where we rely on our volunteer or professional firefighters to be at the forefront of what must be pretty awful situations often—particularly in rural or small communities.I think that the work we do on this bill—the way we proceed through the Committee stage where we really have to look at individual clauses and take care that we have got the detail right—will be a tribute to the work that those firefighters do around the country and I frankly do not care whether they are volunteers or professional or rural or forest firefighters or whether they are employed by the Department of Conservation (DOC) or the New Zealand Fire Service or whether they are volunteers in their local community—they are all amazing people who do a huge amount of work to keep us safe and often at the cost of their own family and at the risk of their own well-being.It is one of the reasons why I so strongly support the first amendment that my colleague Adrian Rurawhe has moved and I want to acknowledge and thank him. What he did was listen to the pleas of the firefighters in our various discussions with them at the Government Administration Committee. He then listened to the advice that we got from the officials about the basis of the name of the new organisation and then he balanced that up. I think he did a very considerate job and a very good job.I want to acknowledge the Minister in the chair Mark Mitchell and say that I hope he is going to take a few calls tonight. He should be able to because he knows a bit about this bill. Before his huge promotion to the dizzy heights of being a Minister he was a more humble member of our select committee but he actually does know the detail of this legislation well. He may well have moved on and no longer care about these things but I live and hope that he might make a contribution before the end of the night.So just going back to the tabled amendment that Adrian Rurawhe has moved—let me tell the Committee the theory as I understand it of why the new organisation is proposed to be called Fire and Emergency New Zealand. So with the amalgamation of the various bodies that are coming into one organisation it is very clear that it is a genuine amalgamation and it is not the New Zealand Fire Service becoming the master body with the others joining it. This is a new organisation where they are all equal players. That was my understanding of the logic of not having the word service" in the name because "New Zealand Fire Service" is obviously the current regime of professional firefighters and it may have been seen as being the master body and the others were being subsumed into it—that is not the intention of the bill.I think that the officials who considered it did so very carefully. I think they understood how big a shift that this was going to be and I think—with the best intentions in the world—the name of the new organisation as proposed reflects that. What I think Adrian Rurawhe's amendment has done is reflect the deep commitment to community that our firefighters give regardless of which part of the organisation they are in. And they do it not for the money not for the glory—they might like the uniform—but actually they do it because of their sense of service. It is a big call and we should respect them for that. That is why I support the amendment to have that word "service" recognised in the name.I would just like to make a few brief comments on another part of the tabled amendment in Adrian Rurawhe's name and that is the addition in clause 3—so we are still on Part 1 obviously; that is what we are debating at the moment. Some of the submitters who made representations to us talked about the fact that they felt it was quite an internal organisation."