Court SimonSIMON COURT (ACT): The ACT Party cannot support this Government's Severe Weather Emergency Recovery Legislation Bill. It gives the Government Henry VIII" powers to modify 27 Acts of Parliament for purposes that may go well beyond cyclone recovery. ACT says that that alone is unacceptable and is a reason to oppose this bill—despite all of the good intentions that the Government ACT National and the Green Party had sitting around the committee table with officials hearing from submitters and trying to work out what the important things are that people in the Hawke's Bay Gisborne Wairoa Northland Auckland and of course the Manawatū-Whanganui region need in order to recover from the cyclone. Well what ACT said back on 6 March "Here are 15 good ideas"—urgent ideas they were on 6 March only a month after Cyclone Gabrielle hit. None of those ideas has been taken up by this Government.The committee received high quality submissions: from the Law Society from the New Zealand Initiative from constitutional and public law experts from Federated Farmers and of course from Civil Contractors New Zealand who represent the people who will actually be doing the work with the diggers with the trucks cleaning up silt and demolishing all of those structures and getting ready to rebuild after the cyclones and severe weather. What many of them asked for was "Please speed it up. Please hurry up. This has taken far too long." All we have here today is an omnibus bill a bill that grants extraordinary powers to the Government but actually provides no certainty no frameworks for economic recovery no formulas that would help people who are flooded out of their homes in places like West Auckland or Hawke's Bay understand if they have to leave their properties if it's too dangerous to rebuild what the formula is that they could expect to see that would help them to understand what compensation they might receive if they have to leave their land and property where they could go and of course what would make it easier to rebuild because currently the Resource Management Act makes it very very hard to consent and build new developments. None of those things is addressed in this bill.Twenty-seven Acts of Parliament could be amended for any reason at any time in the next five years by a Minister in a Government with only three days' review by a panel. Now ACT suggested—in fact we provided an amendment which we hope to debate at the committee of the whole House stage which proposes to include on that panel representatives from the rural community and people with infrastructure experience. We also proposed that if there is going to be legislation like the COVID-19 emergency response legislation or the legislation that guided the recovery from the Kaikōura-Hurunui earthquakes and the Christchurch and Canterbury earthquakes sequence that legislation comes back to Parliament every 90 or so days at a maximum for Parliament to debate whether it was actually effective whether those measures were helping the costs and benefits what could be learned and so that the Government also had an ability to table amendments to its own recovery legislation that it might want to table and have the scrutiny of Parliament to do that.What we also propose through amendments which came out of submissions we heard at select committee is to protect private property because one of the problems that we've heard about is that many people including 50000 in Auckland live in homes built on flood plains and it may not be possible to rebuild in those locations. We've been hearing from this Government and from experts and insurance companies about managed retreat which means some people will have to leave their properties and the homes will have to be demolished but what we don't know is how they will be compensated. So that's why the ACT Party says there needs to be a compensation mechanism and that needs to be in terms of the existing Public Works Act.But I just want to come back to the committee stage and the report that the Governance and Administration Committee has provided back to the House and for the people of New Zealand to read. I just want to run through some of the things that ACT felt were important to highlight out of that report. Now despite declaring a climate emergency in 2020 this Government has done nothing to prepare for the response to the inevitable natural disasters that will befall New Zealand. We've had cyclones and storms—in the past two decades we've had severe devastating earthquakes and landslides that have killed hundreds of people. Large parts of New Zealand will be affected by what could be almost an inevitable earthquake on the Alpine Fault and of course there are many communities in New Zealand built in places where historically tsunami have devastated them—and in fact wiped out entire communities. And yet there is nothing in this bill; the Labour Government has done nothing since declaring a climate emergency in 2020 to actually deliver legislation that sets out how New Zealand might recover from a disaster in future when we can all safely assume there will be one.But that's not to say the work hasn't been done. The New Zealand Initiative submitted to the committee although as they pointed out 20 hours to prepare and submit a written proposal—which was all this Government gave them—was not sufficient. They pointed to a document that they prepared in 2018: Recipe for disaster: Building policy on shaky ground. They were referring to how flawed it was that every time there's a natural disaster a Government comes along and says "Don't worry we're going to cook up some new disaster emergency response legislation. Whether we've learnt from past disasters or not here's something that needs to be passed under urgency". What the initiative said is look post-disaster plans should recognise not only the importance of clarity about the infrastructure rebuild—that's the roads and other essential utilities—but it should also facilitate organic economic development in a way that the local community wants to; not have it imposed top-down from the Government. And that is one of the risks of this legislation: that a Minister with best intentions—or maybe not—could come up with an Order in Council that says "Here's what a region is going to get." Would it be a convention centre; a swimming pool; a stadium? Who knows—but how on earth would a Minister in Government know unless it comes as a direct request from the locals from local government or from the regions? That's what's missing in this bill. The Initiative also points out "a recovery agency should be set up expeditiously." Well what we do know is that the Government has appointed Sir Brian Roche to go and investigate what needs to happen. Well there's a gentleman who has represented the Government and other agencies at the highest level and has competencies around infrastructure governance and management and yet we haven't heard from Sir Brian Roche. We haven't heard from his cyclone recovery working group or committee. We have no idea what is planned in terms of a recovery agency.What local people—like Gisborne farmer Charlie Reynolds who I spoke to this morning—are asking for Minister is: please speed it up. Please provide a framework so that people know exactly what recovery will look like and what their part in it is whether they are private contractors rural landowners homeowners or business owners; people who own packhouses and orchards. What Charlie Reynolds told me today is that many of his friends who are farmers spent weeks trying to pull stock out of mud trying to get access back to their farms. They didn't have internet access and then it turns out when they finally got online to apply for the $10000 that they've been told that they will get immediately it could be weeks and weeks and weeks before they even receive an acknowledgment of their inquiry—because it turns out thousands and thousands of people have applied for this funding. So what ACT would say to the Government is "Please get on with it." Please provide some clarity to people who are suffering following these disasters; whether it's the people in West Auckland who are red-stickered out of their homes or people of Hawke's Bay who just want to know whether they'll be able to keep orcharding and keep packing fruit in the future; even though it's three years until the trees come back. And what about the people of Northland who are cut off again by a massive slip in the Mangamuka Gorge? All of these communities need answers Minister—this bill doesn't provide them. ACT says "Get on with it.""