Mitchell Clayton: Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMitchell Clayton: Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 09 February 2016. Volume:711;Page:8798. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLAYTON MITCHELL (NZ First): It is great to be back after our summer adjournment and great to see everybody’s smiling faces back in the House and of course our newest member on the other side there. It is lovely to have a new face to get to know. It gives me great pleasure also to look around this House.Again I see quite a collegial approach to this piece of legislation. In fact I think from memory the last piece of legislation that we were discussing before we went into the adjournment we actually had a cross-party accord. It is great to see parties coming together when it comes to common-sense thinking. I can say that New Zealand First will be supporting this bill through to the select committee and we look forward to pulling that apart and seeing how we can tidy it and titivate it to make it even better.This is largely an innocuous piece of legislation. We see it as tidying up some areas that really help to communicate better with communities to actually help those affected communities get back on their feet very quickly effectively and in a timely fashion. I think every party has clearly said that that is the intent and that they are going to be supporting that through. This bill the Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill is designed to affect just small and medium sized events that happen around the country. As the Greens have pointed out those events weather events largely are happening more and more frequently and costing the country and communities a lot in lost profits and revenues and of course jobs etc. So everything that we can do to help those civil defence organisations and the local tertiary authorities to get themselves back on their feet I think has to be absolutely commended.The bill basically does four things. Firstly it identifies who does what and mandates roles of responsibility to that effect. Secondly it works out how we do it and strengthens the recovery planning establishes recovery management roles and recovery coordination. Thirdly it goes through transition management planning to establish transition notices which gives the Minister as we have just heard 90 days and a further 90 days to make sure that the recovery is on track to get the area affected back on its feet quickly and effectively. Fourthly it creates legislative authority allowing Crown funding which comes back to the “Who pays?”.I guess out of all those four things the top three are absolutely fantastic but there is a question mark around the “Who pays?” because we have seen this Government get into a debt situation—over $100 billion now and rising—and it really is a question of how we are going to manage the “Who pays?” effect. I think Christchurch is a fantastic example where we have seen budgets being blown out cumulative costs working into billions of dollars and largely the insurance companies have not been able to cover the bill or have not actually been legally obliged to cover some of those bills. So the “Who pays?” is a big question that we are looking to have identified and worked through.The transition notices I think are a great piece of legislation to go into here giving the mandate of the Minister to identify this area whether it be the whole country whether it be a part an area of the country that needs to have special attention provided and it works through the groups the civil defence emergency groups—what are they called here? I have got it written down. They are the groups that actually provide the services to make sure that it happens. So if we have got a transition period and a transition notice is given then we can actually make sure that if a road needs to be shut down if a property needs to be entered into and if there are works that need to be done we can get on with the job we can close down that area we can close it off to the public and it will not inhibit the recovery of one of those medium or minor infringements.As I said earlier we are seeing more and more of these incidents around. We have had floods in the Wairarapa we have had floods in Matatā and Northland has been flooded. They seem to be happening at least annually sometimes biannually and it is a huge cost to the communities at large and particularly to those councils that are largely left to pick up the bill. Again we would like to see a framework put into place describing what the amount of money is that is put aside for something as large as a medium-scale issue such as flooding whether it be weather whether it be high seas with king tides coming with high winds. Cyclone Bola is another example of where we needed civil defence to step in and help out.It comes back to those five P’s: perfect preparation prevents poor performance. I know that we talked about the risk reduction the readiness response and recovery but what we are really talking about is preparing ourselves for the worst-case scenario and ensuring that our communities can get back on to their feet as quickly and less onerously as possible.The area that I have some concern with—and it came out in the regulatory impact statement—is with regard to the Order in Council. It says here: “For constitutional reasons Orders in Council are generally only provided for where there exceptional circumstances. For this reason they would be more appropriate to large-scale emergencies that (fortunately) are extremely rare—and which are not the focus of Stage One of the review and hence the analysis summarised in this [regulatory impact statement]. Any options for Orders in Council might fall in the ambit of the second stage of the review.” It would certainly raise some eyebrows in New Zealand First to have that brought into effect and anything where you have got an Order in Council I think we need to look very very closely at as well.We do support this bill through to the select committee. We think it actually addresses a number of issues that happen when you have a weather event or a civil defence emergency event and we look forward to see whether we can break it apart more closely look at it and hear from submitters at the select committee. Thank you.