Yang JianDr JIAN YANG (National): Thank you Mr Speaker. First of all I would like to thank the previous speaker the sponsor of the bill Chlöe Swarbrick. Thank you for your commitment and also your skills and effort to communicate with different parties and also to work with the committee members. This committee of course unanimously supports the bill.I would like to take this opportunity to also thank former MP Mojo Mathers for her commitment or her work in this area. I observed her work while she was a member of Parliament. I understand the Parliament actually must support resources to support her work. It is important that we support people who are what we call disabled persons.The intention of this bill of course is to establish a fund which would facilitate disabled people to participate in politics and to make sure that everyone has equal ability to be involved in politics. As the previous speaker Chlöe Swarbrick mentioned we as a Parliament have an obligation to support people with disabilities under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. So I endorse that particular quote and I believe that we do have that obligation and we should make it a priority.This Parliament has indeed made a continuous effort to support disabled people to participate in politics. According to the Electoral Commission's 2017 election report you'll find that 92 percent of disabled voters were happy or very happy with the overall voting process; 95 percent said they encountered no issues while voting; and 92 percent were satisfied with the process up from 88 percent in 2014.The commission's goal according to their year 2020 strategy is that by the year 2020 all eligible New Zealanders regardless of disability are able to fully participate in parliamentary elections. Now with our determination with our commitment and with the support of modern technology we should be able to achieve that goal.To participate in voting and to stand in an election—these two are somewhat different. It takes more resources to stand in an election so for that reason we need to provide more support and more resources to those disabled people to stand in elections. So this bill is particularly for that particular purpose.Now the Governance and Administration Committee received 84 unique submissions and 385 form submissions. The vast majority of submissions supported the bill and the committee as I mentioned as a whole supported the bill. So the bill has cross-party support. Nevertheless the committee worked hard and consulted with different parties—in particular with Chlöe Swarbrick—and made quite a few changes to the original bill. Chlöe mentioned some of the changes. I may highlight some of these major changes because I think they're important. The changes have made the bill even better.So under clause 6 Election Access Fund established" subclause (1) says "The Electoral Commission must establish a fund to facilitate the participation of disabled persons". We changed the wording using "disabled persons" instead of "persons with disabilities" because "disabled persons"—this particular expression is used in the New Zealand Disability Strategy so that's the preferred phrase. However we do not define this particular phrase because it's beyond our scope.This fund will support disabled persons standing as candidates or seeking election as candidates in general elections or by-elections as Chlöe mentioned. We included by-elections because we believe by-elections are a part of parliamentary elections. So we included that. And in clause 7 about eligibility originally there were three categories of people or organisations that may be eligible for funding including individuals not-for-profit entities and parties. The committee decided that it is better to simply reduce it to individuals and make individuals eligible instead of not-for-profit organisations or parties because it will make the fund more neutral so it's easier for us to actually manage the fund and make it a politically neutral fund.We also made it clear that the payment from the fund will not be counted as an election expense or a candidate donation and also we made sure that it is exempt income of the individual or candidate. So basically we made an effort to make the bill better more politically neutral and make sure we are able to manage the fund more reasonably.We are committed to providing disabled people with more support so that they can have greater independence and live better lives in their communities. We'll continue to support people with disabilities to continue to participate in our politics particularly in the electoral process. It is important that disabled people have a strong voice and we make them feel valued.So for that reason I commend the bill to the House."