Hughes GarethGARETH HUGHES (Green): Kia ora Mr Assistant Speaker. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. I too would like to echo and share the love. This has been a phenomenal bill to work on. It has been a great group of people to work on it with and along with the unanimous support of the House I would also like to commend it.This bill started off as a pretty practical bill to deal with some of those cases where a household wants to get ultra-fast broadband access and has to cope with shared access. We know from officials' advice that around 13 percent of properties fell into this category. About 25 percent of them had a problem. The output of that was tens of thousands of people had difficulty or a much slower more prolonged more legalistic in a sense process to finally get the ultra-fast broadband turned on.That is where the bill started with some small rats and mice around the telecommunications development levy and disputes resolution. But what the Commerce Committee was able to do based on submissions that we had heard particularly from Northpower was to include an entirely new subpart—Subpart 4—which gave it a drastically new power or provision in the legislation that allows for electricity lines companies to string fibre up or contract third parties to string fibre up.What it means is we spent more than $1 billion rolling out fibre and hundreds of millions of dollars on the rural broadband initiative to put up towers to reach people and all along there have been power lines strung up to almost every single property including rural properties in the country which we could have been stringing fibre up on. So we have grasped the opportunity based on the submissions to allow this. I think most people are going to be pretty happy with the provisions. We have seen previous arguments and debates in the past between landowners' rights and the right to be able to access: who is going to communicate with whom and who has liability issues. I think we have come to a very pragmatic and reasonable set of decisions there. There was an argument as to whether lines companies should be forced in effect to open up their infrastructure so that a third party could string fibre up. Again I think we have reached a pretty good compromise where the powers have been delegated to the Minister through Order in Council to provide those. But these are the practicalities and the common sense amendments we have introduced which people can see; what people probably did not see was the work behind the scenes. I think there is a salutary lesson perhaps for this House. What we saw in the committee was an entirely split committee so all decisions had to be reached by consensus unlike in the debating Chamber in our Parliament where the Government has quite considerable executive power in terms of the agenda and decision making. Such a close committee meant that we had to work together as a team in a constructive atmosphere trying to find consensus. On many issues we were not able to reach agreement but we worked through it.I would like to acknowledge the members. It was an incredible group of people to work with. First of all I would like to thank the officials and the select committee staff who gave us excellent advice. The chair Melissa Lee did a fantastic job bringing the parties together. I would like to acknowledge former communications Minister David Cunliffe who obviously had a huge amount of expertise in this area through to Clare Curran his colleague who has worked on these issues for many years and has a great deal of knowledge through to Brett Hudson from the National Government who came in with some very valuable contributions based on his background with IT in business. So it was a good committee which was able to reach agreement on the big issues that were facing it.We managed to write a whole new subpart to a bill which I have never seen in my 7 years in this Chamber. Hopefully it can be a bit of an exemplar for other select committees: that we are stronger when we work together. Other parties have differences but actually that is our strength. We can bring different opinions different viewpoints different backgrounds and different expertise to craft something stronger than what it originally was. So it was a great process and a great outcome for New Zealanders. It is going to see more fibre strung. It is hopefully a great example for this Parliament going forward that the parties can work together in a true collaborative select committee environment. Thank you.