Faafoi KrisKRIS FAAFOI (Labour—Mana): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker and thank you for the opportunity to speak to this piece of legislation. I hope you will indulge me because I am not sure whether I am going to get another chance to speak in the House this week and I want to take the chance to thank the messengers in the House who are leaving Parliamentary Service at the end of this week. I can see Pauline Philip and Pat in the House at the moment and Judy—and I think that is Sue—up in the gallery. Thank you for the many years of service that you have given to us. We work in a very unique environment and sometimes it can be very political and I would like to thank you all for the professionalism you have shown over the years in my experience as an MP and wish you all the best. I am very lucky—being a Wellington MP I will see many of you when you leave this place. I think I will see Bob and Trevor on the platform at Porirua train station as I do on a regular basis. I thank you all for your service and wish you all the best. Can I also acknowledge the 13000 men and women I think it is who make up our Fire Service whether they are volunteers or professional firefighters in our communities. Like many other members have done I take an opportunity to thank them for their particular services and I would like to thank the Titahi Bay Plimmerton and Paekākāriki volunteers. I live very close to the Titahi Bay Fire Station and quite often get woken by the alarm. Also can I thank the Tawa Porirua and Paraparaumu professional firefighters for the job they do and the contribution they make to the community. It is an enormous change that we are seeing being heralded through with this piece of legislation and can I acknowledge the Minister in charge of this legislation the Hon Peter Dunne. Having read through a lot of the documents and the regulatory impact statement I see there has been a lot of consultation with a lot of community groups to put this piece of legislation together. I do acknowledge the Minister for that. There are major changes that cover governance structure—a change in the funding model—which I am sure we will have a submission on from the Insurance Council of New Zealand. I think this piece of legislation does recognise the changed nature of the work of our professional and volunteer fire services whether they are urban or rural. While we are looking at some of these big picture issues with this legislation certainly when I have been speaking to some of my volunteer fire service people they do not want to let this piece of legislation go through and miss an opportunity for them to their job more effectively. When I speak about that I want to make a comment about subpart 3 in Part 2—it sounds like a bit of a Committee stage speech—which goes to the formation and approval of a code of practice for firefighting water supply. That might seem slightly mundane but it is certainly an issue that my volunteer fire service has brought to me around the issue of training. The responsibility of the upkeep of the fire hydrants in the street—at least in my area; that of the Porirua City Council—is the responsibility of both the professional and local volunteer firefighters. They have had some issues around the maintenance and upkeep of those because every time they have to go and do that they have to put in place a traffic management plan. That has been an issue for them especially for the volunteer firefighters in terms of having the people who are accredited—qualified—to do that the time and potentially the expense that it takes to do that which has caused a great level of frustration within the volunteer fire service. So I look forward to submissions in the select committee. When we look at the firefighting water supply one of the issues I think we have to look at is in terms of training and maintenance of some of those fundamental things. I sit on the Government Administration Committee. I would encourage volunteer firefighter services around the county if this is a particular issue for them—and it certainly is for the Plimmerton fire service in Porirua—to submit to that as well. Another issue around the security of water supply for firefighting is that under the current Fire Service Act section 30(1)(b) says that firefighting services should have the use of all water in any river creek stream watercourse channel lake lagoon well tank or other source of water supply whatsoever for the purpose of extinguishing any fire or stabilising or rendering safe any hazardous substance emergency." In English I think that means that if there is some water there and they need it to fight a fire then they have access to it. The issue again is around training. Some of our volunteer firefighter services need to train and in some areas that particular aspect—the water and the areas around it—is challenging. They have been told "Oh you can go and use the local school pool." but it does not quite match up to the real conditions that they may be faced with if they are asked to take water out of one of those bodies of water. They have asked for permission from the Greater Wellington Regional Council to be able to practise that. They have taken the water out and put the water straight back in but they have found the red tape and the bureaucracy around being able to do that very frustrating. If we are going to give firefighters the power to be effective and give them the ability to use these types of water supplies in an emergency then we have to get real about letting them train in those situations. Otherwise they will get into a situation where they need that water to fight a fire and they will think well "There goes the pond." or "There goes the lake." or "There goes the lagoon." but when they get there they will come up against something that they have not foreseen and have not been able to train for and that is going to be problematic. That was a real scenario where one of my volunteer fire services said "Hey look we will take the water out then we will put the pipe back in."—so the water is essentially just going through the hose—"Can we do that?" and it has been prevented from doing that. That is one of the practical issues—[Interruption] Yes I think it is a very strange issue Mr Assistant Speaker and that is why I think that these are some of the practical things that I would like the Government Administration Committee to look at during the select committee process. I would encourage as many volunteer and professional fire service personnel who share those frustrations to make a submission during the select committee process. I think that Part 2 subpart 3 around the code of practice around firefighting water supplies is good because it compels Fire and Emergency New Zealand to work with local committees any local authorities and the New Zealand standards organisations to get that code right. I am thinking that that has been set up to make sure that some of these impracticalities around training for some of its scenarios can be sorted out so that we do not have what I would call a silly situation where it cannot do practical training. So there is that issue around supply and of practice and training around water and also the issue of having to have a traffic management plan for doing something as simple as setting up and checking a fire hydrant and seeing whether it is fit for purpose if it was to need it. These kinds of issues are frustrating for lot of volunteer fire service personnel who have been in the service for decades. If we can ensure that we can sort out what are in my mind these very small issues—get them sorted—then we will have these volunteers around for 5 or 10 years to come and will address the issue that we have with recruiting more people to the likes of volunteer fire services and to firefighting. If we lose that body of experience because of these niggly little issues it will be to the detriment of all of our communities because we will not have those people there who can give their knowledge on to the next generation of volunteer fire services.I am looking forward to the select committee stage. There is plenty to look at but as many of my colleagues have said at this stage we will support it. We think it is a good change—a change that brings the Fire Service into the modern era and also fits the purpose. Thank you."