Sage Eugenie; Tisch LindsayEUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. I am pleased to take a short call on the Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill for the Green Party and also to record my appreciation of the work done by the many volunteers in civil defence that was obvious in the large-scale event of the Christchurch earthquake. There was huge cooperation with the local volunteer fire brigade and the volunteers were working really hard to provide for people's immediate needs for water and some sense of reassurance in the immediate aftermath of that huge disaster.It is true that this legislation helps move from the immediate response phase to the recovery. There was quite a lot of concern in submissions about the need to ensure that there were the right safeguards around the exercise of emergency powers. We were very pleased to see the changes made by the Government Administration Committee that require greater consultation with affected councils in terms of their mayors and with the relevant civil defence emergency management groups where there is a transition notice being put in place or being extended. It was certainly the experience of Christchurch as Jan Logie has noted where central Government responded in that recovery phase by saying that emergency powers were still needed. Those emergency powers continued for far too long. They were far too extensive. Then it undermined recovery because people felt alienated. They did not feel that they were involved in key decisions about the city's future.Others have commented that this is the first stage of a significant and larger-scale review of the provisions around large-scale events. Well there has been very little transparency around that. We had the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment at the Local Government and Environment Committee this morning and we were questioning her about her report on sea-level rise and the recommendation in that report that a working party be established of Government officials and stakeholders like the insurance industry to look at how we respond to sea-level rise and how we are prepared for that. Treasury has only spent an hour talking with the parliamentary commissioner even though she has done a substantive report about sea-level rise.We need to be looking in a much more comprehensive way at how we respond to natural hazards and how we prevent some of the worst effects of the more intense storm events and the more frequent flood events that we will get with a changing climate. That is of course as well as doing so much more to actually reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. We have not seen the Government dealing with that issue of natural hazards. The Minister for the Environment Nick Smith seems to think that if you put natural hazards in the Resource Legislation Amendment Bill as a matter of national importance that will deal with the issue.But communities are really struggling with how to control development in areas that are at risk of flooding and that are at risk of coastal erosion. If councils do seek as Kāpiti and Christchurch sought to control that development through rules in their plans property owners do not like the decline in property values. They push back. So there is a very limited ability to prevent development in areas that are prone to flooding.It is avoiding effects that we are concerned about in the Green Party rather than just responding to effects. There needs to be a much wider national conversation about how we adapt to climate change and the Government is utterly failing to show any leadership there. We have not even had the Government being open about its plans to review the Earthquake Commission legislation and whether there is scope there for setting up an insurance scheme for the effects of other natural disasters that are related to climate change.This bill is a good bill as far as it goes but it does not deal with the much greater severity of flood events or the impacts of sea-level rise and coastal erosion that we are going to get because the Government is failing to do our fair share in relation to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and avoiding the worst effects of climate change.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I call Poto Williams—5 minutes.