SpeechIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Oh thank you Mr Speaker. First of all I want to thank the House for their tolerance tonight. Interestingly I had my whole team in Parliament today and we'd decided we'd have our Christmas party tonight so that's why I was absent at the beginning of it and I felt that my team are more important than my bill. But none the less this piece of legislation is a very important bill.It's a pleasure to take a call late in the debate on what I think is quite a good little bill. I want to thank Michael Woodhouse in particular for leading the debate on my behalf on this bill. He also sat on the Governance and Administration Committee as did a number of other people in the House Rachel Boyack in particular who's the deputy chair of the select committee that heard this bill.The bill came about as a result of a discussion the Rt Hon Winston Peters was having with himself one day as he often did and Chris Bishop happened to overhear it. He then drew this bill up actually as a result of the comments that Mr Peters had made about the fact that he felt the racing industry was to some extent I guess being victimised by the way the licences were interpreted and particularly relating to what's turned out now to be the small racing clubs in New Zealand. When the bill was entered in the ballot it didn't relate to the small racing clubs; it related to all racing clubs. I think the select committee have done a very good job of tidying that bit of it up.I guess that my point with this bill was that and I go back quite a long way when I started off going to the races when I was extremely young we used to go along in the back of the car and sit around the racecourse and have a nice time—actually picking up the wasted tickets a lot and seeing if we couldn't find a ticket that was still live and sometimes we did and cashing them in. But besides that it was a family outing basically and I think for a lot of people it still is a family outing but only once or twice a year. So that's what appealed to me about this bill.As we discussed in the select committee quite a lot of issues arose with respect to—we had submitters who talked a lot about the damage that alcohol does. I think we all accept that excesses of everything do damage. This bill's not actually about the consumption of alcohol; this bill is about getting people to race meetings particularly in our small rural areas enabling us to have a nice day out and go home at night safe and having had a rewarding day.So in my view there's a big difference between what the alcohol watch groups and those people concerned with alcohol consumption—there's a lot of them and I've got no problem with them—felt was a challenge and what the bill was designed to deal with which was nothing to do with the consumption of large amounts of alcohol.So having got through that point we had quite a number of submissions from small racing clubs who really felt the bill in the form we introduced it would add quite a lot of value to their opportunity to I guess make things easier for them to enable them to do what they wanted to do with their race days without having to provide a massive facility to achieve it. The problem with the facility is that to achieve alcohol licences there's quite a lot of facilities required. Many of these small racing clubs don't have those facilities and aren't able to provide them so to be able to offer a BYO opportunity at the races is quite a significant advantage to them.So I've talked about the submissions from the smaller racing clubs who were extremely supportive of it. What I found very disappointing was there were two submissions one from New Zealand Thoroughbred Racing and one from the Waikato Racing Club opposing the bill. I must say I wondered what they were thinking because they both occupy very important spaces in the racing industry—an industry that's struggling for owners for jockeys for participants and for support. I think that historically that support has come from rural New Zealand. Rural and provincial New Zealand have provided a large number of race horse owners a large number of jockeys a large number of trainers and a large number of people interested in the industry. Many of them have come out of small towns. I myself would probably have never got in the racing industry if I hadn't been involved at a very young age with a two licence-day racing club where I later trained horses. And today I still race a quite a number of horses.And I think I'm an example of someone who may never have gotten involved in racing if it hadn't been for those small racing clubs—those small isolated to some extent racing clubs—and Tangi Utikere talked about the race clubs and the club I was part of was one of those: the Rangitikei Racing Club. It hosts two race meetings a year—it wouldn't qualify for this because it's part of the race group. But there's a large number of small clubs particularly in the South Island that will qualify for this and I think will be very interested in the potential to use this bill to enable them to run a race meeting in a much easier form than they otherwise could've.I just wanted to turn to the select committee report—and I heard some discussion I think from Rachel Boyack particularly on this earlier on. We had quite a debate on this issue in the select committee because I think we all felt—and an interesting point about this: all of the select committee interestingly voted for this bill to go to select committee which is quite interesting. So we all voted for it to go to select committee and we didn't feel it was our role to then recommend a course of action to the House. We felt despite our own feelings that our role was to put this bill in as good of a space as we could and send it back to the House for a debate to be taken by the Parliament as a whole. And that's where we got to as a select committee. As a consequence of that we've written to the Standing Orders Committee and suggested that they change the rules with respect to these sorts of members' bills and bills that relate to conscience. I think there's been about three or four of them in my time in the House that have come back and they have with one exception had recommendations back to the House. The one exception was the euthanasia bill; it had some special conditions around it and so I'd be interested to see where we get to with respect to the Standing Orders Committee and what they recommend back to the House.So we made three very small changes to the bill: we updated references to the Racing Industry Act 2020 as when the bill was written it referred to the Racing Act 2003. We amended Section 235A(1)(a) to insert the word small" into the bill to ensure the bill would only apply to those clubs described as small in the Racing Industry Act 2020 so the effect of the definition comes from the Racing Act 2020 and I think it's most appropriate. We also recommended replacing "racing club" with "small racing club" and proposed Section 235A(2)(b).This industry has struggled in New Zealand in recent years and any little glimmer of hope that we can give it by making things easier for our small racing clubs to involve local people in an industry that ah—whatever we think of it contributes significantly to the New Zealand economy and contributes significantly to rural and provincial New Zealand. Whatever glimmer of hope we can give them in the course of that I think is of huge value to the industry.So I think we've got this bill in as good of a space as we can; I'd urge members to support the bill at second reading and hope that we can make some progress and obviously if we get through second reading we can sort out any further issues that members have with respect to the bill in the committee stage. But I do want to thank the select committee for the work they've put into it; I want to thank all the members of the House really for the consideration they've given me tonight and also I guess to a large extent at first reading and we'll see where it gets to tonight.So that's probably all I need to say; I think everything's been said by the many members who have spoken on it so thank you for the opportunity; and obviously I commend this bill to the House and hope that it gets some support. Thank you Mr Speaker."