SpeechHon DAVID BENNETT (National): Thank you Mr Speaker. I concur with the last speaker David Parker and also Gerry Brownlee's speech in that there are a number of people that want a fast efficient Government to actually do something to help them in their time of need. And that's why the National Party is supporting this bill—Simon Court: Well it's only two months to bring this legislation to the House.Hon DAVID BENNETT: —and it needs to happen in that manner. The ACT member has just said something there and I agree with a lot of what he said actually in his speech but the reality is that when you're a Minister in these kind of situations 80 or 90 percent of the decisions you'd make would be the same as a reasonable person whatever colour party you were. They are just the reasonable decisions that need to be made to help people in time of need and to rebuild. It's not about policy dimensions necessarily. If the road to Coromandel needs rebuilding it needs rebuilding and that's the reality of it. And I don't believe that in the New Zealand Parliament those kinds of situations would be taken in a context which would be misused in that sense. So we have faith in the Labour Ministers to make those right calls just like we expect them to have faith in us and ACT and Green and New Zealand First or whichever Ministers there may be in the future that have to make those calls at another point in time. That's the reality of having a small Parliament and a small country—that you can actually enable that to happen. In saying that though the ACT member did raise some really good issues around what we actually look at as a country about resilience. These events probably started with Christchurch as the major event that nobody had anticipated. And then you've got the Hawke's Bay and Gisborne at the moment. The next one will come and it may be weather related it may actually be biosecurity related it may be something else but there is something else that will come and it's not necessarily climate change. It may be some other thing that happens and we are not resilient as a country. We do not have plans around that and that's really the point I think the ACT member was getting across. And I agree with that 100 percent. We do not think of those things here. It's OK to have plans of rebuild and suchlike but we have got some foreseeable risks in this country and some risks which you can't foresee and I would put Christchurch in the unforeseeable sort of category. Nobody thought that was going to happen to that degree. But there are some foreseeable risks especially around this city that we know will happen at some point. Are we resilient around that? No we're not; not at all. There are foreseeable risks around the connection between Auckland and Whangārei. Are we resilient around that? No we aren't. There should be a decent road there and people shouldn't have to go through little tracks to join one of our biggest cities to our major city. Those resilience issues need to be agreed upon. That's really what this shows. We trust Kieran McAnulty and his team to make the right calls in this case and we will give the people of the Hawke's Bay and the Gisborne the support they need for that Minister and other Ministers to make the right calls. We will do that. But at the same time New Zealand needs to work out what we're actually going to do about resilience for Northland what we're going to do around resilience here for our Governments and those sort of things that are foreseeable. They're there. You can see them. We've had enough events happen that you can see how Northland gets cut off from Auckland and there needs to be something done about that. Tim van de Molen: Waikato cut off from Tauranga. Hon DAVID BENNETT: Now Mr Tim van de Molen has gone to the next point in my speech which was the advantage of Hamilton as providing the resilient option of no issues at all! You know the place that will not flood the place that will not have an earthquake and the place that will be the safest place in New Zealand for Governments and such like. But we won't go there too far because the reality is we're dealing with serious issues that people are facing in their communities at the moment. But if you were actually looking at resilience that Auckland Hamilton Tauranga area is undervalued in New Zealand for what it can do for the resilience of this country.Ian McKelvie: It's got the odd volcano.Hon DAVID BENNETT: Yeah it has and you never know that may be the issue as Ian McKelvie says. But that's the option that we have as a Parliament which is to look forward and to look at those foreseeable things and try and resolve those. There's always going to be the unforeseeable that we can't deal with. So in this case we support the Labour Party Ministers and give them the ability to do what they need to do. They don't need three-year legislation to do that. These things need to be happening in the next couple of months—the big decisions. If you need three years to work this out then there's something wrong. Kieran McNulty and his team I bet you will have three or four big decisions they need to make in the next couple of weeks and they need to happen now. We don't need to elongate this too long in the sense of that power base for Ministers. We also need that accountability and it's great for David Parker to talk about Cabinet having that role but we don't actually know how that would work in practice and we haven't seen how that would be defined. All we got is Cabinet saying that they're going to make a decision in the best interests of New Zealanders. That's not the accountability that actually the Ministers will require by having people that they can put some pressure on to get things done. And it's not the accountability that the public or this institution actually would require. So for the best interests of actually the Ministers making the decisions now they need the accountability that Gerry Brownlee talked about to get things done. So my plea is that this place actually looks at some of those foreseeable risks. We will be doing legislation like this again soon and we don't know what it's going to be on. But there are some things that we do know—we have risks in the economy—and we don't do anything about it. And you can look through a couple of examples that we've talked about here now and that's really the issue that we should be putting our mind to. This is a done deal. This needs to happen. This needs to give the Ministers the ability to do what they need to do. But the reality is that we're going to have bigger problems in the future and we need to work out how we deal with those.Debate interrupted.