Edmonds BarbaraBARBARA EDMONDS (Labour—Mana): Thank you Madam Speaker. Good to be able to take a call on the Natural Hazards Insurance Bill and to support it through the first reading. There are two certain things they say in life—that's death and taxes. I believe insurance is actually not far off it. If you look at history there are records going back to 4000 3000 BCE of insurance—of merchants going off to sea and the goods that are on board those ships being insured from land.Before I went into the scintillating area of tax and tax law I was a claims assessor for a fire and general insurance firm and I was also a private medical and travel insurer claims assessor. So I've had a little bit of history in the insurance industry. Anybody that's worked in the claims industry for the insurance industry you know that Monday mornings are always going to be difficult if it's been a wet and rainy weekend. I can recall very clearly being able to advise on particular claims on Monday mornings when all you see are people on the phones—your claims adjustors and claims advisers on the phone—and you see them put their hands up which is basically when a claims assessor and negotiator has to go on to the call and be able to work through a contract with people on the spot.There's no surprises that New Zealand does have a high insurance rate. Again many speakers in the House tonight have gone through why we do and that's obviously for a lot of the natural hazards that we've had. One of the areas that is always difficult when you are assessing claims is when you come to areas of what we call total losses. Total losses is where an insured has for whatever reason—whether it be due to a car accident or due to a fire; sometimes due to floods—absolutely lost everything for that insured property. It's not just around the actual physical loss of that house or that physical loss of whatever that property is; it comes with a big package of emotions. Most people here have some sort of sentimental connection to whatever the property is that they have or that they own. Particularly for New Zealand you can't get a mortgage without insurance so one of the biggest items that you're going to have in your entire life will be your house. It needs to be insured. If you go through the process of a total loss there are a lot of emotions that come with it.I was not in the insurance industry in 2011 during the Canterbury earthquakes. I was in the tax industry at that time. But I remember when those earthquakes happened I thought of my former colleagues and I thought of the stress that they would have to handle and to be able to support people that would come to them with insurance issues at that time. That's why it's really important for this bill that the Earthquake Commission—that a lot of the lessons that were learnt from those earthquakes have been brought forward through this bill.One of the areas that I'm going to be really interested in looking at and scrutinising as well as when we get submissions from the industry and from insured people themselves is clauses 55 to 83 in the bill and those are the clauses in relation to assessing deciding and settling claims. For example in clause 55 it requires the commission to decide whether a claim is valid and if it is to assess decide how to settle it and then settle the claim. This is a really good improvement on the previous policy because actually what it means is that the commission can now actually make a decision. Previously it was really difficult to. You'd need to go to court for it. What is also really good to see in this bill is that there's going to be some dispute resolution. Clause 58—again whether the claim is valid is a really important question which now the commission will have the authority to be able to decide on.So I'm really looking forward to being able to sit down with submitters to see what they say—whether the draft legislation meets the intention that is set out in the explanatory note of this bill. There's not much more that I want to say on this bill because actually I'm looking forward to it coming through to the Finance and Expenditure Committee. I'm looking forward to being able to see where we can improve this bill and I'd like to commend this bill to the House.Motion agreed to.Bill read a first time.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): The question is That the Natural Hazards Insurance Bill be considered by the Finance and Expenditure Committee. Motion agreed to.Bill referred to the Finance and Expenditure Committee.