Kuriger BarbaraBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country): Thank you Mr Speaker. That previous speaker Carmel Sepuloni started off talking about the good the bad and the ugly and I have to say in a nicer kinder Christmas spirit I don't think that was exactly a great way to start a speech.But what I do want to say is that it is a privilege—it's an absolute privilege—to be the senior whip for such a strong awesome party led by the Hon Simon Bridges. It's an absolutely awesome team doing some great work and at least in our party at least in our National caucus we know who's in charge. Sometimes as a senior whip you get little tasks to do in the House and I've just had a note passed to me today—because we quite often wonder who is in charge of the three parties over the other side. I've just had a note passed to me in the House from someone who says it looks like the Rt Hon Winston Peters dropped this [Holds up paper with No" written on it] on his way to the House. So we have no doubt in our minds around who's actually in charge of this current Government.Now there are a couple of things I would like to say about this year. One of them is the number of working parties that have been put in place: 200-plus working parties. It's a sign of a Government who when in Opposition didn't do the homework. The homework is about getting out in the communities and engaging with those communities and that's what we do on a regular basis. We are out and about we are getting engaged we are doing our homework and we will come to the Government in 2020 with a very strong plan.The second thing that is not well understood on the other side of the House—this has been a year of idealism. I have to say coming from Taranaki the whole idea of just transition around oil and gas is the biggest farce I have ever seen. I do not think that this Government understands the word "transition" at all. There is nothing just about what's happened this year. You need a plan; otherwise you create a chasm and when you get a chasm you have no way of finding your way to the future.On a positive note now I would like to put a call-out to all the people who are going to be working in the emergency services in our hospitals our fire brigades our people who work in St John and all the other emergency people while we might be going off on a holiday we might be going to spend some time with our families—and I hope that you all are because Christmas is a wonderful time to do that. Every time I go to a fire brigade function I realise that every time the fireperson is called out the family's plans are interrupted and so there is often no busier time of the year for all our emergency services than right now in this Christmas period. So I want to wish them all very well.I also would like to wish all of our primary producers in our rural communities great weather for the coming summer. We hope to get enough rainfall to keep the production going but we also like to have enough sunshine so that families can enjoy their camping and their holidays at the beach. So it is really important after seeing some really significant droughts last year that we hope for them and wish them the best summer and the best autumn this year.I also want to make mention of our families because often people ask what sacrifices we make when we go into Parliament and become members of Parliament. Well it's actually the people who support us in our families who make the biggest sacrifices for us because this becomes our life and they become the people who work very hard in the background to sustain the lifestyle that we sign up to. So I think all families should be mentioned at this time of the year.Then importantly I want to thank all of our teams all of our executive assistants all of our out-of-Parliament teams all of the people who work so hard in here to feed us to get our paperwork sorted to organise our days to organise our diaries the people that come round at night and clean our offices so that they are ready to go first thing in the morning. This place is a humming little town all of its own and it never shuts down. I think it's really important that people realise it's not just the question time and the time we have in the House; it's the people that work around here 24/7 on our behalf and I just want to say thank you and thank you to you Mr Speaker for what you've done. Thank you."