Tolley Anne; Bidois DanCORONERS (ACCESS TO BODY OF DEAD PERSON) AMENDMENT BILLThird ReadingDebate resumed from 13 December.DEPUTY SPEAKER: When the House was debating this last Jan Tinetti had the call. She has three minutes to speak should she so wish. That was one of the split calls so I call Dan Bidois.DAN BIDOIS (National—Northcote): It's a pleasure today to speak at the third reading of the Coroners (Access to Body of Dead Person) Amendment Bill. Now I know that speaking about death can be a bit sombre for some but it's actually a really important topic for us to consider today. And I just want to acknowledge the Māori Affairs Committee—not only the current Māori Affairs Committee but the select committee from the previous—the 51st—Parliament which originally considered the recommendations which led us to the bill in the House today.The bill that we're considering is pretty simple. It requires the coroner to consider tikanga Māori and the expectations of other cultures when determining whether someone can remain with a dead person. Really it's about cultural considerations.It's a pretty small bill. I mean as we can see here it's only about a couple of pages long. But it's actually a really important change that we're considering to be making here today. What we're talking about is essentially amending section 26 of the Act which allows and requires the coroner to in fact consider cultural considerations when they're interacting with a dead person. And the coroner does have that discretion at this moment and often does work with whānau when this is required. But this bill essentially enshrines this as a mandate—that the coroner must in fact consider cultural and other religious or ethnic intricacies when referring to whether they can remain with a dead person.So the impact of this bill is pretty clear. There's about 31000 deaths per year in New Zealand and about 20 percent or one in five of those are referred to a coroner so that's about 6000 on average. So the 6000 that we're talking about—section 32 of the current Act sets out the criteria that the coroner should have in mind when for example considering whether to conduct a post-mortem. And the amendment bill that we're considering is really about bringing in the ethnic origins or social attitudes or customs or spiritual beliefs in order to give the coroner a bit more intricacy when making that decision that's required for many different cultures.And I think for those out there in the public—certainly in Māori culture it's really important and I can imagine for other cultures it's important to possibly remain with a dead person for a number of days. And so this bill essentially enables the coroner the discretion or the mandate to in fact do that on a case by case basis.And so the Māori Affairs Committee from the previous Parliament made a number of recommendations to this Parliament. The recommendation that we're considering in this bill is one of those recommendations but I thought it would be worthwhile just running through a number of other recommendations that have also been accepted by this Government around developing a code of best practice that balances cultural considerations with the public interest in finding the cause of death.Other recommendations are around making sure there's a code of conduct in place.Simon O'Connor: A what sorry?DAN BIDOIS: A code of conduct. That's my honourable colleague the Hon Simon O'Connor just wanting a little bit more information on that matter. So essentially this about enshrining that requirement in the law so that the coroner must take into account these ethnic differences when considering whether whānau should have access to and remain with the body of a dead person.So this bill in summary is a pretty simple change to the legislation. It's about improving our cultural awareness and the National Party stands very happy to support this bill.