Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): I am pleased to rise and take what I suspect will be my first call of several today and offer the Green Party's support for this bill along with the other parties in the House. Firstly I would like to acknowledge the people who lost family and friends in the quake and those who are no longer able to live in their houses or their apartments or whose lives have been turned on their heads and who are unable to resume their lives as they are used to them. We in this House clearly take your situation seriously and want to do our best by all of those people. I too want to add my thanks to the Acting Minister of Civil Defence for the process that we have been going through up to this point. There have been two meetings across parties where we have had a chance to consider drafts of the legislation in detail and amendments have been made up to this point. It is a really good process and it is Parliament working as I think most people would hope we worked more often.It is very rare for us in the Green Party to support legislation passing through all stages under urgency because we value the select committee process and public scrutiny and are very aware that a small group of heads is never as good as all the wise minds in this country. In this instance our members are comfortable seeing it pass through under urgency partly because a significant part of this bill is just bringing forward the commencement of a piece of legislation that we have so recently considered and debated. It was only you know 10 November when I was standing in the House talking to this bill at its third reading saying that we were very concerned—we realised how critical this legislation was and that it was about the balance between central power and local power and enabling communities—and we would be listening in the event of any event to communities very carefully to find out whether we had got the balance right or whether we had missed anything.I am on one hand gutted that we are back so quickly after having had an event but I am really pleased that actually part of bringing this back is that the Minister seems to have listened to those local councillors who told the Minister that there was a gap in the legislation that we needed to address—and that that is what we were doing. I was hoping it would be a longer time frame and we would not need to be doing this so quickly but here we are. That is the reality and we have identified a gap. I think that is the nature of disasters—we cannot think ahead of time what is going to happen and what we need—there does need to be process of constant iteration to make sure that our settings and policy and legislation are right.The key part of this piece of legislation is addressing and providing the legal certainty and backup for councils or recovery managers to be able to request or require a building assessment to be done and given and presented to them so that they can see that a building has been properly assessed. We do know that there are several benefits in that but first of all I will speak to some of the checks that were added to that through the cross-party discussions and acknowledge New Zealand First for one of the amendments that has come through around strengthening the requirement for that manager to have regard to whether the structure may cause harm. I think that does add a little bit more understanding of the purpose of these provisions in the bill: we want to prevent harm and provide kind of a chain of accountability to prevent harm.It is also for people to know that if an assessment is required and the building owner or structure owner thinks that is unreasonable they can go to the District Court and appeal that assessment. It will not stop them having to get the assessment done but if the court upholds their concern that it was unreasonable and did not meet the legislative requirement to ask for the assessment then they would get the costs back for that work. So that is also another check that is in this legislation—if any building or structure owner was concerned about that then we have thought through that balance of power.I would also just like to mention that there has been quite a bit of discussion in the debate so far about buildings and residential properties. Of course so many of us know people who are worried about sleeping at night in their residential properties. That is going to be an immediate concern but this also applies to structures that people may not be living in and so the owner of that structure may not have such an immediate prompt to get an assessment done. Maybe the council if it has that oversight of our areas would be more likely to identify whether there may be need for an assessment of a particular structure. So I think that is important for people to think about: that this is buildings it is homes and it is structures. The whole point is about preventing harm.I note that it is really good to hear too that Justin Lester the Mayor of Wellington has been in the media saying that this legislation when passed will be used by the council immediately—that it sees a very clear need for it. I assume that is where the desire for this clause has come from—and I think that is good. It has been traversed that some people are feeling unsure—which is a natural reaction after any significant event. An earthquake creates instability and uncertainty.We do know that this provision will also create a baseline where the council will know that these buildings have had an assessment and will know the standard of them. Some of the feedback through the Canterbury Earthquakes Royal Commission was that we should be seeking to have that baseline and standard so that if there are significant aftershocks then that can be our measure of the stability of those buildings at that time and then—if there is another aftershock—we will know the impact of that event on that baseline. So it is about the immediate safety of those buildings but it also helps us assess that over time in a way that I think is quite critical for those involved in the recovery to be able to manage. As I said the Green Party is very happy to support this legislation.