Sage Eugenie: Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 09 February 2016. Volume:711;Page:8801. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): E Te Māngai o Te Whare tēnā koe; tuarua ki ngā mema o tō tātou Whare tēnā koutou tēnā koutou tēnā koutou katoa.[Mr Deputy Speaker greetings to you. Secondly to the members of our House greetings salutations and acknowledgments to you all.]I am pleased to take a short call on the Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill. The Green Party is supporting this bill because we believe that we do need to strengthen the law to help communities recover from small or moderate-scale emergencies and to make that transition from responding to the emergency to focusing on the recovery. We recognise that the principal Act the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act does not provide adequately for the planning and management of recovery.When this bill was introduced in December my thoughts were with the thousands of families in places like Cumbria in Scotland and in Northern Ireland. They were being flooded sometimes for the second or third time in a decade. We had the floods in Chennai in Tamil Nadu in India where at least 280 people died. They were facing the risk of water-borne disease after those severe floods and 17 straight days of rain. That is precisely the kind of weather that we are experiencing more of and it is likely to become more common with a warming world.That is because warmer air holds more moisture. If we have global temperatures rising by 1.5 to 2 degrees this risk of extreme weather events becomes much more severe and we will have legislation like this being triggered more often. We have seen the misery of that here in New Zealand with the extensive flooding in South Dunedin in June 2015 and in Whanganui where there was record flooding. The river overflowed its banks and people were evacuated. In the rural catchments there was large-scale damage to farmland.We need to take action to reduce our emissions so that we reduce the threat of these severe weather events that we are getting with climate change. We need to prevent these emergencies by having a much more ambitious target to reduce our emissions—to have the fence at the top of the cliff rather than the ambulance at the bottom.We are certainly supporting this bill but we will be very interested in submissions because of the way in which the emergency powers that override normal law operate. Under the current legislation when a state of emergency ends the extraordinary powers that override normal law end as well. But the bill allows the Minister at the national level and mayors at the territorial level to direct that emergency powers continue beyond the emergency period through the mechanism of this transition notice. It allows the Minister to declare a 90-day transition period after the national state of emergency or if the transition phase warrants the use of extraordinary powers to stabilise the response and the transition into recovery to extend this for another 90 days.That means that the Minister or mayors can override normal legislation such as the Resource Management Act and can continue to exercise these extraordinary powers for up to 6 months. These powers include carrying out works preventing people from entering public places closing public roads and giving directions to stop any activity or to take any action. They are very broad powers. We have seen in Christchurch that residents were prevented from going into the central city where there was widespread demolition by the extraordinary powers that the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority used that overrode the Resource Management Act which prevented people from getting involved and having a say on demolition.The powers in this bill as the regulatory impact statement recognises are potentially too long in terms of the 90-day period before a reassessment needs to be made. We will be very interested in the submissions and in seeing what checks are needed on these powers how they are going to be reported on and what sorts of constraints there should be on the extraordinary powers. We recognise the defects that require the legislation to be amended but we think that the provisions for the transition notices and the extension of the extraordinary powers are not sufficiently constrained. We will be very interested in the submissions. Thank you.