Yang JianDr JIAN YANG (National): I rise to speak reasonably briefly on the Auckland Regional Amenities Funding Amendment Bill. First of all I thank the sponsor of the bill that's Parmjeet Parmar and she has been working very hard and I'm very pleased for you to introduce the bill to the committee. The Governance and Administration Committee welcomed the bill and we worked collaboratively on this particular bill to make the bill even better.Now basically the bill would replace a requirement for specific amenities—we have a list of amenities there—to prepare financial statements in accordance with New Zealand equivalents to International Financial Reporting Standards we call it NZ IFRS with a requirement to prepare in accordance with generally accepted accounting practice—that's GAAP. Now this means that the bill corrects an anomaly in the financial reporting requirements that apply to specific amenities. I emphasise that this is for specific amenities because we are limiting the bill to a certain list a list of amenities in Auckland—and that is very important to note. So this bill would allow the specified amenities to prepare a single set of financial statements instead of two; now we have two because of the problem of what we call the legislative overlook from 2015.So let me come to the particular development of this anomaly. What happened really is actually in 2015 the Charities Act 2005 was amended; it was amended to require that certain—certain—charitable entities prepare financial statements in accordance with GAAP. So to be consistent some other legislation work was done so some other Acts were amended. However the principal Act was not amended. So that caused a problem. That means the requirement under the Charities Act to prepare financial statements in accordance with GAAP is in addition to any other reporting requirements under any other enactment. So this is the problem. For that reason we believe that now we should correct that particular issue.These specific amenities were required because of an overlook—basically they had to do double financial statements. But in reality they didn't. So technically they have breached the particular Act because they didn't do two financial statements. So this particular bill will address that particular issue. For that reason when the select committee was considering the bill we made an amendment. Basically this amendment relates to retrospective validation—previous speakers mentioned all these amendments. So this is very important because otherwise these amenities technically broke the law so we need to make sure that we address what happened in the past. It's unusual but we believe it is necessary. We believe that this breach is minor so we should be able to address that.Another amendment of course Parmjeet Parmar also mentioned is the commencement date. We believe that we need to somehow specify the particular commencement date. I believe this bill is a minor bill but very useful. It is useful because—we are supporting this particular bill because we support communities. In Auckland these amenities play a quite important role in our life. So for example the Auckland Philharmonia orchestra—each year more than 250000 hear the orchestra live. So it's a large number of people. And then many people would of course listen to CDs and watch TV—all these. So it's very important we support amenities like this. And then you have New Zealand Opera and you have some others like the Auckland Arts Festival that's very important for ethnic minorities. And you have the Auckland Stardome observatory. I remember that I took my kids to the observatory. So all these amenities play a very important role in your life and therefore the bill is minor but is very useful. Thank you.