Scott AlastairALASTAIR SCOTT (National—Wairarapa): I thought Dan Bidois was going to take a call as he stood up to take a glass of water or something. I thought Have I got the right seat?" But I do.It is a pleasure to rise in support of this bill. I would like to acknowledge also Nick Smith the member who initiated what we are debating and finalising today. It does take some time. I also would like to acknowledge Darroch Ball the chairman of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee and also all the members of the committee. It was certainly a constructive committee. It was a committee that recognised that there were some issues in the original bill. It acknowledged the importance of the various interests involved. When we appoint someone with power—an officer—to do certain things and have certain rights which will override essentially private property rights it's important to make sure that that balance is sensible fair reasonable and acceptable to the community because if it is not acceptable to those people then of course people just would not accept it and they would not allow officers of the territorial local authority to carry out their duties in an orderly manner.I understand that during the Christchurch earthquakes that was not the case but you can imagine a situation where you have some service trying to get into a building to assess the damage to make some decisions on whether the building should be closed down barricaded or demolished and someone holds the whole process up because it is their property and they have the right to not allow this official into their property—"I will not allow you to carry out these inspections." and so on and so forth. So they're the two balancing interests that we're talking about and the committee was aware of the sensitivity around private property rights and we struck I think a very good balance.It is important and as has been explained already there are three levels of risk. It is important that someone is in charge—that there is an officer that has the authority to do certain things and that we don't have a bunch of chiefs and no Indians. In this case we have a chief a person who has the authority to direct certain actions and that's for the benefit of the community—to enable for example police or fire services through a particular area. It might mean barricading certain areas off to the inconvenience of some but for the benefit of the majority. So those powers are essential for those actions to take place and that is a very good part of the bill.It was also constructive in the committee when we considered heritage buildings. That wasn't initially in the proposal and we banged that around and we got to a good space there to consider those historic buildings when considering action to be taken.The second part of the bill was the learning experience that any disaster is going to bring and again it enables the Ministry for Business Innovation and Employment officials to investigate in places where some might say they obviously did not have the power to do so prior to this bill. It enables them to go in to ask engineers "Right I want to see those plans that were used to construct this building." I want some information from the architect to say 'How on earth did you manage to design this building? It fell over and it's only 10 years old. Where was the professionalism? Where was the information? How did you arrive at this decision?' "—so that we can learn from the disaster so that it might not happen again and so that the professions can learn as well and to give an openness and transparency that was not there before the bill.So that's the second part of the bill which certainly adds to the learning the ability of the community to ensure that this experience of the earthquakes in Kaikōura and Christchurch can be of benefit. Because of course what are we? The Shaky Isles. We will have another earthquake. We will have another issue. We will have tsunamis. We will have natural disasters. Who knows we might even have a volcano go off in Auckland. It will happen it's a matter of timing and we need to be prepared for it and this bill goes a long way towards that. I commend this bill to the House."