SpeechIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Mr Speaker. I don't often get a go in one of these debates. It's a long time. I can't remember the last one. I might have written this speech for it. It's a pleasure to take a call in the debate on the Prime Minister's statement which wasn't really a statement about the future actually; more a statement about the dreadful effects of Cyclone Gabrielle—and of course that was very appropriate; I bet there won't be too many Gabrielles born in the next year or two in the Hawke's Bay!Before I get into what I wanted to talk about I wanted to acknowledge the three former members of the House who have passed away in the past week. I know that everyone else has done this as well. But a person that I considered a friend was Chester Borrows and certainly my neighbouring MP—he had a wonderful send-off. I suppose if you can have a wonderful send-off that's great but you don't really want to have it when you're 65. Paul East another lovely man and a person I had a great deal of respect for. And Georgina Beyer who served as a mayor as I did at the same time and the interesting discussions I often had with Georgina when the meetings got a little boring—we'd be out the back doing nefarious things and she was a very interesting person. She was also a very courageous New Zealander and I did enjoy my association with her in her time as the mayor.Like so many other New Zealanders I have family members living in the affected areas of New Zealand—those areas affected significantly by Cyclone Gabrielle. I know many of those not affected physically in those areas will feel a sense of sort of helplessness of guilt and won't really know what they can do to help. That's a very challenging thing for a community where you've got one half of the community badly affected by an event and the other half not affected at all. So I think it's going to take some time for that to resolve itself.From experience of the Manawatū floods of 2004 all I can say is that money is required above all else. Time will also be required to establish how best to provide personal assistance where that can best be used. I think the other thing that's very challenging for these regions at times like this is the mass of people and a surplus of donations arriving in those areas and then needing to be dealt with. It's a very challenging thing for those areas that suffer from those floods.The statement I was particularly interested in the Prime Minister making was that we'll build back better. Well from experience that too is a problem as we need the roads reopened and the houses where possible rebuilt as quickly as we can. Build back better" is really a play on words and cannot occur without much planning and a look into the future which historically we've been very bad at in New Zealand. This is yet another lesson for us; we've had plenty in the past and our ability to build back better has not been great.We now have the third iteration of this Labour Government—and I'll explain why in a minute—and to date all it's done is cancel most of the work of the second version. And of course the first one did nothing to cancel. I've even heard from one of the members opposite that this is now called the "Hipkins Government"—hence my reference to the third iteration; maybe they want to cancel their association with Labour as well!The extraordinary events of the past few weeks on the East Coast Auckland Coromandel and Northland and actually in some parts of my region as well where the Pohangina River and the Ōroua River carrying that Hawke's Bay rain out to sea have done an extraordinary amount of damage to a number of properties on the border of those. In fact the damage there is as significant as it was in 2004.The real challenges facing New Zealand are our economy the rising interest rates—and our climate change response I think is also an issue that we need to debate as a Parliament and politicians in the next year or so. Rising interest rates may well dampen house prices and some of the discretionary spend but it also dampens economic growth and our productivity as businesses no longer develop new innovative products—or take risks for that matter—unemployment rises and recession sets in. Not an ideal cycle for a country aspiring to higher productivity and salaries.Our response to climate change is an area I want to spend a minute or so on. I'll start with an example from the past and that was our response to land damaged by Cyclone Bola. Randomly planting pine trees to stabilise land has proved to be no answer. Randomly planting pine trees to offset carbon credits equally is no answer. It's my view that we need to have a significant review of where we're at with this business. Obviously the review into woody debris in the Gisborne region is welcome and there will be much-needed work to do as a result of that to decide just how we deal with this in the future. It's a significant issue for New Zealand.We live in challenging times and challenging brains will be needed to resolve some of the issues that we've got in the next short while. Thank you."