Bakshi Kanwaljit SinghKANWALJIT SINGH BAKSHI (National): Thank you Mr Chair for the opportunity to speak on the Appropriation (2017/18 Confirmation and Validation) Bill. First of all I would like to talk about the Office of Ethnic Communities. Before I do that I would like to congratulate and welcome Paulo Garcia another ethnic MP who has joined our team today. Now we have got six MPs of Asian origin in this House and Paulo Garcia is the sixth one and the first Filipino. As the National Party has always done this it has brought the diversity into this Parliament—the first Chinese the first Indian and the first Korean and today the first Filipino MP has been brought in by the National Party. So I congratulate him. As I mentioned I will be talking about ethnic communities. In May 2018 the Office of Ethnic Communities organised a Safer Ethnic Communities Ministerial Forum in South Auckland. What was disappointing was to see that the members of ethnic communities who are represented in this House were not invited. When we asked why other ethnic MPs other than the Government MPs were not invited the answer was that it is the Government's responsibility not our responsibility. So it was disappointing for us because we want our communities to be safe and we want to contribute and that opportunity was missed. I would also like to talk about a very important area which comes under the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA): Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ). It has got a big role. We know that about 14000 career volunteer and support personnel who keep people and property safe are part of the Fire and Emergency New Zealand team. I would like to acknowledge their contribution to our country. FENZ revenue in 2017-18 was $612 million which was a significant increase in revenue from $418 million. This is a very important thing which we need to understand: there was a bill which was passed recently through this House where they will have this increased budget for the next four years. That is important to understand—that the people who are paying their insurances will have to pay extra premium for the next four years. We supported this because we want to ensure that FENZ is properly funded. Having that much of a surplus is just a burden on the insurance payers and this levy should be revised. The Minister of Internal Affairs who has been very cooperative in talking about this and I would like to acknowledge her hopefully will consider reviewing this levy structure and reducing it for the next three to four years so that the people who are paying the extra levy should get some relief. Another thing which I would like to touch upon from this financial performance of FENZ is that there is an existing drive on the levy and we saw that the expenditure of FENZ is not increasing in comparison to what the revenue is. So we need to understand that this levy structure is unfair to the people who are paying their insurance. I would also like to touch upon the passport service. Same thing over there—we have got increased passport fees and the revenue has increased from $34 million to $55 million which means that they will have extra funding. We know that the questions were raised to the DIA around why we are increasing this passport fee. That is another area in which people don't realise that has been implemented in the last year. We also know that the time period for the passport has also increased from five to 10 years. We understand that the validity of the 10-year passport will see the reduction in the numbers.