McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Madam Chair. I was just sort of getting to the point where I thought there's a fair bit of waffle going on here so I thought I'd better add a bit of structure of the discussion. I wanted to firstly just thank the Minister in the chair for his opening remarks and remind him that a good dose of cynicism's a great thing provided that cynicism doesn't last too long. I do suffer from a little cynicism around this type of proposition because we don't always find that Governments follow the advice they're given and I accept that.First of all I want to talk about the commission itself because I think that the commission the people on the commission and the people who will be appointed that commission are hugely important. I think they've got plenty of talent and the ability to carry out the role that's being tasked to them and I certainly support—even though I do have a little cynicism about it—this New Zealand Infrastructure Commission/Te Waihanga Bill and the structure that it leads to. But I want to talk a little bit about infrastructure and I know we've spent most of the time—other than Paul Eagle's address about some of the airports—talking about roads here and I'm not going to do that except to say that one of the challenges we have in a small economy like New Zealand is that the people we have in business are hugely important and the knowledge they carry with them is also extremely important. That skill and experience they have with them and they have in businesses like contracting businesses and businesses that supply services to Governments and to councils and communities is hugely important.If we don't have a consistent stream of work coming on those people are very quickly lost in New Zealand because they're poached by overseas operators and they're gone and it's very hard to replace them in a small economy like this. The other thing that's obvious in this business I guess are big machines and some of us like big machines. We see them they do a massive amount of work they pull hillsides to bits very quickly build roads railways and other things. The challenge with that of course is they're hugely expensive and if those people that invest in those don't have confidence in the future infrastructure projects they won't invest in them. So it becomes much more expensive for us to replace the infrastructure in New Zealand than it does elsewhere in the world and that's very challenging for us as well.So it's critical for businesses involved in the infrastructure sector to have some continuity of work. The other thing that's very important to those businesses and might be completely unseen is the intellectual property they carry and the opportunity that we lose if we don't have a significant continuity of work in that area. Now I also think Andrew Bayly's Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) has some significant merit. I've never been that confident in my time in public life around how we do procure tenders or tender for contracts and work and other projects that we procure in the public sector and I'm not sure that there's an easy answer to it. But I do think it's a stream of work that needs some significant attention paid to it and this would have been one way of doing that. There obviously will be other ways we could do that should this SOP not be accepted.Now I want to just talk about one other area of infrastructure which I think's probably overlooked to a large extent when we discuss things like that and that's our defence forces. Some people have a great sea view. Some people have a great view of the back end of another building. I have a great view of Ōhākea air force base whether I like it or not every day. But the interesting thing about it is that our defence bases—three of the major ones which are in the Rangitīkei electorate interestingly—are very critical pieces of infrastructure for us and it's most important I think whether we're in defence whether we're in surveillance or whether we're just trying to protect our communities from climate events or whatever that we have that infrastructure and that we have it in a fashion and have it operating in a manner that can be picked up and used very quickly for whatever it's used for.As I said I look at Ōhākea air force base and I see an enormous amount of investment take place and then disappear and then four or five years later another Government comes along and another enormous amount of investment occurs and then they disappear again. I don't think we realise the breadth of work this commission is going to have to undertake. It's going to be very significant. So having said those few words I think that this bill is a very good one and I think it's well worth persevering with. I'll be very interested and my cynicism might be allayed to see how it proceeds as it goes through successive Governments. I won't see that many more of them of course.