Shaw JamesHon JAMES SHAW (Minister for Climate Change): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's always a pleasure to follow Chris Bishop in any debate actually. But I wanted to start because it did sort of rove into the partisan with that last speech. I always find it amusing in the House when we're sort of caught furiously agreeing with each other about something and this appears to be one of those cases where we've got bipartisan support. I actually do want to acknowledge Mr Bishop for his original member's bill which we supported back in the previous Parliament which we thought was excellent and of course has laid the foundation for this. His quibbles about timeliness of the amendments aside I think that that was a good piece of work and I'm glad that we are in a position to be able to build with it now. I note as Mr Bishop said in his speech that it is a small bill a 20-clause bill. It's not terribly complex. That in some ways was reflected in the low number of submissions. There were only 16 written submissions and I think five verbal submissions that the select committee had to hear. Not a great deal of amendments. Again I think that suggests that we got the general direction of the legislation right and that people agree with it. It is generally the more contentious stuff obviously where you get huge numbers of submissions and people take that as an opportunity to try and lobby for a position. So I have some confidence that actually the low number of submissions isn't a reflection of people's disinterest but a sense that we've got it right and people are pretty happy with the direction of travel. So I am really pleased that we are in a position to be able to forward the legislation ahead.I just wanted to reflect on a couple of the core pieces which Mr Bishop referred to the first being the nature of you know trying to drive up the number of donors that we've got in the country by making sure that the compensatory regime that we've got in place actually encourages people to change behaviour to become organ donors or at the very least doesn't stop them from doing that if they're already doing it. I just want to reference at this point and this may be something that we want to examine later on that in Europe in the 27 countries in Europe roughly half of the countries there have organ donation rates of about 25 percent and the other have organ donation rates of about 75 percent. If you try and work out which are the countries that have got low rates versus which countries have got high rates of organ donation they are scattered east to west north to south high-income countries low-income countries different regulatory environments and so on. They have very little in common except for this: the countries that have got high donation rates of about 75 percent have opt-out regimes and those that have low rates about 25 percent have opt-in regimes. That is the only difference between the two sets of countries in terms of organ donor rates that they have in the participation rates. So I think it would be worthwhile—and obviously it's not within the scope in this but I do suggest that it is an area that this Parliament should turn its attention to—the idea that we might actually want to consider amending this bill again in the future to encourage donation rates by making it an opt-out regime rather than opt-in regime as it is. Having said that what we're doing here by changing the compensatory regime and setting up a national agency which is required to have a nationwide strategy—and if I just may suggest also it was fantastic to hear Mr Bishop arguing for more health spending and greater calls on the Budget. It is completely inconsistent with his party's requirements for lower taxation rates nevertheless but I think it was good to hear him suggesting and putting his shoulder to the wheel for this year's Budget. But in doing these things changing the compensation setting up this national agency it does provide a very good foundation for the future. And as that new agency does turn its head to its national strategy perhaps one of the things that they may want to consider is whether we want to move towards an opt-out regime because the evidence suggests that that would lead to significantly higher rates of organ donation in New Zealand.Having said all of that we find no fault with the work that the select committee have done with any of the submissions. We think it's a good bill and I commend it to the House.