Woods MeganHon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Minister for Greater Christchurch Regeneration): It's an absolute privilege to rise in support of this bill which will make an enormous difference in Christchurch and in Canterbury. I want to begin by acknowledging my colleague the Hon Andrew Little for bringing this bill to this House. Andrew is not only a man who had the very good sense to marry a Christchurch woman but also a man who was with us on the day of the 22 February earthquake and who has spent a lot of time in Christchurch over the last eight years speaking and meeting with people who have been going through the trauma that is having an unsettled insurance claim.Today in my contribution I want to focus on the human element of this bill because this is a bill that will change lives Madam Assistant Speaker as I know you know. It will restore hope to our people. It will help people get their homes fixed and most importantly their lives back on track eight years on from an earthquake. I think that for many people who live outside Christchurch and Canterbury it is very hard to imagine that eight years on there are still literally thousands of people who are stuck fighting the Earthquake Commission (EQC) or their insurance companies to get their homes properly mended.I want to take this point in my speech to acknowledge today the eighth anniversary of the sequence—the beginning of the sequence—of earthquakes that changed our city and region for ever and the enormous impact it has had on the people of that area and the number of people who have shone over the last eight years. But I also want to acknowledge the people that have struggled because we know there are many of them and that is what today is about. I am enormously proud that on this eighth anniversary this Government can deliver on its promises to the people of Canterbury to do things differently. Too many people are trapped unable to move on with their lives and I think that is unimaginable.This tribunal is about giving people a way out about giving them a tool to help break through that deadlock. This is part of a pipeline of initiatives that this Government is putting in place so that we can finally deal with the thousands of unresolved insurance claims in Canterbury. It is not the only thing. In December we put money into the RAS when that funding was due to run out—the Residential Advisory Service. We have expanded the mandate of that service and we are continuing to do so. For us as a Government doing nothing or doing what had happened over the last eight years was not an option. The status quo has not worked. There are thousands of people who cannot get on with their lives.As an electorate MP in Wigram in Christchurch—as I know electorate MPs all over our city have—I've spent the last eight years seeing first-hand this struggle that people have gone through and the thousands of pieces of correspondence that we receive on a daily basis. I want to read a very recent piece of correspondence that I received from a woman in her 60s to tell me about the limbo that she's living in: I live with four-by-twos diagonally bolted through my lounge carpet propping the middle wall of my house up—house unpainted leaks in my roof angry neighbours because the shared driveway is not repaired and can't be done until a resolution on my property. For the past eight years I've not invited friends to my home because of the embarrassment of the condition of it." I am not content for people in Christchurch and Canterbury to continue in this hell and this is why we on this side of the House are taking action. Just think what it would be like if that was your life your mother your auntie or your grandmother that was living through that.I've heard some of the concerns that the Opposition have and I hope they can be allayed in select committee because I think most of them are misplaced. The Opposition spokesperson Stuart Smith said that he thought that a mediation service would be better. Well there will be a mediation service. The Minister outlined in his speech that as part of the pipeline and the suite of services—the change that we are bringing—we know that an alternative dispute resolution service through mediation will be required but what we are not content to do is waste millions of dollars in the courts when there are other ways to do this. In the last three years EQC alone has spent $21.8 million in the courts defending cases many of which it lost and that doesn't count the millions of dollars that the people of Canterbury have had to spend in the courts. This is why we are going to do something different.The Opposition spokesperson was also concerned that this service wouldn't be able to deal with complex claims and said that most of the remaining claims are complex. It's true some of them are but I can tell you that at the rate of re-repairs coming in particularly to EQC there are a number of claims sitting there that could so much more productively be solved through an alternative dispute resolution service such as this. There are many thousands of lives that can be changed by this. There are 3600 unsolved EQC claims at last count—600 with Southern Response and thousands more with the other private insurers. We're talking up to 10000 people in Canterbury who cannot get on with their lives. If this tribunal can help some of them then it is a worthwhile addition to the pipeline of services that we have available.Stuart Smith was also concerned that we wouldn't be appointing people with the right qualifications. It stands to reason that what we have said—and we have publicly said that we see people of the calibre of retired High Court judges senior members of the legal profession being the right people to sit there. We also don't agree that this will slow things down because the other bit of the regulatory impact statement that the Opposition spokesperson didn't go into is that it said only if there wasn't enough expert advice available. We haven't been content just to keep doing the same thing that happened for the seven years before we got into Government; we have been talking to professional bodies about how we can make sure that that expert help is there for people because we will not let people languish in the way they have been left to languish for the last eight years.Also the issue of the ability to cross-examine was brought up by the Opposition spokesperson and I think it shows where I hope the Opposition through the select committee process will begin to understand what this is trying to do differently. This is an alternative dispute resolution service. This is the kind of approach that we saw used to finally break the deadlock in a group action or a class action against Southern Response that had been going on for years. But when we came into Government and tried something different and employed alternative dispute resolution techniques we were able to settle those claims so those people could get on with their lives and that is the important thing that we have to do.But as I keep saying it's not the only thing; we are looking at other measures. We're seeing a reformation of the way in which EQC deals with its claims. This is a Government that has worked with EQC that saw—it took away the resource that was required in terms of the on-the-ground claims managers in Canterbury. That was scaled down far too quickly by the last Government and we have worked with the commission to ensure that we have more people on the ground there. So I am confident that once we put together all this suite of measures we will finally be able to get to an end of these insurance issues that are bedevilling our city and our region. It is not enough to say these are complex these are hard and these are difficult. Yes they are and that's why we're a Government that is putting in place measures to deal with it.One of the most complex issues that we have—which the Opposition has questioned why this won't deal with it—is the question of onsolds. This is an issue that needs to be dealt with by the court. It is an incredibly complex issue where we have to determine where legal liability lies. It does not mean we should not set up this tribunal that we shouldn't be doing everything within our power to make sure that the issues of those Cantabrians—like the lady in her 60s whose experience of being too embarrassed to invite people over to her house eight years on—do not endure. We owe it to the people in our city and our region."