Sage Eugenie; Mallard TrevorEUGENIE SAGE (Green): E Te Māngai o Te Whare tēnā koe tēnā koutou e Te Whare. Ka tū au mō Ngā Kākāriki ki te kōrero i te pānuitanga tuatahi o tēnei pire te Fire and Emergency Bill. [Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker and greetings to you collectively the House. I stand for the Green Party to speak in the first reading of this bill the Fire and Emergency Bill.]I am very pleased to take a short call on this bill. The Green Party is pleased to be supporting it the modernisation of the Fire Service that it precipitates and setting the Fire Service on a good path for the future. I must say that whenever the siren goes in the middle of the night to call out the volunteers in the area where I live I am enormously grateful for their skills their commitment and that huge gift of time that they provide for dealing with fires and accidents. Particularly in Christchurch after the earthquakes the volunteer fire brigade in Diamond Harbour was the core of the response reassuring the community by simple things like taking the fire truck around the streets immediately in the hours after the February quake just to reassure people that it was there and requisitioning a big water-tank that I think was on its way to a farmer which became the hub of the water supply for the community when people's tanks were unable to cope. The voluntary fire brigade is a huge part of our emergency response services and this bill in modernising the services and ensuring that there is a greater commitment—in the words of the Minister—to integrating them with the Fire Service is a good step forward because as others have said there are about 13000 paid and volunteer staff in the Fire Service and a very high proportion of those around 80 percent are volunteers. So we are very pleased about the Minister's comments that the bill retains the existing entitlements for volunteers and that it will increase the support for volunteer firefighters. I think the bill also has provisions in it that Fire and Emergency New Zealand must take reasonable steps to recognise respect and promote the contribution of volunteers and it must consult with them and relevant organisations. We are interested though in some of the clauses of the bill because clause 11 sets out the main functions of Fire and Emergency New Zealand and clause 12 sets out some additional functions. Those additional functions are to the extent that Fire and Emergency New Zealand has the capability and capacity to implement them. One of those additional functions is responding to severe weather-related events natural hazard events and disasters. The Green Party will be very interested in submissions as to whether those additional functions should be elevated to be more of a key purpose because as we saw with the Christchurch earthquakes and with climate change and the increasing likelihood of more intense weather events—particularly more severe storm events with warmer air temperatures that can retain more water; so the storm events are more severe and there is more rainfall—the Fire Service is being called out to respond to those. It is having to have operational capacity not just with fire trucks but potentially also with boats because of significant flooding that we have seen in Northland in Dunedin South and elsewhere so we are interested as to whether that should be much more of a core function of the new organisation. The other area where the Government should take much more cognisance of the impacts of climate change is of course the increasing risk of fire danger. We have seen those chilling photographs of the spread of wildfires in Canada and the United States. The work that the Ministry for Primary Industries has done in New Zealand shows that there is likely to be quite a significant increase in fire danger particularly in eastern parts of New Zealand where we are likely to have more drought with climate change. We are likely to have longer fire seasons an increased fire load because the vegetation has dried out and much drier and much windier conditions. That is yet another example of why we need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions because climate change is going to put even more stress on our Fire Service and on our urban and rural populations. The other area that we would be particularly interested in in terms of submissions is in relation to the offence provisions because the—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! The member's time has expired.