Warren-Clark AngieANGIE WARREN-CLARK (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker. Firstly before I commence my speech in regards to the Charities Amendment Bill it's the first time I've had the chance to rise and extend my condolences to the Newtown community for the tragic fire and loss of lives and to also extend my thanks for the work that the emergency services have done. It's hard and it's traumatic work and I want to acknowledge them and thank them for their work. It's a real pleasure to rise and speak to this Charities Amendment Bill and I want to acknowledge the Minister the Hon Priyanca Radhakrishnan for her shepherding of this bill. The Minister has a really long history of working in this sector so she understands it well and I'm delighted therefore that she gets to progress this bill on behalf of the Government. I also want to acknowledge our Internal Affairs team who gave us the advice; the Parliamentary Counsel Office team for their drafting; and our clerks who organised the whole running of this process so that everyone was where they should be at the time that technology worked and that the process ran smoothly. They spent many hours facilitating this work so our submitters could be heard. And what great submitters they were—and the submissions we received. My thanks go to the many charities the peak bodies and the individuals who submitted. We received 95 submissions and heard 28 oral submissions. As a result of what we had heard we made some really significant changes to the bill as presented at first reading. I want to acknowledge those who took the time to give us their feedback because I think this is how democracy works. We heard the feedback and we accordingly made some significant changes. Many of us here across the House have volunteered for charities. I myself ran a charity for five years and I've also been in the service clubs and many of us—as the Hon Priyanca Radhakrishnan said—on the select committee have had a history of service. I can assure the House tonight that we took this bill extremely seriously. In fact when we talk about changes that we made there are 28000 charities we know in the community and one of the changes we made directly affects tier 4 charities. Those are the charities that have less than $140000 per annum. That's half of those charities. At the very least 14000 are affected by this piece of legislation so I'm really delighted to speak to this bill. We've made some practical improvements to make it easier for charities to continue their work. It increases the transparency by improving access to justice and enables simpler financial reporting for those smaller charities. So these are the 14000 charities that I'm talking about the 14000 charities who will have an easier or simpler process for reporting. And that is in order to reduce the red tape it is in order to support those charities who are run often by the smell of an oily rag and who are also having perhaps difficulties with retention of people who are volunteering their time. So it is one of those areas where I'm particularly pleased that we were able to alter the legislation.The bill as introduced—we've put in place a number of changes to that legislation. My time is running short so I'm going to quickly run through the list of the things we heard from our submitters and then changed in the bill and basically that is as a response to the scrutiny and the feedback from the members.Clause 20 of the bill inserts new section 42G requiring an annual review of governance procedures by charities. We removed the annual review and put it in at three-yearly. That was our response. The work still needs to be done. The review to ensure that a charity is performing its charitable function still needs to occur but once every three years as opposed to annually. So we listened to that feedback. Change two: the term officer" was too broad. We had lots of submissions that spoke to us: was a cultural adviser an officer? Was someone who was doing tasks for the charity considered an officer? So we inserted into the legislation the term "significant influence" so that we basically ensure that there is more than just significant influence. So we said they have to have significant influence and exert powers over the strategic financial and operational decisions of a charity. So we define the "officer" as a person who holds that significant influence and it is important that we did that. There are many other things that we did in this piece of legislation. I recommend the member who resumed her seat Penny Simmonds has a read of the legislation and actually looks to what we have changed. It is significant. It is worthy; 40000 charities are affected. I commend it to the House."