SpeechANGIE WARREN-CLARK (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's a great pleasure to stand and speak on this bill the Human Rights (Disability Assist Dogs Non-Discrimination) Amendment Bill. It was a mouthful but it was a real joy to have cross-party support and to work our way through this legislation. I too want to acknowledge our officials from the Ministry of Justice who supported us but I also want to have a particular shout-out to the Office of the Clerk here in Parliament and that is because—and my colleague Ricardo Menéndez March has mentioned this—they worked very very carefully to try and ensure accessibility for our disability community. Now they worked with the Office for Disability Issues quite closely to enable some processes. The member Ricardo Menéndez March I must commend for having this bill pulled out of the ballot and also for his gracious sharing and acknowledgment of Mojo Mathers' work in this space. I think it speaks of your values so I want to acknowledge you for that and for enabling this space for Mojo to also come and speak to this bill and for being very respectful of the legacy that she brings. So I want to acknowledge you and also congratulate you. I'm a little bit jealous that you've got a bill pulled out of the ballot. So just to very quickly go through: as the member has outlined we did do a number of things in order to try and support the accessibility and we call on all select committees in this House to try and put in place some of these things as well. The member has mentioned additional time. Now additional time is important when members from the disability community are submitting particularly in the instance where we had interpreters come with us and some members were communicating by sign language. It was appropriate that we as a select committee had some assistance ourselves around how we would appropriately approach and engage perhaps the speed of how we spoke—those kinds of things as well. The Office for Disability Issues came and helped and supported us with advice and the clerks helped us as well and we had a couple of training sessions around how to work in an appropriate way. I think that that's really interesting having been a second-term member of Parliament to actually begin to unwrap and unravel this process and ensure that actually we were doing things right. I encourage all members across the House to engage in that process. So what does this bill do? This bill is a very thoughtful very small change but it essentially changes the effect to say that a guide dog or a disability assist dog—when we discriminate when a person has that dog in public then we're discriminating against the person's right to access and to full participation. It really just very simply makes it clear that you can't discriminate against a person because they have a disability assist dog. Now many of us would think that of course that's perfectly normal—that is absolutely normal—but what we learnt from hearing from the submitters was that actually people didn't understand the purpose of disability assist dogs. They didn't understand that they were actually there to help and support a person. So we heard things like people were being denied access to cafes and to buses. They were unable to rent apartments and do all sorts of things because they had a disability assist dog and so this bill is actually a really perfect solution for fixing that. I think it's really useful to talk about the way that we approached this. The bill had to be quite small. It had to be quite discrete in its process. I read back over the Hansard record of the first reading debate and we were quite wide in our understanding and quite wide in our briefing of what we might want to possibly look at but we actually just came to a very very useful place. So we didn't make any amendments to the bill which is fair enough really—it's quite a small bill. It's quite small in terms of what it actually says and that is particularly that it amends the Human Rights Act 1993—the principal Act—to include the insertion:  'disability assist dog' has the same meaning as in section 2 of the Dog Control Act 1996" which really just allows dogs to enter and access and for them to have the same rights as us. When hearing from submitters I thought it was quite interesting. We heard from 75 submitters and except for the one that the member spoke to they were pretty much 100 percent in support of this change. I will quote the submission from Graham Oliver who sort of summed up really how we all as a select committee felt but also how the submitters felt. Graham Oliver said "Disability assist dogs should be allowed everywhere without exception. It's what I would want for myself if I had one." Now you can't say anything much more plainer than that can you? In fact that's the reality. I would like to think that if I needed to use a taxi and I had a disability assist dog no one would prevent me from doing so. Then we also had another submission which came from a person called D C Webster and he was quoting the words from a Spinoff article from November 2021 by Hannah Gibson. I thought this was quite powerful and quite useful for us to reflect upon and we heard many submissions like this. Hannah Gibson said "As an extension of my arms and legs Darcy is part of my physical body. Sometimes I call him my shadow but really he allows my precarious and struggling (but strong in many other ways) body to do more than I ever thought possible. He is my independence; he bolsters my confidence. I know that with him I am safe. To deny him entry is essentially denying me. It strips me of choice. If the bill is passed as legislation it will not magically make Wellington less hilly and inaccessible but it would make a tangible difference to many of us with mobility assistance dogs." She said "The bill is welcome news." and I absolutely agree with that. I think it is worthwhile for us even to think about when we were plainly and simply planning how to enable accessibility to enable transcription to have sign language to organise the sign language interpreters to come to support us and to ensure the pace of the meeting was appropriate. All of these things we had to think about very carefully so there but for the grace of God go I that I do not have to think about those things every day. I am incredibly privileged to not have to do that which is why I am so delighted that at this second reading we haven't changed the bill at all but we I believe are unanimously going to support this bill in its second reading. With that I commend this bill to the House."