SpeechJAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. In contrast to an earlier bill it's a real pleasure to rise and speak in support of the Accident Compensation (Maternal Birth Injury and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. I will get to some of the points of kind of difference that the Greens had around this bill but this is a day to celebrate. It is a really important step for families in our country to have the injuries that thousands of birthing parents have been carrying in silence often in shame without treatment or support for years. I also like everybody else who's spoken tonight really just want to acknowledge the submitters first. Also when the Greens did a call out earlier we got 900 stories from birthing parents around their experiences of birth that we passed on to the Minister and I just want to thank all of them and just say how humbling it was I think for everybody on the committee to be able to hear and read their stories. And before getting into the substance of the bill I also just want to acknowledge just a sense of being really disturbed by the failure of our health system. Getting ACC now to respond to these injuries is one thing and is a really really important step but the fact so many of these injuries were not even ever picked up or responded to by health practitioners and the degree of silence that's existed in our society—and I note too for myself as you know like a feminist who's been active on a range of issues this is not an issue that I have previously picked up before. That shocks me now that I've heard all of these stories because this is something we should have done something about a long time ago. So I really want to acknowledge everybody who shared their story and the Minister for bringing this piece of legislation and then the committee and to acknowledge the chair and Sarah Pallett our resident midwife for the journey and the process and also having a previous Minister for ACC from the National Party. It was like a very intense experience I think for the poor officials so I'll also acknowledge them. There were changes made and I acknowledge in terms of the Minister's articulated intent that this bill will cover—and I'm going to clarify this a little bit from what has been said—all physical injuries and consequential mental injuries to birthing parents. There is a difference from covering all birth injuries to doing that and this is a good first step towards covering all birthing injuries. We are pleased to see a significant number of injuries that have been added to the list to ensure people get the support that they need which is ultimately what this is about.We heard so many stories about people you know like living with injuries where they weren't able to pick up their babies they weren't able to play with their babies and they weren't able to do housework. Sexual relationships: they weren't able to enjoy sex anymore so then relationships broke down as a result of it. Like then you think about the profound impact of that. Here you are this most joyous experience that you've hopefully been looking forward to for most of your life and then it turns into that and you're trying to connect to your baby and know how important that attachment is for the entire life of your baby; too much—too much without support without intervention and support. So this is what this is about addressing.For the Greens we didn't want this defined list of birth injuries because it is a unique approach in the Act to have a defined list. Nowhere else does that exist within the ACC legislation. For us we don't think the best way to address embedded sexism in a system is to create something unique special just for those birthing parents and women. That seems like that might actually have potential to embed a degree of discrimination into the system. We could've lived with it even a bit more than what we're living with now if there'd been kind of a catch-all which is similar to some of the other workplace gradual process injuries where there's a provision that enables things not on the list to be covered. But the officials' advice was that they thought that would catch too many things and that makes me sad. I don't think we should be fighting to defend the existing boundaries within ACC when we know those boundaries right now are deeply problematic and causing lots of harm. So that was why we were looking for a general cover.I heard the Minister say that the rationale for not going for general cover was because it might lead to different outcomes. We also heard that between different areas different language is used to describe injuries so we may well end up with that difference in cover anyway even with that specified list. There's a real potential it'll create more bureaucracy and potential for disentitlement as practitioners use that different language to refer to different injuries. It's also for us a really fundamental point of the separation of the physical from the mental from the whānau actually negates a Te Ao Māori worldview. So we're embedding a Pākehā world view on to a system that is supposed to be providing support for all people in this country. We think we could've done a bit better than that and a generalised approach that included whānau would've been a way to do that.Also just the potential for it to exacerbate existing problems with the approach to treatment injuries by focusing narrowly on cause rather than focusing on the impact of an injury or a person experiencing it was a concern for us. The point about requiring a physical injury before mental injury gets covered I do just want to point to how problematic that occurs to me to be particularly for birthing parents in rural areas. I've heard a significant number of stories of people whose births do not go to plan. They may be haemorrhaging and they have to be airlifted. In this I've heard several cases from Queenstown area—and I know this will be similar in other areas of the country—have to be airlifted out to another city. Sometimes they have to divert their partners in a car racing to one town to meet them. Then they're diverted to somewhere else and their life is at stake. There is no physical injury at the end of that that is on that list. But boy will there be a mental trauma that is a result of the physical process. So I was not convinced that we should not have had a clause to ensure that there was cover for those women.I also just want to speak to the point around—and I was really encouraged to hear the Hon Michael Woodhouse talk about the openness around needing to consider injuries to babies in the future. Also we heard from people who'd fought through the courts to get cover and that it had been a full-time job to get treatment injury cover for their child and recognising that's an inequity. Very very few people are in a place to be able to fight the system through the courts to be able to get that cover. We know people are not getting it. All the way through the hearings we were hearing things that sounded like treatment injuries to most of us around that table that were not being covered as treatment injuries. So for the Greens actually ensuring cover for all birth injuries to pēpē would be the best way to avoid that problem and to ensure that they get the support that they need. Cost for us is not an argument. It is a massive difference—and I'm not going to buy into the sexism that we'd heard previously about men's behaviour and women's behaviour. But just to say this is a really important day for whānau in this country and the Greens are happy to support.