Chen NaisiNAISI CHEN (Labour): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's a real privilege I think as a member of Parliament to be able to walk someone through their private bill and I do join with my colleagues in saying thank you to the local MP as well Chris Penk for bringing this bill to the House. I think it's like I said a real privilege to be able to walk with someone's journey.I have to agree with Rachel that today as we pass through the stages of this bill we need to give Annie the space to tell her story. But I did want to thank her for coming to the select committee for coming here face to face and telling us her story. When she came over to the select committee she presented us with the book that she wrote. There are words I have to omit from this title but it is Where the"—[Gestures]—"is my mother?" so I'll just call it Where … is my mother?—a book for grown-up adoptees written by Annie herself. If I may I just wanted to read a few pages from this book which I think tells her story beautifully. But as someone who wasn't in New Zealand or our family wasn't in New Zealand during the era between 1950s to 1980s and having any personal experience in this area reading her book really opened my eyes to some of the realities of adoption at least through Annie's story and through her own experience.At the back she writes: "An adopted child is born on the grave of another family. Adoption has a long history of being a celebrated act of love charity and saviourism. However there has been a growing number of investigations and reports indicating that adoption is not what we have been led to believe. Why must I go to court to gain access to my identity? Why was it considered necessary to erase my identity? Why are the adopted treated as second-class citizens? Why are we all repeating this flawed ideology? Why are only some people considered tabula rasa?"So I think with these words and these questions that Annie has left at the end of her book for me it's about making sure that we correct some of the mistakes where we can. But as my colleagues have alluded to in their speeches as well it's that we prevent history from repeating itself and as we go into the future that we look at a bigger scale of law change and policy change to make sure that we have laws that serve the best interests of children of families who are going through adoption to make sure that the pain and the suffering of having to go through that process is no longer repeated and that we cater for that the best that we can. It's been just such a privilege to be able to serve on the Governance and Administration Committee. As we were discussing this bill and as we had gone through the stages and all of the submissions and looked at the intricacies of this bill—I think the changes made have been covered very well by my colleague Rachel Boyack in the sense that we looked at other details on how we could limit it either to hers or the other options that there could have been available but also what was unique about her circumstances of the fact that her adoptive parents have already passed and so there was no other interested party I guess you could say in a legal sense to this bill and we opened up for submissions and we have been open about hearing different perspectives and different sides of Annie's story as well. But fortunately for us this has been a really straightforward and really clean-cut case where Annie's will is to have her birth parents on her certificate. She shared this story and I'll always come back to her submission to the select committee her oral submission—she shared her story of how she looked around the room. She has three other sisters that were all adopted as well and she looked around the room and said no she can't see herself in anyone. And I remember shedding tears that day with her when she said finally when she had her child when she held her own baby in her arms she could finally see someone that resembled her and that had her DNA and that shared her likeness. I think that is the power that we have in this House—to be able to do this. And I'm so pleased today that we have used that power to do something good and something meaningful for one of our people in New Zealand. So I commend this bill to the House at this stage."