Craig LizParts 1 and 2 the Schedule and clauses 1 and 2Dr LIZ CRAIG (Labour): Thank you Madam Chair. It's a real pleasure to rise and stand in support of this bill. Just having a look back over the Organ Donation New Zealand website over the last few days it's a real reminder about how an organ donation can transform people's lives—just looking at the stories there of people who had had liver transplants lung transplants and kidney transplants. Just to quote from Suzanne who'd had a transplant: she said after her transplant basically All of my energy used to be spent trying to stay alive. Now I have a full-time job a relationship and I can go out with friends—it's everything I've ever dreamed of."But the reality is that unfortunately in New Zealand there's many more people waiting for an organ transplant than there are organs available. On the Organ Donation NZ website what they're saying is there's about 550 people still waiting for a transplant in New Zealand and so what this bill does is it's going to be making it much easier for people to become organ donors. I want to focus just in this intro call on Part 1 which looks at the compensation for live donors. What it does is it expands the eligibility for earnings compensation to include those who return to work part-time during the first 12 weeks after surgery. Up until now it was an all-or-nothing decision. Basically at the point where you returned back to work you lost the eligibility for that compensation. There are a lot of reasons why somebody may want to return to work part-time. If you think about some of the things that are involved in say kidney donation or any other donation it is sometimes quite major surgery that's involved and so you could understand why people may want to return to work but they may want to return to work at reduced hours. So what this bill does is it lets people return to work at those reduced hours and still claim compensation for that.The bill when it was introduced defined usual hours as the average weekly hours of employment at the date of application. But the problem is that that was a bit vague and particularly if you are thinking about people who were self-employed. As a select committee we had some discussion around this and we thought we needed to make that clearer. And so the suggested amendment there is defining usual hours as the donor's hours per week as specified in their employment agreement—fairly straightforward except if you're self-employed.So then if that doesn't apply what we are suggesting is that then you actually calculate usual hours based on what your earnings were in the 12 weeks prior to when you made the application. And so that gives a good reflection of what your usual hours are likely to be.The other thing that Part 1 also looks at is allowing regulations to be made to approve oversees organ exchange programmes because in terms of making sure that we can get enough organs it is useful to be able to be involved in international exchange programmes. Basically what this bill does is for donors who participate in these approved programmes it removes a requirement that the donor and the transplant surgery have to happen in New Zealand and that the recipient needs to be eligible for publicly funded services in New Zealand. So basically that allows exchanges to happen.What we've added is a new Schedule 5 that's included in Part 1 that basically creates a list of approved organ donation exchange programmes. The first one to be added to this list is the Australian and New Zealand Paired Kidney Exchange Program so that if you are engaged in an approved programme then that means that some of those other requirements don't need to apply.The issue though was that there was some concern that we may have inadvertently allowed overseas-based donors to become eligible for earnings compensation when they were taking part in the exchange if they were already receiving funding in their own country and so some proposed amendments were made in Part 2 to ensure that if you were eligible for compensation in your own country then that would apply rather than us also needing to compensate people as well.So Part 1 is really important in terms of just making it easier for people for live donors to make a donation but at the same time receive compensation and allowing the flexibility for when they return to work. So it is an important section. Thank you Madam Chair."