Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): I am pleased to rise and take a call for the Green Party in the third reading of the Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill. We are very pleased to be able to support this with the other parties in the House. As has already been stated by other members it is really important in terms of responses to natural disasters and other emergencies that we are able to be in accordance with each other in this House and that people in the communities know that we are listening and that we are putting their interests first. Having unanimity on this bill is really important. I would like to particularly acknowledge the Minister of Civil Defence Nikki Kaye who brought this bill to the House and I wish her well at the moment.I will also just restate how constructive this process has been. Being on the Government Administration Committee there absolutely was a process. It felt as if everyone on the committee was actually listening and checking the implications of this legislation to test it against the question Would this help the local communities?" rather than it being a battle between different parties' interests. There were positive changes that were made through the select committee process and indeed in the Committee of the whole House stage when the Labour member Clare Curran I think put forward the amendment to put in the requirement for strategic recovery plans to be in the legislation. That was I think a positive change. Although there was the feeling from some members on the committee that maybe that was not necessary what we heard from different councils and other people with a stake in this was that the planning capacity in different communities varies significantly so providing more direction in the legislation would be helpful to ensure a consistency in approach and indeed support for communities being able to respond.At the heart of it this legislation is put in place to help us as a country move on in natural disasters from the immediate response which is not necessarily covered by this legislation into recovery. At the heart of it there is pressure from legislation to have extended civil emergency provisions going on longer than may actually be necessary. They give people the assurance that they can go and act in the way that they need to in specific situations but carry on probably more interventionist limitations beyond that. This legislation actually gets more specific so that we can have the interventions where they are actually needed not the blanket interventions. I think that is really positive because at the heart of our concern about this legislation was balancing the need for support from central government—for a community that may be in shock and in a state of dealing with something it has never confronted before—and supporting and enabling communities to be able to come together and respond.We have seen this in Christchurch we have seen it in Kāpiti and we have seen it in Whanganui. We see it all around the country actually—that communities often come together provide support for each other and know what is needed in a way that would never happen if a response was centralised. We needed to make sure that the legislation was enabling that community response not getting in the way of it. We heard far too many stories from Christchurch in particular that the response we had there was at times of communities coming together responding looking after each other and doing what was needed but then central government systems came in—with the best intentions absolutely the best intentions—and were getting in the way and actually shutting down those community responses. At the end of that actually the actions that happened were not necessarily what the communities needed and people ended up feeling disconnected and disempowered by the process. That is not what we want in the recovery process because the recovery process at the heart of it is the environment and the people working together.We are quietly confident that this legislation has got that balance right. But we did say and I hope it is a sentiment shared by others in the House that this is one of those things for which we need to test how it works and be really willing to bring legislation back to the House if it is not delivering in that way—if communities tell us that actually we did not get that balance right. We need to make sure that we are carefully listening.I do need to put this in the context of how important climate change is which I have done in every speech. We cannot talk about these small and medium sized disasters—which are significantly flooding disasters—in New Zealand without talking about climate change. Globally in the 1970s there were on average 78 natural disasters each year—I think—recorded around the world. Now we have over 350 natural disasters recorded every year. This is something we cannot avoid. We need to be doing everything we can as a country to reduce our emissions and stop the runaway climate change that will make it just unimaginably bad.But a significant amount of climate change is already locked in. We are feeling the effects of it already. We have to take steps to be able to respond to that and protect our communities as the sea level rises and as storms and floods come more frequently. We know that in New Zealand we are already seeing between $1.2 billion and $2 billion spent every year on cleaning up after these small and medium sized natural disasters so the thinking that says that we cannot afford to take significant action on reducing our emissions—that we need to put the economy first—is really just short-term thinking which seems to be missing the reality of what we are facing right now. Climate change is already impacting on communities and families and our national Budget. We need to get serious about this and go beyond legislation that just helps us to pick up the pieces. We urgently need to move on preventing worse disasters in the future. Thank you."