Guy NathanHon NATHAN GUY (National—Ōtaki): Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker. It's a great opportunity to take a call on the Fire and Emergency New Zealand (Levy) Amendment Bill—one that we do support. We've just heard an interesting contribution from Stuart Nash. I won't bother debating a whole lot of things that he said because some of it made sense but I must say some of it didn't. This bill is an important one. When I think back to when I was the Minister of Internal Affairs from 2009 to 2011 it was a great responsible job to be the Minister of Internal Affairs because it was such a wide ministry. In fact at the time we brought in Archives New Zealand and the National Library so we made it even bigger. But importantly the engagement that I had with the New Zealand Fire Service at the time was very important and the thing that I liked most about dealing with the team at the New Zealand Fire Service was the focus that they had on the volunteers. Yes paid firefighters are important but so are the thousands of volunteers up and down the country. I have numerous small fire stations in my Ōtaki electorate. In fact on Saturday night I will be at a celebration for the Paraparaumu Fire Station where they have a fire service gold star. But what officials used to tell me when they came into my office was that the Act was out of date and needed modernising because when they turned up to motor vehicle accidents—and a lot of the 111 callouts that they have are unfortunately to motor vehicle accidents—they wanted to know if they were mandated to do that ahead of the ambulance because on some of occasions particularly in rural communities they would get there a lot quicker than ambulances. Then we think about the USAR—the urban search and rescue. They are a great organisation and they really stepped up for the Christchurch earthquakes. Were they mandated to do the role that they played? In fact when we put the call out internationally we had numerous numbers of USAR teams that came to Christchurch from around the world and then what happened was we had requests at various events—tsunamis earthquakes—around the world for our New Zealand USAR team to travel and be deployed into these various countries. Were they mandated to do that? Well as it turned out they weren't. So modernising the Act was very important. I want to acknowledge Paul Swain who did a huge amount of work at that period of time to do the review. Actually interestingly enough he is now the chair of the New Zealand Fire and Emergency—what are they called now? New—Hon Tracey Martin: Fire and Emergency service. Hon NATHAN GUY: Fire and Emergency New Zealand—and I thank the Minister for that. Paul Swain I think it's fair to say has a huge amount of support right across the House for the work that he did in terms of the Swain review as it's commonly known now and indeed what he's doing in his leadership of this relatively new organisation. The other person I want to acknowledge is Peter Dunne who chaperoned through the new Act in 2017. Focusing now on this amendment bill this evening there's really a couple of aspects to it. It's clear that Minister Dunne might have been a bit ambitious on his time frame for setting the levy so it's only fair that that gets pushed out a little bit to give the insurers and the brokers time to upgrade and potentially resize their hardware and software which they need to do to have a mechanism to collect the levy. The other one is the importance of allowing some exemptions for public museums and the like—we support that. Also it's interesting—Minister Martin will have some work ahead of her in terms of setting the levy. She'll need to be considering the number of motor vehicles and the number of properties that are insured and we know that actually those numbers—well motor vehicle numbers are going to continue to grow in New Zealand. Insured properties—a lot of properties are insured because they have mortgages. But as they get through the period of having a mortgage then they don't—often they let their insurance lapse. The exemptions as I've talked about—and I know from my experience as a Government Minister in the past that setting levies is always a bit of a headache because if you set it too high then effectively you're taking too much money off the taxpayer and if you set it too low it's difficult for Fire and Emergency to do their job. So those things will be teased out and debated in the committee stage. On this side of the House we support the bill. Thank you.