Dyson RuthHon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): I am pleased to take a call in this part because I missed a large chunk of the earlier debate on this bill due to the fires in my electorate in Christchurch. The combination of those fires very recently and the floods that we are still experiencing now is a very good reminder to this Committee of how much we owe to the firefighters around our country whether they are rural and forest or whether they are volunteers or whether they are professional. In the Port Hills fires those three groups joined together and did an amazing job of saving many houses. Tragically one life was lost and many houses were lost as well but it was an example of what I think the vision of this bill is.The part that we are discussing tonight might seem quite odd to some members of the Committee. It is this: what shall we put in the law that firefighters should do? Ha ha! But actually it makes sense because you do have to do that because they have responsibilities they have roles and they have additional powers that need to be granted by law in emergency situations in terms of access to water in terms of controlling fires or prohibiting fires. So there are powers and responsibilities that Part 2 gives them.It also deals with industry brigades and I heard the comment from Damien O'Connor in this regard earlier. Industry brigades—the Minister in the chair the Hon Peter Dunne might correct me if I am in error here—are the only group that are not actually formally under Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) now in this proposal but there is going to be a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between industry brigades which are like company brigades really; they operate just around one organisation generally. There will be MOUs between them and Fire and Emergency New Zealand. I wish it was called Fire and Emergency Services New Zealand" but I will wait till next year and we will just do an amendment to the legislation after we change the Government. I guess it is probably the best way.One other point that I want to make in this contribution is in relation to Supplementary Order Paper 263 from Kris Faafoi. I deeply regret that Kris Faafoi has already used his four calls and could not get a fifth. I would like to pose the Minister a direct challenge because of the idea that some fire hydrants are not being checked because the requirements of a traffic management plan for goodness' sake are too onerous—so they are left in a condition that is not appropriate. They are not working properly or even worse the Fire Service is breaking the law or the requirements of the service in not having a traffic management plan when firefighters check a fire hydrant. Either of those is unacceptable. We want Fire and Emergency New Zealand to just work and work properly. Firefighters need to check the fire hydrants. For goodness' sake they do not need a traffic management plan when they go and put the fire out. I hope we never get to that extreme. This is a silly situation and it should be fixed.I would like a commitment from the Minister seeing as he has told us he is not going to support the Supplementary Order Paper to have in his letter of expectation on the conclusion of this legislation to the new Fire and Emergency New Zealand board a requirement that it has a common-sense approach to dealing with checking of fire hydrants and ensuring their safety. That is a really easy option for the Minister to take. Stop the board imposing such nonsensical and unnecessary requirements on our firefighters. They know better than pretty well anyone how to keep safe actually. I have confidence that they will know how to check a fire hydrant without getting run over and that is all you want. You want the fire hydrants to work. You want the firefighters to be safe. That is my challenge to the Minister. I have enjoyed chairing the Government Administration Committee which looked at this legislation. This part was really funny but I can assure all members of the Committee that we did look in a lot of detail at what powers we were giving to the firefighters what responsibilities they had and just really making sure that it would work. So if we can get that commitment out of the Minister tonight we will all go home happy—a lot happier than we would have been had we finished the evening debating the resource management legislation."