SpeechIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Mr Speaker. I just wanted to address a couple of the earlier speeches before I got on to the facts of the bill and I would remind the ACT speaker Simon Court that the great thing about democracy is that if you want to get your own way and have all the brightest ideas you've got to have support for them. And it's not much good standing up here with all these great ideas if you've got no support. So I think it would be really good for them to bring those ideas to the select committee and see if they can't get support for those ideas.I also want to just address the issue that was raised by our friends from the Māori Party because there will be very strongly founded submissions from many Māori-based organisations and entities in the course of the next two or three days. And I think the issues that were raised by the speaker Debbie Ngarewa-Packer will be raised in the course of those submissions. It's a matter of whether that fits with I guess the long-term aspiration of the bill and how it fits in the decision-making process. And I'll get on to that in a minute.So I think both those issues—well certainly the last issue—will be considered. I just want to address one other thing that the ACT Party speaker said. And I don't often defend myself in Parliament but I have driven a digger myself once or twice. I'm not very good at it but I do understand a little bit about digging holes but I also was the Mayor of Manawatū during the 2004 flood which was a very similar event to this and I'll get on to the differences in a minute. And so I have quite a significant amount of experience actually of leading a community through this kind of event and I'm sure there are other people in this House that have that same experience. So I don't think we should take for granted that we know nothing in this place because some people have had experience of these things.Anyway back to the Hawke's Bay—or to the Severe Weather Emergency Recovery Legislation Bill. I keep on talking about the Hawke's Bay area because it's an area that I suppose I know best and I've got a lot of family members who live there. And I did take the opportunity to go and have a look for myself because you can't imagine the state or the devastation there unless you do go and have a look. You can see all the TV pictures because TV pictures you don't know where they've come from. But the big difference between this event and any other event I've seen in my time—and we are a country that suffers from a lot of these events simply because we're a couple of three islands a long way from anywhere with massive ocean around us. And we're very prone to weather events. We are equally as prone to earthquakes as well of course and that's where some of the base of this legislation comes from. But it's not until you go and have a look at what's happened over there that you realise the difference between this event and previous events that I've seen in my lifetime in New Zealand. And you know for many many events we see houses flooded we see land slip away we see fences disappear and we see silt dropped everywhere. I've never seen in my time the mess that's been created by the built infrastructure—primarily horticultural related—around vineyards and apple orchards and things like that where you've got this mass of wire and all sorts of stuff tangled up in a heap and it's going to be a nightmare to extract it. And so I think when the Hon Gerry Brownlee talked earlier about the length of time it's going to take for this to recover that's going to be one of the really complicating issues because if you don't have that complicating issue you can basically put a tractor through build a fence resow the grass and it's fixed. And so I think there's a lot of issues in this particular event which are—certainly on the East Coast of the North Island—different than what I've ever seen anywhere else in my lifetime in New Zealand. And so it's going to require some very different solutions. And in the course of putting the first bill through the select committee we dealt with some of those issues. This bill will deal with a whole lot more of them. And I want to again reflect on the 2004 event in the Manawatū—in fact it was the Manawatū Tararua and some parts of Wanganui and King Country. It was quite a large area and the damage that was done was pretty significant. We didn't have an Act like this of course in those days to resolve the problem. Fortunately the Government stepped in and put in place a fund which enabled those businesses to prove their losses basically and then draw on that funding. Now the way that funding was allocated was decided by committees in different areas. So they had little committees of I think three or four people who took the applications and then understood and worked their way through what was required to fix those applications. And I think from memory it might have been only 80 percent of the total damage that was paid for by the Government. And when you look at those areas now they've made a remarkable recovery. And you've got to hope that this legislation enables the Government to make those kinds of decisions and make them quickly and effectively. It's not going to be cheap unfortunately but that's the nature of the challenges we face as a country. So it's going to be extremely expensive to fix. Anyway I've veered slightly from the actual intent of the bill because the intent of this bill as most of the speakers have alluded to is to get this thing fixed as quickly as we can with as little obstruction from our current I guess laws and the protection that they give to our communities. But we're really just trying to put back infrastructure as quickly as we can to get the thing moving. Now one of the challenges that I alluded to in the last bill that came through the House is the fact that it's all very well to talk about putting back better but it's very difficult to put back better when you're in a hurry to put it back. And when you've got—I think Gerry Brownlee said—28 bridges and I know—and I'll get on to the Manawatū in a minute—there's four bridges in the top of the Pohangina gone as well. When you've got to put those back you've got to put them back as quickly as you can simply because those people and those businesses affected by them can't operate without them. The same thing applies to houses although there'll be many many houses that I've seen on the East Coast that won't ever be put back anywhere near where they came from. And that of course has happened before in the Christchurch earthquakes—the best example of that. And you've just got to hope that we can very quickly get to a position where we can make good decisions—quick decisions—about opportunities to rebuild and let those people get on with their lives in the slightly different venue or location than they were before—hopefully not too different.So that's really the reason we need to put this bill through the House so quickly because we've got to enable those businesses communities contractors everyone else involved to get on with this thing as quickly as possible and with as little impediment as possible. And I think contrary to one of our early speakers the safeguards in this bill are more than adequate. In fact I think the Hon Gerry Brownlee thought they were probably too onerous and I think to some extent he might be right because it's not really a threat to put something back where it was because it was already there. And so I think that a lot of the decisions that are going to be made here are going to be made on the basis that it's got to be done quickly and got to be done as best we can but might not in every case be permanent either because there will be opportunities in the future to change the way these things are set up. But initially you've got to do it as quickly as you can. I just want to very quickly talk about one or two other changes. I was very pleased to see one of those changes come through with respect to the Resource Management Act where it's including—and it should have been in the last bill but wasn't; I think the Minister actually alluded to why it wasn't but it simply wasn't because we didn't understand the magnitude of the damage in the Ōroua the Pohangina and the Rangitīkei Rivers which of course get all their water from Hawke's Bay. So it wasn't our fault; it was Hawke's Bay's fault. We'll blame them! All the water came over the hill and ran down our rivers. We didn't get much rain actually but it's done an immense amount of damage and as I said earlier I think at the top of one of those rivers four bridges have gone—one quite big one. And so it was really good to see that brought to the fore and this. It enables that area to be part of the recovery as well. In fact this bill does cover the whole of the North Island but this was specific to the previous bill that was brought to the House. So I think that the last thing I really want to talk about is the skills and experience that the severe weather events review committee will have and I think that their role—again the Hon Gerry Brownlee said—really is to make recommendations as to what's sensible and what's not. The recovery part of the package after that will require a whole lot of different expertise. And I think again when you look at the East Coast particularly—and I'm not so familiar with the events in Northland—it's going to require a massive input from horticulture and agricultural sectors because that's where the real damage has been done and clearly from the country's perspective at a time when we've got our export economy struggling a little bit simply because we've got a lack of people to put output from the dairy industry and probably the horticulture sector as well. So we've got some issues that we're facing the challenges in the economy and to have a large piece of our economy knocked out it's not going to come back quickly but it's important that it comes back as quickly as it possibly can. So I look forward to this bill coming to the select committee. We've got pretty good at it now. We've had a bit of practice a couple of weeks ago and I'm sure we'll get through this in good order and report back to the House in a couple of weeks' time. Thank you Mr Speaker.