O'Connor SimonSIMON O'CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): Thank you very much. Look I'm happy to address this first reading of the Emergency Management Bill. As the Parliament has heard the National Party does not support this bill. We fundamentally don't think this is the right bill or the right set of proposed new rules to actually sort the situation. In some ways it's echoed already by officials within the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment—or as we know it MBIE—who as I understand it were recommending that actually we should be doing a much wider broader or if you will wholesome set of changes into emergency management and the best way to illustrate that is this bill looks I would argue far more on the bureaucratic and administrative side of things. I think the Minister for Emergency Management himself has said that this is around management changes and that's fine. We know from events that happen around the country that there's always a chance for improvement. But this bill is quite narrow in what it is trying to do particularly around as I say management—if you want to call that bureaucracy administration or whatever. It's not unfortunately looking at the more resilient side of things and a few speakers in the House have talked about this. With the recent weather events that we've had around the country and the likes of cellphone towers and wider telecommunication systems there was the lack of resilience the lack of priority of which of those should be brought online first. It is not clear and this bill does not—it does not—address those issues.On this side of the House we definitely see the need after every major storm cyclonic or whatever event to relook at our management systems. It makes absolute sense. The legislation that we're looking to change was drafted in 2002 and a lot has changed since then so I think it's really important to stress that we on this side of the House do see the need for change and the need to improve; we just don't think that this bill does much at all. It's particularly focused on the management side alone and as I say officials themselves have indicated they'd prefer a much wider bill.I think importantly as well—well for me personally it just feels like we're sort of shuffling the paper a little bit when I read through what the bill is trying to do. I'm not completely confident it's going to make much difference on the ground. I know there's been a lot of focus about how we engage more with Māori. Personally I think that's a good thing actually. I think it's good that the bill is addressing that we see iwi and hapū step up and others have rightly mentioned the place of marae and that's fantastic. But I don't know why it needs to stop there because when I think of various disasters and adverse weather events around the community it's not just marae that step up; it's our local churches halls our Rotary groups sports groups. I think at times—and this also can go through media—there's sort of the impression that only one group of New Zealanders steps up and I just think that's wrong. I think we all step up as best we can and we work very very cooperatively together. Granted I wanted to make clear that what happened in Auckland—certainly in my electorate—was minor compared to other parts of the country but the civil defence stood up people from the local marae and our Pasifika community stood up St Vincent de Paul stood up various sports groups stood up—whole lots of New Zealanders stood up and worked together and what struck me was that they did it remarkably well without actually much overall coordination. I think there's just a natural sense in Kiwis of what to do. That doesn't take away from the need to have a management system but my core point here is that while the bill spends a lot of time addressing our Treaty obligations and working with local iwi—which again makes a lot of sense—I don't know why it needs to exclude other groups. I also don't understand why it needs to exclude the private sector who play an incredibly important role in this space—I mean most of the telecommunications systems if not all are private for example. A lot of the transport systems be it from helicopters to diggers and trucks—again these are private entities. I'm sort of surprised that the bill appears to be silent in that space. Look it's not that the bill is wrong—and I want to say that really clearly. It just doesn't really I think address the wider needs. But I might just finish where I should've started which is of course acknowledging all those over the last few months—it doesn't matter if it's the adverse weather events Cyclone Gabrielle in particular and other disasters which we've seen over the last few years. I want to acknowledge all the people who are affected there. I think certainly on this side of the House we do want to see a management system which learns from what they've been through but sadly on this side of the House we don't think that this particular bill is going to contribute as we would hope it would.