Leary IngridINGRID LEARY (Labour—Taieri): Thank you Mr Speaker. The rain didn't stop for 24 hours. Roads closed; schools flooded; dementia homes were evacuated; thousands of homes and businesses were ruined by contaminated water which included sewage. And look this could have been Auckland 27 January or Hawke's Bay a few weeks later but it wasn't: this was South Dunedin on 3 June in 2015. Now my heart goes out to the people of Auckland and the East Coast because they now know all about climate change. But people in South Dunedin have known about this for a decade. We've lived with it researched it worried about it and talked about it. People have planned for weather events but to be honest not much has been done about proactively creating a vision for our city. Now this is part of New Zealand's highest deprivation levels; some households have got incomes as low as $14000 a year. But while they are poor in financial resource they are hugely wealthy in social cohesion aroha community and love for where we live. The land is flat so there's high levels of disability and there's a lot of older people. So if you put poverty old age and disability into the mix with climate change that's a very wicked problem. Insurance payouts were at $28 million at that time. However the real cost in terms of economic and social damage of those floods was around $138 million and the flooding wasn't just severe it was also in the most densely populated part of the city. So while most of Dunedin is hilly South Dunedin is flat. It's made up of fresh water marsh and swamps with sand underneath it and then there's dunes on the shore that protect in a way from sea-level rise. And the flat has become one of the most densely populated parts of New Zealand; it's got lots of little Scottish houses on tiny little sections built basically on to the sand. So there's three elements which make it a perfect storm when it comes to climate change: there's sea-level rise and the wearing down of the dunes there; there's the thin water table—so some areas are as low as 30 centimetres from where the water comes and the hills around make it basically like a bath-tub so the water comes down off the hills in weather events; and the land is sinking by one millimetre a year. The fifth element is more man-made and that's around an issue that's affecting so much of New Zealand—broken pipes—and this certainly came out after 2015. There was a bit of argy-bargy between the community and the council about what was to do with broken pipes or pipes that haven't been cleaned; and what was climate change—and that was really divisive. It made a stand-off from the council with the community and then managed retreat was mentioned. There wasn't the care taken in to have that conversation and people got really traumatised. Since then people have learned from that—there's been lots of research bores have been drilled there's water forecasting enabled lots of meetings by the council with locals and the community does feel like it's part of the conversation but what it wants now is action. Eight years of reports and talking and consulting without any visible action is a lot of time. Since I've been the MP I've reached out to the Dunedin City Council several times to say that I think New Zealand needs a pilot for climate change adaptation and I think that South Dunedin should be that pilot. We need creative leading-edge urban design design that can adapt to the water flows. So you could look at street cambers; look at how houses are built—whether they could be removed or moved around. South Dunedin could be a poster child for climate change adaptation but it needs a scale of ambition that is more than I've seen from the local bodies and it's more than what ratepayers can provide. It needs political will and co-creation so not a proposal that's just put into a budget line; it needs to truly be co-created. It needs a vision that's exciting and that inspires taxpayers from say the North Island to feel like they're getting value for money from this. So we are the single biggest community to face flooding from sea-level rise at least in the medium term. I think that the work that the Dunedin City Council has done around mapping and showing how the housing market will naturally shift to move to higher and safer ground is fantastic—it's world leading it's award winning and we've been shown that as local MPs. But I've been nagging my senior colleagues about this issue saying I think that we need to have a co-created solution" and I believe there's political will. It is crunch time so we need a vision. We need the people in the city the city leaders to reach out to Government and say "Let's do something about this." because if we don't pay for this now if we don't front foot and invest we will end up paying with the aftermath. So do we get caught out and pay anyway or do we invest?"