Curran ClareCLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): I would like to support the last comment made by the Minister of Immigration. We certainly do hope that Nikki Kaye returns to the House as soon as possible. Interestingly Labour supports the intent of this bill. We are supporting this bill. I would note that the chairmanship of the Government Administration Committee is more inspired and solid because ultimately this bill is a better bill than the bill that came before the select committee after the first reading. That is due to some really quite hard work and quite a lot of to-ing and fro-ing from the committee back to officials. I think it shows select committees at their best because the piece of law that comes back for consideration by the whole House is better for that.Interestingly the bits where the Minister who just spoke Michael Woodhouse seemed to think the disagreements might lie are not actually. I think we actually came to quite a good place with that part of the legislation. No doubt other members will comment on that as we go through. As I said we support the intent of this bill which improves the way that communities recover from emergencies and for there to be a seamless and timely transition from response to recovery. The rationale for the bill was around the review of the legislative framework for recovery and this is a first stage. I am going to be referring to this a few times. This is supposedly a first stage which focused on the small- to moderate-scale emergencies such as floods and weather-related events. The Minister referred to a few of them. I would actually make the comment that these events being described as small- to moderate-scale emergencies are actually pretty solid and quite significant emergencies for each of the regions that they affect. One of the submissions that came before us from Resilient New Zealand noted that the Insurance Council of New Zealand illustrates that the average cost of these natural disasters for New Zealand individuals businesses insurers and central and local government is about $1.6 billion a year or 0.75 percent of our GDP. That is not insignificant. If you add up the major events—the storm and the flooding in the North Island last year; the storm and the flooding in Otago which was in my electorate of Dunedin South where South Dunedin flooded; and the North Island storm in May last year—the combined impact of those which is the insured impact and the economic and social impact is estimated to be nearly $600 million. That is not insignificant. As I said we note that this bill is the first stage of a wider review being undertaken into the legislative framework of recovery. One of the comments I want to make is about the concern we have around what happens next and when it happens and the importance of that—because this is not enough this piece of legislation. It is not bad for the frame that it chose to cover but there is a lot more that needs to be done. We do have some concerns. We expressed some unease during the submissions phase at several provisions that created what we consider to be an imbalance between the exercise of ministerial powers and consultation with local communities in the recovery phase of an emergency. As a result of that concern Labour wrote its minority report and had to rewrite it several times during this process and what the minority report ended up being was just an expression of some concerns whereas originally it was very specific about what those concerns were. What that showed is that there was good work done in bringing back more balance in terms of how that relationship between the local communities having input into when a transition phase should occur or what the next stage should be and the ministerial decision-making—where that balance should lie. I learnt a lot about the impact of words like should" "must" "seek" and "clarify"—all of those things have actually got really important meanings in law. We ended up in a place where we think there is a good balance and we think that the submitters generally would consider that to be the case as well. One of those submitters was the Christchurch City Council which of course as we know has a lot of experience in managing major issues. Yes it recommended in its original submission that a co-governance regime should be in place for local and central government to make these sorts of decisions. What we ended up with in terms of the amendments to the legislation that have come back before the House has been very carefully worded. In clause 28—we will be discussing this more obviously at the Committee stage—we are ultimately proposing an amendment that provides for the Minister to seek and consider comment from affected local civil defence and emergency management groups and the mayor of any affected local authority before implementing or extending a transition period. We do remain concerned and watchful that this imbalance—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break. Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Before the dinner break we were debating the Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill. Clare Curran was speaking and she has 3 minutes and 30 seconds remaining to speak.CLARE CURRAN: Thirty-two seconds.Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Do not contradict the word of command.CLARE CURRAN: I will be succinct to get my final points across on this bill. Large-scale events and readiness are not covered in this bill and this clearly was not the intent. The problem that we have on this side of the House is at what point they do become covered. At what point is New Zealand going to be reviewing its legislation and its practices around these matters? We are concerned that this bill fails to deal with important issues regarding large-scale events and a number of submitters mentioned this. This includes not just recovery but risk reduction and readiness as well. Despite the commitment of the Minister to a second stage of legislative review focused on large-scale emergencies there is no evidence of this occurring in the short to medium term. I also want to make the point here that in this country at the moment there is no effective tsunami national alerting system or even an effective local alerting system despite there being more than a quarter of a million dollars being spent on this. This is a critical issue given that there were two major earthquakes that occurred off the coast of New Zealand at the beginning of September and there were immediate questions asked as to why it took so long for there to be an alert and what the impact is. These issues are not insignificant. Focusing on recovery is important—I am not diminishing from that—but so is risk reduction and readiness and we believe there is a lot of work to do around New Zealand on community responsiveness. A number of submitters commented on the importance of civil defence and emergency management strategic recovery plans. A provision for this was contained in the original bill—section 57A in clause 21. That has now been removed. It was removed because it was considered that it got too complex and there would need to be too much detail about what those plans should involve. We were advised that by removing this it was going to basically be an expectation that in the civil defence and emergency management plans there would be these strategic recovery plans. But the legislation does not require it. Alarm bells were rung by major insurers such as IAG around this and we want to acknowledge that and I am putting on notice that we may put a Supplementary Order Paper on the Table at the Committee stage around this. Finally what we thought would have been the most contentious part of this bill when I first read it anyway—the permanent legislative authority provision which creates a new legislative authority for the payment of certain expenses; it is a flexible payment mechanism—was not. We think it is actually quite a sensible mechanism. We got advice from Treasury on this and we will talk more about this in the Committee stage. Ultimately we support the bill."