Mitchell ClaytonCLAYTON MITCHELL (NZ First): I think it is a very profound evening this evening that we are talking about the biggest review/amalgamation bill coming through the House in the last 70 years—I think it was the 1940s when we had such a big amount of change—on a day such as this when we have seen a civil defence emergency being called in Canterbury. Our sincerest condolences go out to David Askin and his family his loved ones and friends who will be suffering at the moment because of course tragically he died yesterday in the afternoon putting out these fires.I would like to start off on a positive note but I do have some very serious reservations. In the first reading in the House we were very very clear that New Zealand First would support this bill through its first reading in order to get it to a select committee so that we could hear submissions and look at this bill further but we were very concerned.I can tell you right now that there are bigger concerns than the fact that we are going to take the word service" out of the Fire Service and there are bigger concerns than the congratulations that we seem to be giving each other—and patting each other on the back—because this bill is very important. Outside of the submissions that we have heard in the Government Administration Committee we have been inundated with people who are involved directly and indirectly on the periphery of the Fire Service who have some serious concerns. They will be sitting at home and in the gallery tonight absolutely with their eyes and their mouths open wide aghast at the absolute complacency with which we seem to be walking into this trap. I will get in to that in a moment; I am going to start positively. I have been trying to keep myself calm here.Just as a bit of an overview we have close to a total of 14000 workers inside the Fire Service and 83 percent of those workers are volunteers—men and women giving up their days their mornings their nights and all their holidays to go and assist in all manner of occasions. There were 5400 structure fires last year and 10300 medical emergencies that the Fire Service showed up to and assisted with. There were 5100 vegetation fires there were 4815 car accidents that they went to and 3245 hazardous material call-outs. That is just the start of it. That is not including all of the weather incidents that the Fire Service attends such as the pumping out of water from the bottom flat of your house or your garage that has filled with water. The number of times we have seen the Fire Service working well beyond its call of duty—chopping down trees that have cut power lines. Just yesterday a young girl went missing and who did we call? We called the Fire Service to go and find that young girl of 5 years old in the Waikato. Search and Rescue came together with the community the volunteers to do this. The Fire Service adds so much value. It is far more than we are putting down on paper here and yet we are not adequately funding this. Our funding model is absolutely flawed. There are two things that we are going to oppose in this: the funding model which we do not believe is fit for purpose; and of course the culture within the organisation—the amalgamation of urban rural and the volunteer sectors coming together and I will get into that a little bit shortly. This is the 17th review that the Fire Service has had in 21 years and the first major reform changes. We had 104 submissions and 47 of those were oral and I have to say some of the evidence coming out in some of the submissions was quite damning.The positive aspects were that the enabling factors of fire in the open air as a land management tool is absolutely essential when you are dealing with scrub fires and rural locations. The best way to control fire is actually by lighting other small fires and controlling them. It is great for getting your vegetation back and getting it blooming. This has been a change that they have found is working very well through Europe and it is great to see that this bill actually modernises our current situation. The power to move fire risk from private property is another great part of this bill—as I say I am going to focus on some positives before we get to the nuts and bolts of the issues that we have—as is the uninhibited access to water in section 45 of the bill which will enable fire services to tap not just into the mains water supply but into any water that is available on a property whether it is from a farm river or the like. That water is now made available to them. Finally another positive aspect is the power for entry for the fire inspectors who may at any reasonable time—and I underline the word "reasonable" because it is in there clearly in the bill—actually enter a premises a building or a landmass to inspect it to make sure that it is safe and fit for purpose.The issue that we have in New Zealand First and the reason that we are opposing this bill—and I am surprised that there has not been more Opposition to it. There has been a lot of fluffery and a lot of lollipops and candyfloss clouds talked about. The reality is that if any of these members of Parliament have read the Malone review from Australia which is the Queensland review from back in 2013 or the Ferguson report from 2016 from Western Australia outlining the major issues with their amalgamation project that they went down in 1998—and I am sure some of them may well have and have just decided not to bring it to your attention.Let me just read out some of these reports. The 2016 Western Australian special inquiry found the fire service approach for urban and rural private lands in Western Australia did not function well to cater for the different cultures between the urban and rural environments. It goes on to say that the systems for managing rural fire has been variously described as at best "disjointed and disconnected" and at worst "dysfunctional and broken". The report goes on even further to say that "The FRS"—or Fire and Rescue Service—"culture is one that prioritises structural firefighting over any other type of fire that favours incident response rather than hazard reduction and which focuses on the Perth metropolitan area rather than the entire State."This is the trap that we are walking ourselves into. The Queensland Malone report came out and said very very similar things. It said that after the amalgamation of the rural and urban services into a single service many volunteers felt that the greater local autonomy that was put forward in 1990 by the Minister "would have never eventuated." and "Instead rural fire service volunteers felt their operations started to be influenced by the urban fire culture". It is exactly the same in Greece Canada and California. All these other countries and States around the world have seen that the amalgamation of urban and rural does not work.I am heavily involved in the surf lifesaving movement. We have got about 300 volunteers who give up their weekends every weekend to go down to the beach to make sure that people are kept safe. If we wanted to flip the organisation and let the 20 or so full-time employed people in the organisation tell the 200 people what to do very very quickly the volunteers are going to stop showing up. This is exactly what is going to happen if this is not addressed and not a single party here has raised the concerns of the thousands of volunteer and urban fire services and the search and rescue operators who are actually going to be marginalised if this bill comes in to place. The reality is that it is going to be put into place. It is like: "Buckle up your seatbelts because we are going to get bumpy from here on in."We have to acknowledge the fact that the funding model is also severely flawed. If you take into consideration everything I have said so far that the work the Fire Service does is over and above what the levies are going to be providing for—with car levies with a levy now on residents and of course now we have got contents insurance levies coming through—the major fund is going to be supplied largely by the non-residential the commercial operators and owners of property. There is no cap on them whatsoever. At the moment the residential levy is capped at $76. We have got the contents levy at $15.20 which is a total of around $91 per annum. The motor vehicle levy is a flat rate of $6.08 but the non-residential commercial levy is going to 7.6c for every hundred dollars insured. People are going to stop insuring their properties—they are going to under-insure them for a start—because that gets up pretty quickly. If you talk about a million-dollar property you are talking about $7500 in fire levies a year on a commercial building which is going to be covering nearly half of the entire fund that they are looking for to actually run the Fire Service which is around about half a billion dollars.I do not think there has been enough consideration put into this bill. Certainly listening to and reading the reports from Property Council New Zealand talking to the rural firefighters and looking at international studies and reviews that have been done what we are doing here is duplicating what has not worked internationally and I am telling the people of New Zealand: watch out. We are in for a very bumpy ride and I cannot believe that there is no other party out there that is nodding agreeably and saying: "We should not be going into this like we are." After 17 reviews in 21 years I say we can do better and we should be holding it off until we can do better. Thank you."