Henderson EmilyDr EMILY HENDERSON (Labour—Whangārei): Kia ora e te Māngai o te Whare. It's a pleasure to stand and take a call on the Charities Amendment Bill. I hope you will indulge me if I first acknowledge the terrible hurt that is currently being felt in my community as it is the community of Newtown. As the MP for Whangārei I want to acknowledge my people who have lived in the last four weeks through the loss of four of our young people. I want to acknowledge the whānau. I want to acknowledge our extraordinary first responders. I have to say at this moment my town is submerged in grief. And I want to particularly acknowledge at this moment the community of Raumanga and of Ruakākā. Raumanga were the first to lose a young person and Ruakākā are the most recent and the weight of that grief is very heavy on my people at the moment. And it is some of that grief that charities in our community will be helping to alleviate—charities like the Bream Bay Coastal Care Trust charities who as my colleague and friend Angie Warren-Clark remarked live on the smell of an oily rag. I grew up on the back of such a charity. My mother opened the Miriam Centre a child abuse and family crisis centre about 35 years ago and I quite literally grew up between my mother's back office and my father's back office in the family law firm down the road. I know how hard it is for these small organisations to manage the regulatory responsibilities they have while they are trying to do the mahi in the community. It is not necessarily in the skill set of those running a charity who are trying to get out and do the work of helping people and raising them up to have to bear the weight of regulation and reporting. These are charities and as my friends and colleagues have said about half of them are the small ones. About 14000 of the 28000-odd charities we have in New Zealand are the small ones and it is difficult for them to bear the regulatory load. And that is where this bill comes in. Now I've heard again and again through the night the criticisms coming in from the Opposition. I guess when you're not in the position of having to do stuff it's very easy to throw stones. But the point is we are trying to do something and as a wise person once said to me the enemy of getting anything done is trying to get it perfect. Never let the fact that something is not all-encompassing bells and whistles stand in the way of the fact that it is a darn good thing that will make multiple important changes. I want to thank the officials for the work they put in—as a member of the Social Services and Community Committee I saw the blood sweat and tears they put into this bill—and most of all the submitters who made so many good and helpful suggestions which we have done our best to incorporate. I want to point out to all of them that when we did our work we did it with a deep understanding of the difficulties the real-life struggles of running a charity. When you have as your chair a woman who ran Women's Refuge for about nine-odd years when you have Anahila who has also been involved in charities for more years than I can count and when your Minister herself is a member of so many charities believe me you have the depth of experience with which to work. So the things that very briefly we are doing here are to remove regulation. They will reduce the reporting requirements they make it easier to seek legal redress without having to go to the High Court and they do a range of things that will make a real tangible difference to the work of people who are incredibly necessary to our community to my community. I look forward to taking Angie Warren-Clark and Minister Deb Russell to several of them next week to talk about the important work of charities in my community and we will be able to talk to them about the improvements we have made to their work. I commend this bill to the House.