Tirikatene RinoRINO TIRIKATENE (Labour—Te Tai Tonga): I am pleased to take a call on the Committee stage of this bill. Can I firstly commend the member Chris Bishop who is sponsoring this bill and who has brought it through the House to this point. It is a very worthy bill that meets a serious serious issue and a serious need that afflicts many many patients out there. I think of just the many people whom I have come into contact with who are undergoing renal issues or who have to do dialysis and are awaiting transplants. It is just a very unfortunate situation and they are all hoping that they can have a donor to donate a new kidney for them. So yes this is a worthy piece of legislation. Can I also commend the Health Committee because it has done the heavy-duty panel-beating on this—because if we look at the bill it is pretty much all rewritten. It has been rewritten and there have been very large improvements made to the bill and we do commend the work that it has done.I wanted to raise a point regarding the entitlements. We know that on application to the Director-General of Health there is a set definition of what is a qualifying donor". For a qualifying donor there is the entitlement to a 100 percent financial support over the 12-week period of recovery following the surgery in which they donate their particular organ. But there is a second part to the application process under Part 3 of the bill and that involves a discretion that the director-general has to provide an entitlement for work that is done prior to the actual surgery itself. That is a discretion that the director-general has to grant financial support to the donor for undergoing tests or any other medical procedures that may be required in preparation for the surgery itself.I just wanted to draw the Committee's attention to what I think is an inconsistency in the drafting. If we look at Part 3 and we go to clause 16 it says: "A person must apply to the Director-General in writing if the person wishes to—(a) be a qualifying donor; or (b) receive discretionary earnings compensation." In that clause there we are talking about alternatives. Either there is an application to be the donor "or"—so they are quite separate. I guess the "or" in that clause is there to link alternatives.But if you look at the provisions to do with the granting of the discretion that the director-general has in clause 12 you will see that the discretion can be given only to a qualifying donor. So the applicant has to be a qualifying donor to meet the test to actually receive that discretionary compensation. Yet in Part 3—the application that is made—it is not a requirement I guess that the person who does apply be a qualifying donor. So in my reading of it it does apply to a person applying to the director-general solely for the director-general to apply the discretion for compensation prior to the actual surgery itself. So I just question the use of that definition of "or" because they are quite separate requirements in that clause—they are not linked. I would imagine that obviously the applicant would want to be a qualifying donor but the fact that this has been separated out as an either/or scenario does not quite follow in my reading of it. So I think it might be more appropriate if it was an "and/or"—you know if there was an inclusive-type definition to cover both scenarios."