Curran Clare: Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCurran Clare: Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 08 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8678. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): Labour will support this bill’s referral to the select committee. In principle we consider that the objectives of this bill are sound. Nothing is more important than keeping our families and communities safe. Our civil defence services must be ready to respond effectively to any emergency and we must all be prepared for emergencies before they happen. I do not think anyone would disagree with that.The four Rs as they are described—risk reduction readiness response and recovery—are the backbone of our civil defence planning and with effective coordination and integration they should provide robust protection and preparation for civil defence emergencies. They look good on paper but we have to make sure that they work in practice.Civil defence people do important work and put themselves into some very difficult and sometimes dangerous situations after an emergency. We have got to make sure that they have appropriate powers and abilities to do their job correctly. As I said we will support this bill’s referral to the select committee.We do have some concerns about the scope of the new powers and as to how robust this bill will be when put into practice. I note that this is the first of two bills signalled by the Minister of Civil Defence Nikki Kaye and my remarks relate to some of the notes of caution and the signal that there are areas that do not appear to be covered under this proposed legislation.This is the first major amendment to the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act 2002. Therefore it should provide an opportunity to overhaul the 2002 Act using recent case studies of disasters requiring a civil defence response. However the legislative review from which this bill was born had a mandate to look at emergency recoveryonly. I referred to the four Rs. Well this is only one of them the last one: recovery. Certainly emergency recovery was an area that needed addressing. However we feel that taking just one component of this framework runs the risk of undermining the purpose of the original 2002 Act and may make it difficult to implement in practice. Recovery planning and training is vital but it also has to work alongside the other three components and not in isolation. So a wider review of that current legislation should take place in order to provide holistic and clear legislative support to local government alongside the other three Rs.We support the inclusion of the national and local transition periods and the effort to make the move from the response phase to the recovery phase more cohesive. But when the response phase is already hindered as was the case in Dunedin in June the implementation of a local or a national transition period will be futile for short-term recovery.We also support the establishment of a permanent legislative authority in managing Crown financing and reimbursing of civil defence emergencies. The “PLA” as this is called we hope will be fair and equitable in the allocation of Crown funding for emergencies. For example it took 2 days for the Government to announce an initial cash injection of $250000 for Whanganui in June with a further $2.6 million pledged 2 months later. By contrast it took 2 weeks for Dunedin to receive a $100000 cash injection from the Government—the only one that it would receive in the ongoing recovery effort. On the surface the two events may not be comparable. However the regional context is very different for both the areas and the tendency for condensed low-lying housing in the South Dunedin area has meant that the social cost of those June floods has been absolutely devastating. Those costs have been estimated for insurance purposes to be well over $30 million but the true social costs will never be known because there is no counting those.So what happens when current legislation fails and what will this bill really do to ensure that those failures are remedied? I think those are really important questions for the select committee to answer and to look at some real case studies—I know there are a number of them. As the Minister Amy Adams who spoke before me mentioned core civil defence and emergency management principles are to act locally coordinate regionally and support nationally. But what happens when local authorities do not act? What happens when they miscalculate the enormity of a disaster and refuse to declare a local state of emergency?In the case of the Dunedin floods the four Rs failed. The risk was not reduced the city was not ready the response was woefully inadequate and the recovery is ongoing and costly. Local government had been provided with multiple warnings of the flood risk in South Dunedin due to a high water table. We have the recent report from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment that provides really solid evidence for that and there certainly was solid evidence available to the public and to local government before that yet nothing was done to reduce the risk.So what was the oversight there? The city was not ready. Local civil defence authorities were left floundering for evacuation points and volunteer bases with notes from the first briefing of the emergency operations centre saying that the question was: “Where do we assemble people in South Dunedin?”. It was left to a local marine search and rescue group to set up a volunteer base at St Kilda and I personally had to call the Minister of Civil Defence at midnight to put pressure on her to get some kind of response. That was not her fault. That was the issue that was not being addressed for South Dunedin in Dunedin at the time by local authorities and by civil defence.Most of all the response effort was woefully inadequate because no state of emergency was declared in Dunedin on 3 June. In response to my request as to why a state of emergency was not called in South Dunedin Dunedin civil defence responded that at no time did emergency services indicate that the situation was beyond their capabilities. On that day alone the fire service received 289 calls compared with 20 calls in total the previous Wednesday. It was so stretched that its multiple incident procedure policy had to be activated. That is triggered only when the communications end is not able to cope with the workload and it may necessitate the reduction of fire service responses to incidents. The police fire and ambulance services had all units committed at peak time during that flood event. To top it off Dunedin civil defence closed its operations at 11.30 p.m. despite more than 30 of the most vulnerable citizens residing at a local rest home having to contend with constant sewage leaks and power outages. And on and on it went.The response from local civil defence authorities fell markedly short and this set back any meaningful recovery efforts. Had a local state of emergency been declared the story would have almost certainly been different but it was not and South Dunedin is still suffering because of it.The Dunedin floods story shows that although the four Rs legislative framework might look good on paper in practice it is another matter so more effort is needed to ensure that local government is both supported and held to account for its work in emergency management. Although it is good that the recommendations included in the regulatory impact statement have been included in this bill their effectiveness is significantly reduced if the four Rs model is not working as a whole. It is all very well to have robust recovery measures but if the local response falls short then they are in essence meaningless. In considering this bill at the select committee these matters need to be taken into account.