Pugh MaureenMAUREEN PUGH (National): Thanks very much Madam Speaker. Like my colleague Penny Simmonds I stand in support of the Accessibility for New Zealanders Bill in its first reading in the House today. We are supporting this bill through to select committee but as has been alluded to by my colleague there is quite a lot of work to do on this bill. As we can imagine there will be a lot of interest in this bill from the disability sector.I thought I would lay the foundation of my contribution today by just looking at some of the numbers with regard to the disability sector. We know from a disability survey that was done in 2013 that there were an estimated 1.1 million disabled New Zealanders to some extent or another. Now if we put that in context that's actually over 20 percent of New Zealand's population. So the sector is not an insignificant part of our Kiwi way. Again in that survey it was realised that some people with disabilities also have multiple impairments. So when that survey was conducted 53 percent of disabled people actually had multiple impairments. So we can start to see the complexities that do arise with people with multiple impairments in the disability sector.If I even refer to my own childhood growing up with disabilities in my family—one being a severe intellectual disability non-verbal communicator—as a child I didn't realise that this person was intellectually impaired I just thought he was another playmate in a big body. Such is the innocence of a child. But as I grew up I started to realise the commitment that my relations had to make to the upbringing of someone with such a severe disability and the barriers that exist in our society for people in that situation. And my grandfather bless his soul and God rest his soul was a coal miner on the West Coast and suffered a severe back trauma in a coal fall in the mines and was a paraplegic my whole life. So again he was my grandad and I thought that's normal for us. But again as I grew up I started to realise the barriers that are imposed on someone especially with the ability to get around in a wheelchair in those days. I've still got the gear lever that he used to use in his manual car—being able to use the break and the clutch in this complex mechanism that he had to get installed in his car—and still drive relatively safely. But such are the complexities.So when we look at this kind of legislation I think what we see is a very wasted opportunity. For all of the consultation and the thinking that has gone into this over five years this is the best that can be produced? That almost appears to me to be tokenism in terms of getting something on the statute book that looks as though there has been real debate and real consultation real listening. What we're going to end up with is this piece of legislation that sets up the Accessibility Committee and the legislation will also enable the Minister to appoint two more people to that committee. It's already going to have up to eight people on it. Then the legislation requires the Minister to establish a community nominations panel for the purpose of nominating candidates for the committee members.Chris Penk: Oh layers of waste.MAUREEN PUGH: And it is—thank you Chris Penk. It's layers and layers. Again what we see from the Labour Government is layers of bureaucracy before anything on the front line is actually delivered. It also enables or requires the Minister to establish a Māori nominations panel for the purpose of nominating candidates for appointment to the committee. So it just seems such a wasted opportunity.As Penny Simmonds alluded to before it looks as though this is driven simply by accountability to the process without any consideration of what the outcomes are going to be. If I look back to my times in local government when the Building Act was amended we had directives about what new buildings could be built in your district. Those buildings that were new public and accessible to the public whether it was free or paid say hospitals or theatres or things like that—the Building Act actually required tangible changes to be made to the design. So that was supporting accessibility. It was early days of it but it actually gave us tangible solutions for some of the accessibility issues and over time we would see as buildings are either updated renovated or built the accessibility change and more accessibility for people that needed it. So they're the tangible things that can happen. But sadly this bill does not do that.One of the things that did stand out to me in reading this bill was around the lack of enforcement that it actually has. If I look at some of the clauses it empowers the committee to request information from specified entities that it considers necessary or desirable which is all very nice; they can request it but there is nothing in this legislation that says that they must comply that they must provide that information. So again another missed opportunity. There are no time lines in this bill. There is a review after five years but I'm not sure what it will be that will be reviewed. It will probably be the process and there'll be a lot of boxes that can be ticked. But we want to always go back to the people that this bill actually seeks to support and they're the people with the disabilities the over 20 percent of Kiwis that we are talking about. We want to make sure that their accessibility to buildings to transport and even to our streets has improved in some way but this bill does nothing to allow any kind of data gathering that will measure improvements for them in accessibility in their everyday lives.When I look to some of the press releases that were done just recently just last month one lady is actually saying that if there are no changes made tangible changes such as in this legislation which there are not people like her will still be forced to shower on her veranda. I think that's an absolute tragedy. There doesn't seem to be in any of the legislation that we deal with in this House any commitment from the Government to create enforceable legislation. I think the main barrier to doing that is because this Government is afraid of measuring outcomes. We can all probably guess why that is. It is because they have failed to deliver for Kiwis across this country on a raft of legislative change. I have to say that in the press release that I read neither Minister Sepuloni nor the new Minister for Disability Issues would commit to accessibility legislation that was enforceable. I just think that's a tragic waste of this House's time and a tragic waste of opportunity because this is not going to come around again any time soon.So unless we can get some very big changes to this bill in the select committee process I think we have just delivered another piece of tokenism. I would like to say too that if we are for the disability sector very genuine about delivering changes and improvements to accessibility across this country and if we are to take steps forwards let's make them giant leaps not this tokenism that we're dealing with today. Thank you very much Madam Speaker.