Warren-Clark Angie; Dean JacquiANGIE WARREN-CLARK (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's a real delight to stand and speak in support of this bill. The Labour Party will be supporting this bill because it certainly aligns with our views and values. The Human Rights (Disability Assist Dogs Non-Discrimination) Amendment Bill is a bit of a mouthful but it is nevertheless quite a simple bill that does a very important small change to the legislation. I want to acknowledge the member Ricardo Menéndez March for having this bill pulled from the ballot. I've got my own bill sitting in the ballot. It's an exciting time and we all like to have these things happen. I also want to acknowledge Mojo Mathers who originally put this bill in over five years ago—December she put it in five years ago. So it's been a long time sitting there in the ballot and I think it's really really important that we now have it drawn and we are now discussing it.As the chair of the Social Services and Community Committee I'm delighted that this bill will be referred to us for investigation and development. I'm looking forward to the community giving us lots and lots of feedback for us to support and enhance this piece of legislation in any way that we can so that it better supports our disability community. What will this bill do? Essentially I think the member Jan Logie has explained it extremely well in that this bill seeks to I guess modernise some language where we talk about a guide dog in the legislation and extend the definition of guide dog" to include disability assist dogs. Now one of the things that I've been particularly interested in is around this whole area of disability assist dogs in that we are now seeing more and more dogs that are highly trained—it's somewhat expensive but that's because of the years of training that goes into them—being out there in the community. I've been quite interested in ensuring that those dogs have access alongside I guess their masters—I'm not quite sure or their "person"; I think that's the term—or their person so that actually these dogs can be the most effective and perform their function. So for example recently I met with a family in Ōmokoroa and that family had an assist dog. They called that dog a service dog so I would be interested in looking at the different definitions. There are three kinds of definitions. There's a service dog a disability assist dog and an assist dog. So we should have a look at the definition when we're looking at this legislation. But anyway I met with this family and I got to see their new training dog. Unfortunately the previous assist dog had passed away and the family were very bereft and it was devastating to the family to lose that dog. The young woman has a diagnosis of autism and the dog calms her. The dog helped and supported her to be calm in public to be relaxed and to be able to carry out the everyday functions of life which is tremendous and this dog passed away. So the family were now needing to have a further dog given to them or purchased for them and it was just remarkable to watch the difference that this young dog had actually made to this family. It was just just lovely. I had the conversation with them about how does it work at school and the previous dog had gone to school really well trained. Many many need I think at least two years' training and that dog was amazing in the school environment. It had not only helped and supported this young woman but it also helped and supported to keep the rest of the class calm and in fact other children read to the dog and were more comfortable reading to the dog and that assisted their learning. It was quite lovely. That started my journey around the thinking about what we're looking at here which is previously we just had guide dogs and those guide dogs are amazing. My grandmother was entitled to have a guide dog but she felt that she couldn't properly exercise and care for it in a rest home and so she chose not to have one which I do think was quite sad. But I do know that the changes that that would have made and supported her to be able to see better would have been amazing. Now back to the bill—sorry I was getting carried away there Madam Speaker. So this bill changes the definition in the Human Rights Act to include disability assist dogs. The bill aligns with our values as I've said and changes the definition under the Dog Control Act. It protects the basic rights of disabled New Zealanders to live free from discrimination in that we must and should always support these families to have their best lives and to live the best lives that they can. So what do these dogs do? The member Jan Logie has talked about that and I certainly have as well. One of the things that I wanted to talk about though is the difference between an emotional support dog versus a disability assist dog. I don't know if any of you have ever seen this but in America sometimes you'll have a route they'll be able to go on to—you know a train or a plane—essentially as an emotional support animal. However we're not talking about emotional support animals; we're talking about appropriately trained animals. In reference to that I'd just like to go through the organisations that have the appropriate accreditation in New Zealand for training of those dogs. So there is the Assistance Dogs New Zealand the Hearing Dogs New Zealand for deaf people the K9 Medical Detection New Zealand the K9 Search Medical Detection the Mobility Assistance Dogs Trust the New Zealand Epilepsy Assist Dog Trust Perfect Partners Assistance Dogs Trust and Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind. I think that what we could look at here is we could make sure that the appropriate training is in place. We should make sure that people aren't I guess getting a dud dog or buying a dog that's not fit for purpose so perhaps we could extend some of what we look at to ensure that these assist dogs are fit for purpose. I think we could also maybe think a little bit about how do we identify these dogs in the community. Perhaps they need to wear a cape or they need to wear a vest and they probably all do but maybe we need to put that in the legislation. There are all sorts of parts to this legislation that we can actually explore. I think it's really important that when we go out to the community we seek submissions from the disabled community because I firmly believe in what that community says which is "Nothing about us without us." I think that that will in fact help us better shape this legislation as we take it through the select committee process. With that I commend this bill to the House.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): The question is that the motion be agreed to."