Graham KennedyDr KENNEDY GRAHAM (Green): I rise to convey the Green Party's support for this Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill (No 2) and the extension of the deadline for reporting back. I have not been personally involved in the relevant committee; my colleague Jan Logie has been and is unable to be here. But a quick look through the background and the proposed legislation makes it clear that we must proceed along these lines. The legislation itself of course is not exactly earth-shattering but we are dealing with earth-shattering matters and so it needs to be taken very seriously. We need to make sure that the parliamentary and governmental procedure is much tighter more rigorous and more proactive for the future because as we all know we are kind of in for it as the years go by.The bill itself as we know amends the 2002 Civil Defence Emergency Management Act and the purpose is to provide that the relevant management strategy due to expire in January can remain in place until July 2019. The reason is simply that more time is needed for the technical advisory group's findings to be considered. The group was set up as I understand it only around about April so it has not had very much time. The question could be asked as to whether it should have been as I think my colleague Clare Curran was alluding to set up earlier—even years earlier.But the Green Party does support the extension. The work is critical. I just segue from there into the comment that you might expect from me that the onset of climate change will intensify the emergencies that we experience over the next decades. For example globally as I think has been pointed out in earlier examples of this kind of legislation if we go back four decades to the 1970s there were 78 natural disasters per year—78. Today there are 350. So that is within four decades.New Zealand is now spending approximately $2 billion annually on natural disaster. We can go back to the Christchurch earthquakes Kaikōura Kāpiti floods Port Hills fires Edgecumbe floods and it goes beyond that. It is earthquakes floods fires and now as we see around us literally slips; major slips unexpected slips and coastal erosion from sea-level rise. So this is the new world that we are in and it is a new world that we are going to need to adapt to and our legislative planning is going to have to adapt to that as well.It raises the question as to what a natural disaster is. Can certain disasters be averted or minimised? Disasters such as climate change at least in its magnitude and frequency is human-induced. So that leads us to a need for the recognition of the urgency and magnitude of preventive action through strong mitigation policies and I do not wish to get off the subject of this fairly narrow technical focus but it is important to put it in the context of that broader need.I would just finish by recalling with a touch of poignancy the report that I tabled in the House in late October or November 2011 about the Christchurch earthquake following a series of public forums that I had held throughout Christchurch when I was there after the earthquake. I developed in consultation with colleagues a report on how to react as a nation and as a Christchurch City Council and as a Parliament to the tragic earthquake in Christchurch of 2011 and tabled a report with 26 recommendations. So it is documented for the House and I just would humbly point out to Hon Scott Simpson to convey to Ministers that there is a report lying there tabled since 2011 on recommendations that are relevant to this kind of technical advisory group—just a humble contribution. Thank you.