SpeechKEVIN HAGUE (Green): I spoke in the debate on the first reading of this bill and mentioned some of the personal connections that I had to the work of the Blind Foundation through my father-in-law Jim Newcombe who is blind. He uses the services of the foundation extensively—he uses the talking book service he achieves internet access through services provided by the foundation his globe is one that he bought from the Blind Foundation shop. My mother-in-law his wife Joan Newcombe is a very active fund-raiser for the foundation. So I have a strong association with the foundation and indeed I have noticed how it has grown and changed over the years. It is that changing role of the foundation over time its seeing itself in a different way that is at the heart of this bill. I am a member of the Health Committee and I want to in the second reading take the normal role of thanking members of the committee the officials who assisted the committee with its work and the foundation itself. The foundation's submission and supplementary material were very interesting indeed.Members have spoken in this debate about the importance of clarifying the legal status of the foundation through repealing a superfluous law that might otherwise be confusing. But it is the other purpose for this bill that I think is more important and more interesting. It reflects a journey that many organisations in civil society have been on and the Minister the Hon Nicky Wagner in her remarks referred to the 19th century origins of this organisation. That was at a time when the prevailing model for social assistance for supporting members of our community who required support was very much a charity model—the model of doing good works—but the good works were being done to the people who had needs: to blind people and to people with low vision. We have moved away from that model and yet that is the model that has been enshrined in statute. I worked for 10 years for the New Zealand AIDS Foundation. The AIDS Foundation as some members of this House will know had its origins in the 1980s at a time when it became extremely clear that if we as a society were to take effective action against the HIV epidemic that was hitting our shores we needed to empower the communities that were most affected. So both Labour- and National-led Governments at that time in fact saw the wisdom of empowering organisations from those communities rather than running programmes from the Ministry of Health for people at risk from HIV. Actually if we were trying to deal with a community of men who had sex with men or communities of injecting drug users or communities of sex workers the only source for messages that those communities would trust would not be the Ministry of Health—it would be sources from within their own communities. So it is very much a model of empowerment of those communities.It has been great to see in the subsequent years that model being replicated and rolled out to other community-based organisations. So the model is very much now one of community-based organisations reflecting that empowerment. That empowerment results in better outcomes for in this case blind people and people with low vision. It is great to see that purpose being honoured in this bill and I look forward to better outcomes for blind New Zealanders as a result of this bill passing. Thank you.