McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Mr Speaker. DEPUTY SPEAKER: Ian McKelvie. IAN McKELVIE: Yeah I'm getting there Mr Speaker. It's a slow process. Thank you Mr Speaker. It gives me pleasure to speak on the third reading of the Births Deaths Marriages and Relationships Registration Bill and to be able to support its progress through the House along with the National Party. I got to join this discussion just after the Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) was referred to the Governance and Administration Committee and I was there in time to listen to the many many submissions on it and take part in the discussion on the bill which I thought the officials handled extremely well in difficult circumstances actually because we'd put some quite significant demands on them. So it's a bit interesting because the changes recommended by the select committee were then adopted at the committee of the whole House and while it's very unusual to be discussing work done by a select committee at the third reading in this case it's necessary because of the unusual process the bill followed as it came back to the House. Therefore I want to thank the members of the select committee. They put a significant amount of work into this. We heard a lot of submissions over a couple or three weeks and of course it was during the time when Auckland were basically imprisoned and so we had three captive Auckland MPs who couldn't get away from the submission process. They were there for good. But none the less they persisted and did very well. I want to thank the select committee for listening to most of the submissions with courtesy and with sound questions. But I want to apologise to those members of the public who felt uncomfortable with the process because I've got to say I felt uncomfortable with the process too and I'm going to explain why right now. I was uncomfortable with the manner in which the live streaming of the select committee proceedings led to some submitters being very unfairly attacked on social media without either the will or in fact the ability to reply or any protection from Parliament. If we're to continue to use live streaming and social media to get our proceedings out there we're going to have to put suitable protections in place or we will lose the public's confidence and we will no longer have people willing to submit to Parliament particularly on difficult pieces of legislation. I frankly don't believe people should be able to use social media to attack submitters that they don't agree with. Therefore the only reasonable solution for us is to prevent comment via this medium in the future and I think that Parliament is going to have to consider that. I've never felt the need to doubt who I am to change my name to amend my registered sex nor indeed to live for years in fear of who I am and in fear of what people might think of me worrying that my private information will get out against my will worrying in fact that when I die I might not be identified correctly and so on. I'm lucky. What I'm saying is that I've never walked a step in these people's shoes and who am I to judge them or to not support their case when I'm in a position to have significant influence on it? I believe many submitters to the SOP were very like me but chose to oppose this piece of legislation for many reasons many of which I respect but they were not compelling enough reasons for the select committee to accept. Consequently we unanimously supported the SOP as reported back and consequently this bill at third reading.This is big. We heard from hundreds of people whom all of these issues affect on a regular basis. I must say having listened to the arguments for and against this SOP and subsequent legislation it will have very little or no effect on me but it will have a significant effect on so many people's lives and that I think—as has just been said not a few minutes ago by someone in the House—is why we're here. If we can make a little bit of difference to someone's life and have no impact on other people's lives in the course of doing it I think we should most certainly persevere with that. I want to speak for a minute about the fears of some of those who opposed the bill because I think it's necessary to address it. We heard from submitters afraid that men would use this legislation to impose on women. We heard that prisons would be rife with people misrepresenting their sex for ill-gotten reasons that schools would have boys in girls' changing rooms and vice versa. We've noted that the Ministry of Education would have to put some very real investment into resolving these questions that the prison service would have to—and actually it is in the process of adequately addressing and resourcing this issue and that the current laws are sufficient to manage any threats that women felt might be imposed on them. I hope we are right; in fact I'm sure we will be right. One of the great disappointments of this process was the scant attention paid to the issues facing people born overseas and their opportunity to participate in this process. We were given very good reasons by the officials as to why this was the case. They did also make significant effort to try and resolve this issue for us with quite short notice and whilst we could have accepted their solutions those solutions didn't guarantee protection of those people and certainly didn't guarantee that we could actually even access their birth certificates to rectify the problem. So there's a lot of work to be done in that area and our Minister of Internal Affairs I think in her address today said that she'll get on and make sure that that work's done. So given that that hasn't been resolved I think the rest of the bill is in as good a shape as we could have got it in and I hope that it does what it set out to achieve which is to make so many people's lives much better. The provisions and changes listed in the bill have been well traversed by speakers earlier in the debate and I don't intend to go there other than to say I think that the select committee did a good job. I think that the Minister's done an outstanding job of getting this thing through a pretty tricky process really when you think about it and also the officials did I think a pretty special job of trying to sort through a myriad of submissions and some quite challenging issues. So it's with a great deal of pleasure that I support this bill as it goes through the House today.