SpeechDAMIEN SMITH (ACT): I rise on behalf of the ACT Party to talk about the Integrity Sport and Recreation Bill and it falls to ACT once again to challenge this piece of legislation. It seems to be across the House that people haven't really looked at what's happening in the UK or Australia with regards to this type of legislation. It doesn't matter whether there's several Ministers of sport and recreation in the National Party or one in the Labour Party; this bill demonstrates that in terms of a stand-alone integrity sport solution there's a lot to be desired. It's not a step in the right direction and to retain the skills of these independent bodies while supporting their capacity the transition committee that is contemplated in this bill requires a commission and this will involve tens of millions of dollars of people running around in black suits with blazers pretending to monitor sport.ACT believes that this will take away valuable resources from the anti-doping and match-fixing legislation that is required at the core of this bill. Everybody wants to play hard and win hard but I can't see what this does for the high performance sports athletes in New Zealand. In terms of the bill itself there is another way to look at this where people can get their day in court with a QC-based commission which thoroughly investigates a body like Racing New Zealand which this bill will never be able to grasp or do. The bill contemplates a new Crown entity called the Integrity Sport and Recreation Commission and Sir Don McKinnon has said he wants to look at what's happening around the world and to fit it to what works for New Zealand. Now that has clearly not been defined here and so that would flag up early concerns for the ACT Party over the independence of the new agency and how it would actually investigate Sport New Zealand. There's a couple of points that need to be raised about the bill; why the status quo has not been considered. This seems to be like a massive leap into the unknown where if you look at the information pack that's been supplied there is actually a body that exists that if it was enhanced would allow us to actually deal with this and that would be by extending the powers of the Sport and Recreation Complaints and Mediation Service to actually deal with options that are independent based on sports integrity with pure focus and it's not a status quo arrangement. It could be enhanced with some legal mechanisms to involve QCs in very serious misconduct or local authorities and local representative sports organisations in communities. The other aspect is just on the cost of this bill there is no clear mechanism for defining that in terms of the values and benefits that it produces. Now it's easy to say on face value that it all looks great but actually what does it do for New Zealand sport? What does it actually do for the recreational sportsperson? What does it do for the high-performance sportsperson and—Angie Warren-Clark: It keeps them safe.DAMIEN SMITH: Keeping them safe—well that is obviously part of a code of conduct that exists at the moment. That's one of the other worries we have about the bill—it's all optional in terms of codes of conduct and everybody else will have the ability to write their own codes of conduct which means there's a plethora of scenarios that could emerge. Now that to me doesn't make sense. It's not binding. It doesn't actually commit sports authorities to administer any set of rules that are actually universal and across the board. So keeping people safe is important but it isn't the total requisite for a bill of this nature. If you look at the Australian system they have clearly been down the road further than us and they're getting hammered by athlete welfare complaints especially in the first couple of years of operations but then they run out of resources for anti-doping and the match-fixing investigations. So you can see that there are unintended consequences of this. So they changed a model earlier this year and the Dutch people have changed the model to place sports management investigations outside and away from Government control.Why is the Government actually doing this when it should be independent bodies that actually get them truly accountable in the courts and the administration of those sports? So why do we need a commission? Why do we need a sports commission as contemplated by the bill? What is the function of it? The same people are going to be running this. The two sports organisations are going to be welded into one and it's still going to be the same people with a wider mandate to do things that are actually getting done at the moment. So to me we should look overseas to what is a sensible approach where sport and the legal aspects of funding the legal aspects of behaviour are actually carved out and very well understood. You'd need a matrix here of about eight boxes to actually get what is going on and I hope with the select committee process we will get to the bottom of that. I'd like to see Sir Don McKinnon's views sooner rather than later given the truncated version of the select committee process. So for that purpose we cannot support the bill at this stage.