Roche Denise; Tisch LindsayDENISE ROCHE (Green): I rise to take a short call for the Greens on the third reading of the Fire and Emergency New Zealand Bill. Like other speakers in the House and as my colleague Jan Logie has said before the Greens will be supporting this bill. We note that it has taken a long time to get to this point but the process has been fairly thorough. There were consultations and reviews in both 2012 and 2015 that came up with a raft of recommendations which have mostly been adopted in the legislation that we see being enacted before us today. Like others have before me I do want to acknowledge the work that our firefighters both voluntary and professional do for New Zealanders and the sacrifices that they make for us. If we think about the work that they actually do we know that it is not just putting out fires but also attending car crashes cutting people out of cars on the road supporting the ambulance services and also attending to things like road closures slips and floods. In my own community on Waiheke Island in April and in March we had enormous weather events that resulted in the fact that basically our voluntary fire service attended something like 26 call outs over an 11-hour period starting at 11.30 at night. That was on just one of the days that we had those weather events. Most of the work the firefighters were doing was clearing roads cutting up trees so that people could get through pumping out people's basements and roads and dealing with water damage. The work that these people do is amazing. I would also like to recognise the fact that they put their lives on the line and I think particularly of the firefighters who attended the fire several years ago in Tamahere and also the 60 firefighters who were impacted on by the toxicity of the fire that they fought in 1984 at the ICI chemical factory some of whom are still dealing with the consequences of that. So these are brave people—there is no doubt about that—and they deserve a service that actually treats them consistently and a service where they can progress through it. I have heard that the union has been fairly supportive of this process and that is good to see too. Again I acknowledge like my colleague Jan Logie did that this is the merging of two cultures—the voluntary culture and the professional culture and the urban culture and the rural firefighting scene—but we are hopeful and I am sure that the rest of the Fire Service is too that this will deliver consistency across all of New Zealand and consistency of resources that are available as well. There is the potential that the kinks that may still remain—particularly in the stuff around levies which will be contained and nutted out in the regulations—can be ironed out within the 3-year review. I commend the Government for developing legislation that allows for that because that does mean that things that may not have been foreseen can actually be dealt with.I also suggest that this is a model that should be watched very very closely because we could be looking at it for our other emergency services—in particular I am thinking about the ambulance service which has recently had some real issues around staffing. The Fire Service supports it in many of the incidents that it attends and the ambulance service is a very similar type of organisation in that it is staffed by professionals and volunteers. The ability for people to access ambulances across the country is not consistent because of the availability of volunteers and the lack of a requirement for safe staffing by having two or more ambulance officers attend at one time. So we will be supporting this bill. We look forward with interest to see how it plays out. The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I call Marama Fox—5 minutes.