Faafoi KrisKRIS FAAFOI (Labour—Mana): I know you had an option Mr Chair so thank you very much. Can I first of all begin by acknowledging the men and women of our Fire Service. Some of them will be busy tonight and were busy last night dealing with weather-related call outs. I will make a point later on in my contribution as to why I think this Parliament needs to seriously consider Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 263 the SOP in my name on this piece of legislation because of what might be happening right now especially in some of the flooded urban areas where the silting-up of fire hydrants may be a real issue.I do have an SOP for this part Part 2. I just want to give some plain English context to it. Every 5 years I understand—and I acknowledge Carl Mills from the Plimmerton Volunteer Fire Brigade—the fire brigades in my area have to go and check the fire hydrants in the area. My understanding is that they have not done that for the last at least 10 years because of issues around traffic management plans and the issues and the red tape in and around that. It is essentially too hard for them to be able to do it especially for volunteer fire brigades. The reality of that is that—and I do not like to say this; it alarms me—when fire brigades turn up to an issue where they may need the fire hydrant there is a degree of luck involved as to whether or not the fire hydrant is actually usable.That is not just in my area it may be in and around other parts of the country where the situation is the same because the local fire brigades have chosen not to check fire hydrants because of the onus on them of traffic management plans. So if they ask to check a fire hydrant they will rock up and for every hydrant they check they are expected to have a traffic management plan to make sure that they are safe in and around that fire hydrant. That task is onerous and I think I have spoken about this already in some contributions to the bill and I think it needs to be sorted out for a number of reasons. The first reason is public safety because it is a real issue. There was a call-out I understand in mid-February this year in my electorate where there was potentially a fire and the fire brigade turned up to a potential fire call-out at a motel. They went to the fire hydrant to be able to use it to be able to plug the hose in and it was silted up because there had been flooding in that area some time before. So that fire hydrant was unusable. If the building had been on fire they would have had to go to another fire hydrant 300 metres down the road and if it was not silted up like the fire hydrant that they checked first then they would be able to use it. But there is pure luck involved in that because if it was flooded and silted up then they could not use that too. I would not want to be the owner of a property where the fire brigade could not use the fire hydrant outside my property because it was silted up because the local fire brigade chose not to check it because of the impost on them of a traffic management plan. That is why I think this legislation needs to include this because we need to have confidence that our fire brigades are going to be safe when they are checking those and that the fire hydrants actually work.There is another issue that I want to raise with the Minister in the chair Peter Dunne around this. We expect those fire brigades to be out there working and they are not checking those fire hydrants at the moment and my question to the Minister in the chair is that if you will require traffic management plans of fire brigades can I ask what your understanding of the situation is when police set up checkpoints. If our police are setting up checkpoints at the moment and are not requiring a traffic management plan why is there a different standard for the police and another standard for our fire brigades? I think they are essentially doing the same thing. They are using the road for a purpose it is not an emergency in this case they are going to a site to set up potentially a drink-driving checkpoint to test people on the roads using that road and I want to know what the onus on the police is around the traffic management in that area. The Police and the Fire Service are two Crown entities that this Parliament goes out and asks to do certain duties to keep the public safe. If we are going to ask fire brigades to go out and check fire hydrants and carry out training on roads and require them to have a traffic management plan is the same rule in place for our police? If not why not? And do we have to standardise this for agencies or Crown entities like the Fire Service and like the Police? I think we may have a bit of a mismatch here.My understanding is that if the police want to go and set up a checkpoint they do not have to have a traffic management plan. They make an assumption that what they are doing needs to be done and they will go and do it. If the same standard is going to be asked of the police that we are requiring of our fire brigades when they are using the roads not for emergencies but for training and testing purposes I would suggest that the police every time they set up for a checkpoint have to go to the local council to get a traffic management plan. My assumption is that the police would not like to do that because if those were publicly notifiable you would know where they are. I would also expect that they would want to do things quite quickly and respond with some urgency so therefore would not have a traffic management plan. My question to the Minister is: is there a standard that can be met? If not I think the SOP I have in my name to put the onus in legislation for there to be a code of practice around traffic management and to give a degree of control to fire brigades when we are doing testing and training on the roads needs to be there. If it is good enough for the police to go out there and do whatever they need to do without a traffic management plan because they know they have got some criteria to keep them safe why is it not the same for the fire brigades?It is my understanding since 2015 that water testing and training on roads was nationally prohibited by the New Zealand Fire Service if brigades did not have a traffic management plan. At the moment if you do not have a traffic management plan and you are in a fire brigade you are not doing any testing or training on the roads. I think that has real safety implications. I go back to the issue of basically testing the fire hydrants. There is the expectation and I understand an obligation on our fire brigades to test those hydrants and check that they work. If we as a House are ignoring the practical issue for fire brigades right now to make sure that they can do that work—if those hydrants are not working and a fire brigade turns up to a fire and cannot use the hydrant in front of a house that is on fire because there is an issue with it like it has been silted up or it is non-operational and that brigade does not know that because it has not tested it in 5 or 10 years then I do not think we are doing our job well enough. To say to leave it to the new entity to sort it out I do not think is enough. I think we need to put it within the legislation that there is a code of practice working with local authorities and working with the transport agency so that we have an understanding of what goes into whatever traffic management plan that we can assume that those fire brigades will adhere to and let them get on with it. The real implications are that some fire hydrants around the country are probably not operational now because they cannot be tested. So the amendment in the SOP that I put in my name here looks to do that to put the onus on the new entity to make sure that this issue is sorted out. To be fair if we do not then nothing could happen and the situation will carry on as it has. But I certainly do not want to be a member of Parliament who knows about this issue and then for an event to happen where a hydrant does not work and something happens that we do not want to happen. So unless the Minister can assure me that this issue is close to being sorted out I would hope that this Parliament could seriously consider putting an obligation on the new entity to make sure that this happens—to make sure when a fire truck turns up outside your house and wants to hook up to the hydrant the hydrant works—because at the moment this Committee cannot guarantee that.