Naylor JonoJONO NAYLOR (National): Certainly as we have gone through this Coroners Amendment Bill it has been a very interesting process and as other speakers have already alluded to a very challenging one. We have had to confront some issues that I guess we usually try to avoid often in life and certainly experiences we do not necessarily want to have to go through ourselves. I too want to just acknowledge the number of submitters who came and shared their personal stories with us in a public setting. That is a big thing to do and I just want to again acknowledge their bravery and their commitment to wanting to see things improve. It was a privilege for us to be able to share that time with them and also to hear from them with regard to those issues they wanted to raise. This is a bill that is designed to improve people's interaction with the coronial service. It is also designed to introduce and bring in some more pragmatic approaches for the coronial service to be able to deliver a better service to the people who interact with it and also basically to deliver a better result for all of New Zealand. First—and I think it is a critical part of this—is the desire through this bill to be able to reduce the length of time that people wait for an outcome from a coroner's report. For families who are grieving and who are wanting to bring closure having that as an outstanding matter can just make the grieving process that much more difficult. Waiting 400 or 700 days for that report to come out really just is not acceptable if we are wanting to deliver a service that is going to have a level of sympathy and empathy for those people who are suffering and who have been through the difficulty of experiencing the sudden loss of a loved one. If we can through what we are doing as legislators improve that for them then it is absolutely beholden on us to do that and so I support that. There is a practicality in this bill also about making it not mandatory for there to be coronial inquests into certain matters. For example if somebody dies of obviously natural causes—perhaps they have had a long-term illness that has led to their death—while they are incarcerated if there is nothing pointing to a suspicious death it seems absurd that at the moment a coroner is mandated and has to do a full inquest rather than just an inquiry. So this is a practical step that has been taken. Of course there is nothing to stop a coroner from actually doing an inquest. If they have got concerns then they can still follow through with that. Just in response to what we have heard with regard to the now non-mandatory inquest for service people who die in the service of their country overseas if the Auditor-General perceives that there is a need to have a coroner's inquest or inquiry then the Auditor-General can still do that. We are not prohibiting the coroners from being involved at all in those overseas deaths of service people but we are actually ensuring that it is not mandatory—it does not have to happen. The bill does not prevent it from happening and so I believe that the concerns that the Labour Party members have raised can be addressed. If the Auditor-General believes that the family does need to have that coronial input not just the service inquiry then he or she—whoever is holding that office—can make that happen. In summary this is a balanced bill it is a pragmatic bill and I hope that it will go some way to alleviating the suffering of New Zealanders who have suffered the sudden loss of a loved one going forward. It is a pleasure to endorse it to the House.