McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Madam Speaker. I agree with the Minister for Racing: we need to fix this right now this week and I'm pretty sure we'll get some way down the path of fixing it right now this week. But before we do I want to go back a little in history—and unfortunately I like the Minister was around in 1969 and very well remember the report that pretty much resembled the report that was given to the Minister last year. That's one of the tragedies of the racing industry and I think we do need to go back a bit in history just to get a view of where we're at today and where this bill is hopefully going to take us to in the future.If you look at the previous Racing Act it was somewhat restrictive on the Minister's ability whoever the Minister was to do much to assist the racing industry frankly. It had to be done through other means—via tax or whatever. This bill in my view goes a long way to giving the industry back the prerogative to run themselves. I think it's most important as we get to that point that the industry does this in a collegial manner and I'll outline a little more about that in due course. But one of the problems the industry's had throughout its history in fact is that the three codes have been fragmented. In fact the individual codes have been fractured within and it has caused some problems in the industry. I don't think you can blame the Parliament entirely for that but certainly some of the legislation we've had in the past backing the industry's position wasn't necessarily constructive.I want to talk for a minute about the select committee process which I found surprisingly collegial. I've never sat on a select committee that remotely resembled that select committee. It was bipartisan. I want to congratulate Darroch Ball on his chairmanship of it. He didn't interfere much and he was extremely collegial as I said a moment ago. I also want to congratulate Jan Logie who did an awful lot of work in the background and assisted the Transport and Infrastructure Committee quite significantly I think with some views that needed to come to the committee. They came to the committee in the form of submissions but she also went out of her way to get to understand an industry that's not that simple and I think that was pretty significant.The select committee listened to and took note of submissions and then set about implementing many of the changes requested by the submitters. I might add that I think if a few more Ministers and select committees operated in this manner we'd produce a whole lot better legislation in this House. On many occasions I think we could do that much better than we have and I think—as I said a minute ago—this select committee and the process we went through was hugely constructive and has come out with a bill that in my short travels around the country in recent weeks I think is appreciated by the industry. Hopefully they'll get on with the job of getting over their differences basically and making this thing work. I'll just touch on that a little bit further on too.I also want to compliment the officials because as anyone who sits on select committees—and I don't want to be critical of officials for a minute—often finds officials have a view on how things should work and they like to get their own way to some extent. But I thought in the process of this bill they went out of their way to assist the committee to get to the point we wanted to get to and that particularly applies with respect to clauses 19 to 26 which relate to the property issues which were very challenging for particularly some of our smaller communities but also for our other communities.I hope the passing of this bill will put the once great racing industry back on its feet and allow us to give the horse breeders of New Zealand an opportunity to invest with confidence and show just how good they are. They are some of the best in the world. We have some of the best conditions for breeding horses in the world and it's an opportunity for us to make the best of that and I think it's important. It's one of those industries of a few that stick out in New Zealand where we're clearly as good as anyone in the world and we can excel wherever we go in the world with those horses. And the Minister referred to one of those a minute ago. I think it's very exciting opportunity for the industry and I just hope that they've got enough I guess strength and horsepower left to make that work for them.The industry came to the submission process with a large number of concerns about the way the bill was initially written. They were keen for it to follow the Messara report in a much closer manner than perhaps when it was first presented to the Parliament it did. I don't want to be critical of the Minister at all but they were quite keen to remove the Minister from some of the influence the Minister could have in the course of the legislation being implemented and actually you can see why because as with anything you can get Ministers appointed to these things that understand them and you can get Ministers appointed to these things that don't understand them and that don't want to. So I think the more an industry can remove itself from the processes of Parliament the better off they are. The first place that we had quite a discussion on was around the appointment of the TAB board and how that was to be processed going forward. I think it's most important that the industry—all sectors of it including the sporting sector—have a collective view of what they see the TAB board's future being. If they do that they will have the ability to nominate people who the Minister will then appoint with confidence. If they don't get their decision-making collective on this they're not going to give any Minister the confidence to go with the appointment processes as is intended by the bill. So it's intended by the bill that effectively that appointment process will enable the collective bodies to get their heads together and appoint and nominate people who are appropriate to take the industry forward. If they don't do that then that's going to be challenging for any Minister. That was the first issue we dealt with.The second issue was one of intellectual property. The original bill effectively gave the intellectual property of the industry to the TAB. Now the intellectual property of the industry is not necessarily owned by the codes or anyone else. The intellectual property of the industry is effectively owned by every sector of the industry because the breeders have a portion of the intellectual property the racing clubs have a portion of it as do many other people—from the trainers to the jockeys to whatever. They all own" the sector of that intellectual property. The challenging thing for the industry was it was effectively under the bill granted to the TAB. Now if you looked at the larger racing clubs in New Zealand for example it could be that they may have wanted—if the TAB doesn't survive—to contract themselves out individually. If they didn't own their own intellectual property they wouldn't be able to do that. So that was resolved and actually was resolved thanks to a large extent to the tenacity of my colleague Andrew Bayly who understands intellectual property better than I certainly do and better than most people do. He had some very strong views on that. So I think that that was a good outcome and I think it's an outcome that the TAB now accepts and fully understands.I'll talk very briefly about Racing New Zealand. When the bill came to the Parliament there was the ability for Racing New Zealand to form itself effectively. Now Racing New Zealand is a combination of the three codes. They had the ability to form themselves but there was no direction under the bill for them to be formed. One of the concerns I think that certainly I had—and I'm sure that other members of the select committee had as well—was that the three codes have never been able to collectively form themselves into anything historically. Interestingly they came and submitted on a united front to the select committee which I thought was unusual. In fact it was certainly unusual by industry standards. They came and submitted collectively and that gave us a false sense of security because knowing the history of them I felt and I think the select committee certainly felt it was necessary to form Racing New Zealand in legislation which effectively gave them the opportunity to put their body together. They then collectively will represent the codes hopefully—that's the idea of it: collectively represent the codes—in their negotiations with the TAB and with everyone else they deal with including the Minister. I think that will work too. So that was another provision that we inserted into the bill.I want to talk briefly about—because I'm running out of time—the sale of surplus racetracks. This was by far the most contentious issue that the committee had to deal with. It was the subject of probably 90 percent of all of the submissions and particularly from those racing clubs that felt they were the subject of the bill's design. We had a lot of discussion about this and I think our aim was to give those communities the ability to protect their property—and I say their property and I mean that—in one form or another. Small communities build up assets of all sorts to make their community work and in this case it's a racecourse that we're talking about. It was necessary to ensure that those communities were protected going forward and that that asset was protected either for that community or for the industry whichever the clubs felt was the right way to do it. I'm sure this will be documented as we go further down the track in a much better manner than I have. But it is a very important part of the bill. It's a piece of the bill that we feel we've got right and we think it will give a balance to all those racing clubs going forward.Now I'm clearly going to run of time but I just think it's a very good piece of legislation and I think it will set the industry up for the future. I'm confident that it will obviously pass here. We certainly support it. Thank you Madam Speaker."