Kuriger BarbaraBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country): It is a pleasure to be speaking on this bill and I would like to commend the people who have been instrumental in getting this member's bill to the stage where it got in the ballot and it came to the House. Chris Bishop is currently the owner of this bill but I would also like to—as others have said—commend Michael Woodhouse who started this process and Cam Calder who was a previous member of Parliament prior to my time. Everyone who has been associated with this bill—it is a great idea and it has been great being on the Health Committee to be supporting it.As someone said before when you look at the statistics there are 550 people who are out there waiting for organ donations; 450 of those are kidneys and we just do not have enough donors. Unfortunately the other 100 are around heart lungs and liver. There is potential around pieces of liver but we have only one heart and unfortunately that is a different make up in terms of people having to go through the death process to be able to donate.New Zealanders are very altruistic and it is really interesting for me that 48 percent of New Zealanders put on their driver licences that they are prepared to donate. But unfortunately—and we had a bit of a history lesson before about Jackie Blue trying to get some legislation passed around the wishes of those donors being upheld because family members for whatever reason find that pretty hard when it comes to the time of death and sometimes change their minds about letting their family's organs be donated.Also the other thing is that we have our Minister of Transport in the House tonight and he is making every effort to make our roads safer. We are cutting down on the number of accidents and so it is commendable that we are now able to being a piece of legislation that says people can donate while they are still alive.Nothing is ever as simple as it seems and I too like others in this room have really enjoyed being part of the Health Committee. We are a great committee and we do work really well together. There was a lot of support for this piece of legislation. It seemed like it was something that was going to be pretty simple. I would like to thank Chris Bishop for his patience because sometimes what seems simple actually takes a lot more time than it first appears. It was a matter of going through the process and seeing what other pieces of legislation might be affected by this and all the what if" questions.Really it is all about removing the financial barriers. It is not about paying people for their organs. It is about removing the financial constraints that can get in their way. There are a lot of people who would probably dearly love to give a kidney to a parent a sister or an auntie or even give it to someone who is completely unrelated but unfortunately due to their financial circumstances they are not able to do so. This bill is not a silver bullet but it is a small and significant change to how we encourage organ donation in New Zealand.We did spend quite a bit of time talking about the level of income. We talked about the 80 percent which was recommended in the bill as introduced. But we felt that if someone was making an effort to do this unless we had it at 100 percent they were really going to end up being out of pocket. It was going to limit the number of people who would come forward because 20 percent of your income is still 20 percent of your income and this is really quite a brave thing to do. The United Kingdom where we looked has a core policy of cost neutrality and that was the idea of donating—that it should be neither a financial advantage nor a financial disadvantage so the idea of 100 percent went down well.The responsibility of the bill—we have now moved the responsibility for administering the legislation from the Ministry of Social Development to the director-general at the Ministry of Health because that was a more appropriate place to put it. It is a piece of health legislation and so it was really critical that we had it in the right place. We have also recommended futureproofing the bill to allow by Order in Council a regulation declaring the type of human organ that will be a qualifying organ. Who knows as we make scientific and health breakthroughs what other organs may fall into the category and may be able to be donated into the future. Although at the moment kidney and liver transplants are the only types of live donor organ transplants that are carried out in New Zealand we do not know what the future is going to hold. But we do know how long legislation takes sometimes and we do know that when we try to change things it is not that simple so it was best that we did it in this other way so that if other possibilities come up we can certainly be in a place to have an opportunity to change that.The eligibility—we recommended defining a "qualifying donor" as a person who will lawfully donate an organ to a person undergoing transplant surgery in New Zealand and will forgo earnings while recuperating. The other thing we thought it was really prudent to do was we recommended that any new entitlements be backdated to the date that the bill receives the Royal assent otherwise there might be a risk that people who are intending to donate organs would defer the procedure until they became eligible. It could both delay urgent transplants and complicate the management of the elective surgery by health boards. We also are looking to change the title of the bill. We are recommending that rather than use the word "financial" we are talking about "compensation" for live organ donors. That reflects on the fact that it is compensation; it is actually not a financial payment. It is actually compensation for income that they are going to lose on the way.There has been extensive consultation. The bill has been before the Health Committee for 12 months and it has undergone significant review. The Health Committee received 110 written submissions four supplementary written submissions and 14 oral submissions on the bill. All submissions broadly supported the bill's central objective of removing barriers to organ donation. It is just one of those things that we would probably call a no-brainer. We have to do it. Most of the conversations and most of the details were around just exactly getting the detail right. No submissions were opposed to improving the level of financial support to live organ donors.I would like to just make a comment now. Louisa Wall raised the November challenge of the Diabetes Action Month and the Diabetes NZ Fitbit Movement Challenge. As a Health Committee along with Farmstrong we spent a day in the gym. We followed one another and we kept the pushbike going down in the gym from 2 o'clock to 10 o'clock. I think the Health Committee is a great committee. It was a wonderful way to lead the way. I currently have a Fitbit on and I can challenge myself but never as well as other people can lead me to a challenge.Jacqui Dean: 15000!BARBARA KURIGER: You can count me in. I am really prepared. Perhaps it is a challenge Jacqui. We challenged the whole Health Committee and we would like to challenge other members of Parliament to join us in this because as a Health Committee it is always important that we lead the way on health issues.Kris Faafoi: Target Primary Production—another worrisome group!BARBARA KURIGER: We will be producing lots of energy as we use up our Fitbits I can promise you that. This bill deals with some of the issues around live organ donation which still only makes up a very small percentage of organs donated. More work does need to be done for measures to increase deceased organ donation. The Government is looking at options for increasing that as well. It has been a real pleasure to take a call. I congratulate you Chris again on having your bill drawn from the ballot. We look forward to seeing this bill through to fruition. Thank you."