Foster-Bell PaulPAUL FOSTER-BELL (National): E Te Mana Whakawā Tuarua tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou katoa e ngā mema o Te Whare Pāremata o Aotearoa. In speaking on the Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill in this second reading debate I want to pay tribute to both the Acting Minister who set this bill down for the second reading the Hon Gerry Brownlee but actually the Minister who drove the creation of this bill the Hon Nikki Kaye. I want to pay tribute to her and congratulate her on the excellent work that went in to the drafting of what was a very good bill. It did receive insufficient submissions to warrant a huge amount of consideration by the committee. There were only 12 submitters of whom only six opted to submit verbally before us. But the bill has had a few amendments that have arisen out of the work of the Government Administration Committee and I will just touch on a couple of those. We have recommended amending the bill so that the function of the civil defence and emergency management groups is to plan for recovery rather than to create a separate recovery plan. One of their key functions when they are executing their duties is to build in that recovery planning as part of an overall strategy. This is common sense and I think there was fairly broad agreement as to the positive outcomes that we could have from that. Also we had extensive debate in the committee around the local transition periods where the Minister would either make extend or terminate a local transition period. There are a number of powers that go with a transition period and these include emergency powers to have people removed from their properties for instance and to control access to roads—these sorts of things. We had debate over the level of community consultation that was appropriate. We have to remember that these are firstly emergencies. They may be of a small to moderate scale which is what this bill intends to address but they are emergencies. They may involve key personnel being uncontactable incommunicado or even casualties of the event that has caused the emergency. So we settled on seeking and considering comment from affected civil defence and emergency management groups and the mayor of any affected local authority as the right level of community consultation. There is not time to run surveys or go out and consider wider views when you are dealing with an emergency or even an emergency transition. So I think we have arrived at a pragmatic sensible middle ground on that particular point. I am glad that parties across the House agree and I hope that they will support the bill all the way through to a third reading. As has been referenced by the Minister Michael Woodhouse when he introduced this bill on behalf of the Acting Minister this is only the first stage of a wider review. It is not intended to deal with a Christchurch-level event—something that causes significant damage across a whole province. This is to deal with emergencies of a small to moderate size and more localised in effect. I am looking forward to the Government work programme introducing those further measures in due course. It is a good bill and I fully commend it to the House.