McKelvie Ian; Dean JacquiIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Madam Speaker. I say thank goodness for Simon Bridges. I've never spoken in this House to more than two people—my mother and my wife came to my maiden speech!—so consequently I'm very nervous. It's my first opportunity to speak on this bill since its first reading and it was actually a bill that I had quite a lot to do with in its initial stages and certainly at the time that Mojo Mathers designed it and brought it to the House. I think it's a special effort by her actually to get a bill into the House and for Ricardo Menéndez to carry it on. I guess that's what happens in this place because quite often we see member's bills designed and put into the House by a member and later—some of them two or three members later—they go through the system and come out the other end. So I think this is a very good piece of legislation.There's some issues I want to raise when I go through my short contribution to it but the three main issues addressed by this bill are pretty simple. First of all it replaces guide dog" with a "disability assist dog" and that's a critical part of it because a guide dog initially I guess was designed for specific purposes but a disability assist dog can almost mean anything to anyone. And I think that's the intention of the bill. And I'll get on to why that is the case in a minute. So currently dogs—as has been well addressed by the earlier discussions—often are not permitted in streets not permitted in buildings not permitted in all sorts of parts of our society. This bill enables that to change for a dog who's certified as a disability assist dog and that's really important.And the third issue I wanted to get on to and one that I think's been misrepresented by some of the Government speakers to some extent was in fact the Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) that was introduced to this bill by Penny Simmonds. And I need to refer to this because I think it's going to have a long-term ramification for the bill. In the course of this bill they've stated the names of the organisations able to train dogs which I think's a mistake in itself because the moment you do that you've narrowed the scope of the bill and narrowed the ability of people to otherwise participate in that activity without this House putting the bill back through its process and that's no way in my view to pass a piece of legislation. The SOP that was introduced by Penny Simmonds and Maureen Pugh would have dealt with that because it would have enabled those organisations to expand the range of people able to train a dog.And if you think about those of us in rural New Zealand most of us have trained many many dogs and training a disability assist dog frankly is very little different to training a sheep dog or any other sort of a dog. And so I think that it's not necessarily something you need a specialist to do. So often we see in the disability sector disabled people themselves training their own dogs to do this sort of thing. And this SOP of Penny's would have enabled all that sort of thing to happen with ease and I think that's the great shame of not enabling that to go through and I'm sure that will cause some challenges in the future.And so I think that the intention of that SOP—and whilst it might not have gone through the process and I accept the fact that it didn't go through the select committee process it was well discussed in the industry and it was well discussed by a number of submissions to the bill as well. So that issue was well addressed in the course of the submission process and a number of organisations throughout New Zealand were very cognisant of the need to expand that range of people who could train those dogs. So I think that SOP had the best intentions and I think it is a shame it's not included in the bill and I'm sure it will mark us again in the future. Simeon Brown: Keep going.IAN McKELVIE: Thank you Simon—Ha ha! Simeon. I really think that this bill is worthwhile. It's a worthy member's bill and it will achieve exactly what it set out to achieve within the framework that's been put in place but it won't expand itself as it might have otherwise done.So I think it's a pretty good bill. I want to commend it to the House. I also want to congratulate again Mojo Mathers for the work she did on it and the work the Social Services and Communities Committee did on it as well because they certainly did some good work on that. And with that I've probably extended my time this afternoon but I do want to just pay tribute to our former leader who's going to speak shortly in the House. And I think it's a pretty special occasion for Parliament and for us in the National Party. Thank you Madam Speaker.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): I call Kieran McAnulty—five minutes."