Lee DeniseDENISE LEE (National—Maungakiekie): Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to be speaking on this bill for two reasons. The first is it's a great bill by my colleague Harete Hipango a fellow rookie MP. There are now five new National MPs who've had the privilege of getting their members' bills drawn from the biscuit tin—five of us. So the odds are definitely in our favour and we look forward to the ballot on Thursday where we'll add—Andrew Falloon is crossing his fingers. I'll look forward to Thursday and maybe we'll get that number up to six or even more. The other reason I'm happy to speak to this bill is that in my past life I ran a charitable trust. I know first-hand how important community groups are and their volunteers and their well-being and how they contribute to this country how they contribute to communities to family lives to the lives of everyone. What I'm missing on hearing in this debate is how the other side of the House isn't acknowledging how to attract and retain volunteers. It is a seriously important and impactful issue here.Hon Member: That's a very good point.DENISE LEE: Thank you for the backup I'm getting from my team on this side; not much from the other side but we'll carry on anyway.Hon Member: That's right.DENISE LEE: That's right. I happen to have very recently met with a number of charities both big and small and there's one common theme emerging and that common theme that is emerging is that it is incredibly hard in today's day and age to attract volunteers. And that's the theme that I want to touch on with the remaining time that I have here this afternoon. Volunteer organisations across the entire sector are struggling to find the finances and the actual volunteers to do the work that they're doing to continue the amazing work that they do on behalf of our country. The traditional model of being mostly reliant on actual volunteers is shrinking by the day.These groups are being forced to change their model and look at more paid staff to do the same work where they had copious amounts of volunteers to do the same thing. It's not working so much any more which of course is a great shame. Now this is not the issue in itself. Many charities and NGOs are large enough to accommodate paid staff but this isn't actually what this bill is addressing. This bill is addressing those that are under a certain limit those who are only looking at 100 hours per week. So that may be for instance five staff for a couple of days of work a week.So what I'd like to suggest is that we don't focus on how—and this is the accusation coming from the other side of the House—this particular bill is undermining health and safety because this law change actually does not exempt voluntary associations from a legal standard and a duty of care. It does not I repeat exempt them from that. The usual laws under ACC and tort or civil law still apply. So if that's the case why are we not focusing on retention attraction of volunteers and backing that? I would just simply say if we send this bill to select committee then we'll be sending a signal to our most incredibly important volunteer organisations—the smaller ones of which mine was one—that we are going to be exploring and looking at ways to help them. It doesn't create barriers for health and safety and making sure that there are rights protected. It's about helping them attract more volunteers diminishing the barriers that often exist. The particular push that we're presenting from this side of the House is the Government should show that they care about attracting volunteers.I commend this bill. Thank you Harete for bringing it to the House and may you draw another bill out of the ballot on Thursday.