Bishop ChrisParts 1 to 3 schedules 1 to 4 and clauses 1 and 2CHRIS BISHOP (National): It is a great privilege to be here tonight speaking in the Committee stage of this very important bill and I want to thank all parties in Parliament for their support of this bill so far. The bill has had a title change; it is now called the Compensation for Live Organ Donors Bill. It changed from the Financial Assistance for Live Organ Donors Bill and that reflects the fact that the Health Committee considered that compensation for lost earnings was a better reflection of the bill's purpose.In my introductory remarks for this debate that we are going to have tonight I wanted to just outline for the Committee the purpose of the bill again. The purpose of the bill really is to—I suppose you would say that the overriding purpose of the bill is to reduce the financial barriers for live organ donation and the corollary purpose to that is to better compensate those who altruistically decide to sacrifice literally a part of their own body to help other people. We need to recognise I think that people who are live organ donors are heroes—they truly are heroes in our society. They selflessly sacrifice a part of their body to try to create a better life for somebody else.In fact we heard at the Health Committee which I was very privileged to sit on—and I want to pay tribute to my friend and colleague Scott Simpson for swapping with me on the Finance and Expenditure Committee to allow me to come in and hear some of these stories. We heard stories from people who have donated organs—typically kidneys but also other organs that are available for donation—about the hardship that they had to endure when they made that sacrifice when they did decide to try to help out a friend a family member or a loved one. Actually there are people out there in society who choose to donate to people they have never even met. Truly what a heroic thing to do to donate a kidney typically to somebody else whom you do not even know because you want to contribute to society and try through the bonds of friendship and love to create a better place.What we know is that the financial barriers to people when they are considering whether or not they donate are considerable. The status quo at the moment is that people receive the equivalent of what we used to call the sickness benefit. I would not say it is a paltry sum of money but it would certainly be a large sacrifice for many people when they do choose to donate. Typically people take anywhere between 6 to 12 weeks off work. For people who are earning money for people who are on any sort of moderate income to have to take time off work and sacrifice that sort of salary is just not a starter for most people. Indeed we heard lots of people who came before the select committee and said exactly that.What this bill does is it increases that support to 100 percent of earnings that were forgone. So it is compensation at that 100 percent rate. The bill as originally introduced as we know set that level of compensation at 80 percent which was in line with ACC. At the second reading I think we canvassed in the House why the analogy with ACC is actually inappropriate and the biggest reason for that is of course that people who decide to sacrifice a part of their body the people who decide to donate an organ are not enduring an accident as we would typically think of it in terms of the accident compensation legislation. We do not need to create that gap between what you are earning on ACC and what you are earning at work because these people are going to go back into the workforce once they have recuperated from that operation. So the analogy with ACC is inappropriate.Instead what we decided to do at select committee was make that rate 100 percent of earnings forgone. This brings New Zealand into line with what they have in the United Kingdom which is 100 percent earnings compensation and will essentially adopt the principle of cost neutrality. In other words you should be no better or worse off from having donated. What that means is that essentially it gets rid of that financial barrier that may exist. We have to be very careful in walking a fine line between disincentivising people by placing a financial barrier and the commercialisation of organ donation or the potential commercialisation of people's body parts. So I think the 100 percent compensation is the appropriate balance. It does not over-incentivise people; it just gets rid of that financial barrier. That is the major purpose of the bill and I am looking forward to the conversation tonight.