Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. I rise to take a call on behalf of the Green Party on the Charities Amendment Bill second reading. I'm new to this piece of legislation I have to admit. I didn't have the privilege of sitting through the Social Services and Community Committee to hear the submissions and so I've been trying to do catch-up. To be perfectly honest I'm not sure I'm fully there yet. Hopefully I will be as the bill progresses. I do want to say I've heard two very very different views expressed from the Government side and the National and ACT parties. And on my reading of it it's possibly somewhere in the middle from what I can see at the moment.So I do just firstly want to acknowledge the important role of—the language I like is—community organisations. I find charity" a bit slightly triggering of Victorian values and some model of the wealthy doing good to others which I know is not inherent in it but that's kind of the history of that word for me that I don't like so I tend to think of the community and voluntary sector and tangata whenua sector. They play an incredibly important role in our society. I think that has been acknowledged by everyone and they are very very different. It's important that they are different because that ecosystem is the best way we have of ensuring different peoples' needs are able to be met. And central government is never going to be able to form a relationship with people in the way that our community and voluntary sector and tangata whenua organisations can.We've seen it again and again through COVID and recently through the adverse storms and the cyclones. These organisations were the people that stepped in and kept people afloat. We know from research that was launched recently around the state of the sector that they are really really struggling at the moment. What's come through in terms of the survey is increased stress a sense of overwhelm around the increase in demand and need of their services and help and no increase in funding for many of those organisations or in some cases actually a reduction in funding. And the kind of complexity of the issues that people are struggling with has just changed fundamentally from what it was 20 years ago and people are desperately trying to keep up. They are way more nimble than Government agencies can be in terms of being able to do that response but the staff in the organisations are really anxious and stressed at the moment.I hear from the Government members but actually leaning in on the point that this legislation provides the ability for the chief executive to offer an exemption on financial reporting for those smaller organisations. I specifically want to talk to the value of those smaller organisations and particularly we know that Māori organisations often have struggled to build the relationships and get the funding from central government because of the compliance involved in the application process and the red tape. But yet they're the ones that hold the most precious relationships right? I've heard actually in another jurisdiction somebody who was a commissioner overseeing all the family violence work who pointed out that in their view what they saw was that organisations who were competent and able to win tenders for funding contracts were the least competent and capable in delivering the change that was needed.So this piece of legislation actually is part of that puzzle because we have professionalised our expectations of the community and voluntary sector in a way that has privileged large organisations. It's interesting really hearing from the National Party in terms of this bill when they have been so complicit in that process over many years of starting to privilege more and more larger organisations wanting to deal with fewer organisations because that made Government's job cheaper and easier and now to hear them singing the praises of the smaller organisations and the need to listen to them was kind of jarring for me to be honest but maybe they've learnt—maybe they've learnt! Ha ha! That would be nice.So I do want to say: so this enabling the exemption around financial reporting is a positive thing because that helps get those organisations to be able to build that relationship and recognise the value of that work. However giving the charities commission the ability to review and requiring agencies to review their governance structure every 3 years—I'm not convinced that that helps us get to that place around enabling organisations to do things in the best way for them and not building more compliance on. I do want to acknowledge as well that from the submitters the very strong call—and I suspect it's jarring for the Government members but that point about a lot of the submitters calling for the delivery on that first-principle review and that's because in particular the way our legislation is set up and its relationship with advocacy is deeply problematic. We've increasingly had analysis coming from the community that we've been imposing kind of business models that work in the corporate sector on to tangata whenua and community and voluntary sectors that have traditionally had very very different ways of working that actually are not improved by imposing corporate business models.Actually being able to see a need and respond in partnership with others with far more flexibility—and I point to I think an op-ed by Denis O'Reilly talking about some of the experiences in the 1970s and the comparison to now for people who are wanting to think about some of those issues. I'm not harking back to the 1970s I can't remember them myself. Ha ha! I certainly wasn't working in the sector back in that day. I may look like it some days! But I do think he makes some good points and there is an increasing kind of sense of need to critique the control from central government of community organisations and asking "Is that helping them to do what they need to do or not?"Also Social Service Providers Aotearoa—to pick up from their submission. They were centring the importance of that review actually fully embedding Te Tiriti o Waitangi at the heart of legislation governing the practices of charities in Aotearoa New Zealand and to ensure Treaty principles are integrated within charities legislation. That is something that the Green Party would really support and it is a shame that after this time we're not at that point at the moment. I do call for the need for that work and to go back out to our communities and get to kind of the heart about how can the sector thrive and what support can we offer to ensure the sector thrives as opposed to how do we ensure compliance and confidence in terms of people donating money. That doesn't feel to me like that's the central question. The central question for the Greens is: actually how do we support these organisations to do the incredibly important work that they do and that to be front and centre? So on that note we are supporting this bill."