Logie Jan: Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 09 February 2016. Volume:711;Page:8796. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Tēnā koutou e Te Whare. I rise to take a call on the first reading of the Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill. The Green Party is supporting this bill. We acknowledge the need to resolve some issues that have been identified through reviews and we recognise this bill as part of that process. This bill relates to recovery from small to moderate disasters and we have been told to expect legislation later in the year for larger-scale disasters on the scale of Canterbury which we hope never to see again.There is a lot of work going on in this space. There has been the review of the response to the Canterbury earthquake management of natural hazards through the Resource Management Actand the building emergency management. Of course all of this sits—hopefully—within a framework of the National Civil Defence Emergency Management Strategy and relates to the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act 2002 and the 2015 plan which this legislation sits within or over. It is important to point out that part of what this bill seeks to do is legalise guidelines and processes that are already in the existing plan but are not formalised through legislation. So we may be a little bit behind the eight ball in doing this but it is probably good that it is coming to the House now.The 2002 legislation which this all sits within focuses on the four Rs—reduction readiness response and recovery—and this bill specifically focuses on the recovery aspect. This is an appropriate area of work for the Government and I do not think anyone in Canterbury or with links to Canterbury would argue that this is not a critically important area of Government concern and Parliament’s concern.The Green Party will be interested in the discussion through the select committee of any issues relating to the oversight and consistency of this bill with other work that is happening as well as the existing frameworks and experience on the ground because that we have a lot to learn from. It is undoubted that we know we have an increasing need for civil defence emergency management planning. As a result of improved reporting but also climate change increased population pressure and building on land that was never meant to be built on we have seen a massive increase in natural disasters over the last few decades. Globally there was an average of 78 recorded national disasters every year through the 1970s. Now there are over 350 recorded natural disasters every year and some of the figures I read showed that 217 million people have been impacted on by natural disasters every single year since the 1980s. In New Zealand we have been spending between $1.2 billion and $2 billion—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break.Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.JAN LOGIE: As I was saying before the bell interrupted me there is no doubt that the number of natural disasters around the world and in this country is increasing and in recent years New Zealand has been spending between $1.2 billion and $2 billion a year in cleaning up natural disasters in this country. This bill is dealing with those things in terms of emergency management and it is dealing with natural disasters although it is also dealing with issues beyond that. A state of emergency may also be triggered by an epidemic an actual or imminent attack or a warlike act so we are not talking exclusively of natural disasters in this legislation. As we know though natural disasters—and it does seem some days when you are looking at the world that terrorism is also increasing around the world.Clearly despite our existing legislation’s focus on reduction preparedness and prevention we need to be doing more as a society around that. We need to be building strong interconnected communities to prevent terrorism. We need to be ensuring strong biosecurity measures around public healthat our border. We need to invest in public health in this country and to have strong regulations around where people are allowed to build and we need to put plans in place and support our councils to deal with rising sea levels and the flooding that we know is coming. And critically we need to ensure that we reduce our carbon emissions and take some leadership on preventing even worse climate change.We need to do much more on all of these measures but the reality is that we already have communities living in at-risk areas. One degree Celsius of warming has happened and more is already locked in so we will have an increasing number of increasingly severe storms and droughts in this country as climate change evolves. We also know that we live in a country with fault lines which we cannot control. There are limits to our ability to control nature and other people so no one—especially not the Greens—is arguing about the importance of having good emergency management.This bill is focused on the recovery aspect of the four Rs which are reduction readiness response and recovery. Specifically the main provisions of this bill are to introduce group and local recovery managers and the requirement to put in place a recovery plan in the event of an emergency. Currently the Act does not establish these roles or clarify the mandate for these people even though they are in the plan that was put in place and agreed on last year I understand. As I mentioned earlier we are actually a little bit behind the eight ball in bringing this to the House and I would have thought that if there was a need for legislation it perhaps would happen concurrently with that decision or before locking that plan in. So existing roles and processes set out in the documents that exist do not have legislative mandates.Legalising these roles intends to ensure that these people can do their jobs and that seems to be a good thing. I would note as a caveat though that we certainly will be interested in hearing the perspectives from people at a local level because I certainly know that in some communities where you have got really strong good community networks there is the possibility that a more formalised structure may override and negate those networks. We saw that happen in Lyttelton where its time bank meant that they had a list of contacts for everyone in that community and it listed their skills. They were able to jump in after the earthquake and connect act and build community as well as being engaged in that response and recovery and then the formal structures came in and shut those people out. That from what I have been told by the people there was not a positive experience for them.I have also seen the same in Paekākāriki after a flooding where there was an amazingly innovative response of matching people who were affected with those who were not so that the people who were not affected could go and deal with Work and Income and all the other institutions which may not necessarily be very easy to deal with even in the best of circumstances. I would hate to see a system that locked out those very strong community responses so we will be listening to hear from people to make sure that that does not do that.What this also does is allow the Minister to declare a 90-day transition period after a national state of emergency and to extend this for another 90 days. The Minister can override normal legislation and continue to exercise emergency powers for up to 6 months in this legislation. The regulatory impact statement noted that the public may see this 90-day period as too long even if it was most administratively efficient. So although we are certainly supporting this legislation at this stage we will be listening very carefully to make sure that this is not another centralised Wellington attempt to impose the views of this Government on to local communities.Good emergency management response utilises the knowledge and skills of communities; it does not override them. We would hate to see any legislation that furthered that type of approach. Thank you.