Kuriger BarbaraBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki-King Country): Thank you Madam Speaker. Well I'm here speaking this morning on the Charities Amendment Bill. It's a bill that I haven't taken any part in the Social Services and Community Committee for but it's a pleasure to speaking on this bill with my colleague Maureen Pugh in mind who does in fact sit on that select committee.It's timely that we're here talking about the Charities Amendment Bill from the perspective of our charities and volunteers. And it was only last weekend where I was in a small town in the heart of Taranaki - King Country celebrating volunteers evening and it's just fantastic. I always say that if all volunteers stop work at midnight on any given night nothing would happen in this country. And so I know there's a few people that think that everything that happens comes out of Wellington but certainly when you get into our small communities it's very obvious that that certainly isn't the case. And a lot of those organisations are run by these very charities that we're talking about.So it's a shame the bill doesn't do what it says on the tin because the object of the bill is to make practical changes to support charities to continue their vital contribution to community wellbeing while ensuring that contribution is sufficiently transparent to interested parties and the public. What it actually said or set out to do was simpler financial reporting. We can understand that from a charities perspective. People who volunteer and work within and for charities love to do the hands-on work that they do the caring for people and all of the other roles they undertake. And often it's the paperwork that is set out in a difficult way in terms of regulation and red tape. Anything we can do to make it simpler as a Parliament we should do so. So it talks about simpler financial reporting to reduce the compliance burden but it actually hasn't done enough work in the context of this bill to actually show that that's what's going to happen.We can all understand improving access to justice and promoting transparency and fairness. Actually the simpler you keep something the more the easier it is for these organisations to put transparency and fairness in front of people. We have a lot of people who take on the accounting processes for these organisations—they're not accountants; they're people that love what they do and they take on a role as a treasurer and all of a sudden they find themselves deep within books trying to understand things and learn new things. Within these charities there's often a turnover of people in those roles as people get worn out and pass on and the next person takes over. So no one's against promoting transparency and fairness but in the simplest way possible would be helpful.So the intent was to clarify the role of officers supporting the governance of charities and improving the regulatory tools. Unfortunately it doesn't do what it says on the tin which is why the National Party isn't supporting it at the third reading. The difficulty that we have with this is that the Labour Government included a first-principles review of this Act in their 2017 manifesto. But instead the Ministers relied on the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) to undertake a review of itself and of its business unit the Charities Services. Now it would have been prudent in the interests of transparency that this was an independent review rather than an internal review. And no one might be suggesting that there was anything untoward here other than it is very hard for people within an organisation to often spot the things that they are not doing as well as they could have been. Often when you do these things if you don't have a complete independent look and the body itself is involved in the review you don't always get a completely I guess thorough result where people can see things that need changes that don't often get seen from within.So the charities add about $4 billion worth of value to our country. What they do is they keep communities connected. We see it all the time. We've talked this morning in one of the other pieces of legislation that we talked about about cyclones and disasters and civil defence. It never comes more the fore than it does at those times when we have all of these groups out doing everything they can to support their communities in a time of need—right from our volunteer fire service members to a whole range of other groups in the community that help out. There's actually 28000 charities registered in New Zealand. So if we look in all of our communities I'm always amazed at how many of these people are the glue and the fabric of our society.So given that the Labour Party policy was to carry out a proper first-principles independent review the bill does not deliver on that. It tweaks a few items which could make some aspects of compliance simpler but it doesn't address the key concerns. It seems that the Government did not listen to the sector who are not at all happy with their bill and think that it'll make their lives more difficult when they're just trying to help their communities. I'm sure that that wasn't the intent that the Government set out to do but unfortunately that is the result that's come from pushing this bill into the place that it's been put—it's not delivering what it set out to do. So none of the proposed amendments address the existing structure. The review has led to these changes and as I said was undertaken by DIA reviewing itself and that actually undermines some of the trust and confidence in the aspect that there's a bit of doubt as to whether it's picked up on all of the things that it could have and should have picked up on.Interestingly enough the original Act was introduced in 2005 by the then Labour Government. However at the committee stage in 2004 the bill was almost completely rewritten and then rushed through under urgency in a single day without proper consultation on the rewrite. How do we keep hearing this? This is 2004-2005 so we're talking almost two decades ago and we're finding that nothing is really changing in terms of rushing legislation rushing things through the House and rushing things under urgency. Here we are this morning sitting in here in an extended sitting because Parliament is due to rise in another six sitting weeks' time and the Government is concerned it's running out of time so we're here in extended sitting putting through bills that the Government has indeed run out of time for. So the National Party was very concerned about the process then back two decades ago and now it's concerned about the process again.So we support our charities. We back them every step of the way with the work they're doing. We don't believe this bill is at all helpful in terms of completing all of the things it needed to complete to help our charities. For that reason we can't support it today. Thank you.