Tinetti JanJAN TINETTI (Labour): I am privileged to stand here to take a call on the Coroners (Access to Body of Dead Person) Amendment Bill. When I first saw earlier this evening that I was going to be taking a call on this bill I wondered very hard about this particular topic but the more I've researched into it over the last couple of hours the more privileged I feel to be actually standing here in front of the House talking about this particular bill. I'd like to thank the Māori Affairs Committee of the 51st Parliament for the work that they did in their inquiry into whānau access and into management of tūpāpaku. I'm almost embarrassed to say that word now that Marama's said that it's the most difficult word. I thought Oh am I going to be able to get that out?" But a big thankyou to the submitters and the people that told their stories because it is those stories that have helped form this bill and the importance of this bill. Thanks to the Hon Andrew Little for bringing this bill in front of the House.The reason that I feel very privileged to be here talking to this particular piece of legislation is that it is bills such as this that help cultures understand and it helps particularly other cultures understand Te Ao Māori. I think in this country that that is incredibly incredibly critically important and becoming more so. The more we are able to stand here and talk about such practices and such practices as the tikanga around death in Te Ao Māori the more normal it becomes for all cultures. I want to tell a couple of stories of my own experience around death and how working with Te Ao Māori and within Te Ao Māori completely changed the way that I saw that saw death in the world. I was scared of death and I was scared of dead bodies for a long long time. I remember as a preschooler seeing my first body of my great-grandmother and being really scared going into the funeral home and nobody putting me at ease in that situation. That sense stayed with me for a long long time right through into my adulthood. I lost both my parents fairly soon fairly young. I was in my early 20s when my parents passed and I remember vividly—I was teaching in Invercargill at the time when I got news that my father had passed very suddenly and I will never ever forget when I got home to Christchurch the devastation of my mother. But part of that devastation was around the fact that she had no idea where my father was what was happening to him or who he was in care of at that particular time. Because it was a sudden death there had been an autopsy and my mother had no understanding of what was happening. That was a very tragic time for the family. It was harrowing not only for the fact that we were wondering what was happening to Dad as well but for the fact that we were having to work through with Mum in that particular process.Those feelings of negativity and the negativity around that whole natural part of life—because that's what death is a natural part of life—stayed with me for quite some time. But then as I said I was very privileged to work within Te Ao Māori in the last school that I was working at. Here was a school who had a demographic of—at one stage over 95 percent of the population were Māori. In that time I learnt so much about the process of death. I almost say this with apology because I see it through a lens still as a Pākehā and still as the greatest learner so I'm still looking at it from the outside but I'm understanding the tikanga so much better and it's helped my understanding of death as well. And that's what Te Ao Māori does. The tikanga helps make sense for everyone. Dansey talks about Māori understanding death and dying within a specific cultural context in which post-mortems remain a foreign and terrible act for Māori and that understanding. But for Māori death is not an instantaneous event but a process of becoming and that was the part for me that earlier on in my journey of understanding I never understood. That's where my cultural outlook was very much a European English outlook on life. I never understood that it was a process of becoming. So processes for Māori and I guess for any culture—and that's what I like about this bill: we're not just talking about Te Ao Māori. That's where this came from but we're talking about all cultures—all cultures—being respected. Processes such as the post-mortem can actually disrupt the wairua of the deceased causing it to become lost. Now I've sat with parents of children that I've taught whose older children—there's one particular story. An older son passed very very suddenly. This is a few years ago and this parent did not experience the best practices that we're seeing happening with our wonderful coroners now. This particular parent was separated from her son from the tūpāpaku and couldn't be with him during that time. I remember her telling me that she felt that his wairua was becoming lost because they were not able to be there with him through the whole process. The observance of tikanga and performance of required rituals and practices such as sitting with the dead are absolutely critically important to those people. And to that particular mum it was absolutely critical that she stayed or somebody stayed with her boy the whole time. The fact that that was taken from her was a terrible wrench to her but also part of her cultural understanding that her boy's wairua was completely lost.This is where this bill is really really important because we are able to have those conversations. This is what's so strong about what we're doing here. Just changing the law allows people the opportunity to speak about the practice to speak about the cultural norms and to speak about what it is important to the cultures and hopefully the experiences that that mother found during that time will never happen again because we here are tonight starting to make that change to that law so that we're given permission to have the conversations that all people of all cultures will understand.We've heard here tonight that the bill enshrines good practice. We've heard that it codifies current practice but we also know that the good practice is current but it's not everybody. We need to overcome the fact that not all of the coroners are showing good practice. It's only a minimum but we need to overcome that minimum as well.In conclusion I am thoroughly honoured to be standing here tonight. I thoroughly commend this bill to the House but I'd like to finish with this quote from Selket Glover and Palmer who in 2014 said this "At the heart of these discussions are the observations that such practices [in the coronary process] are embedded within a Western scientific approach; that these values are often at odds with Māori cultural norms; and that the legal infrastructure typically favours Western science over Māori values." Well tonight I'm really proud to say that we're overcoming that legal infrastructure that typically favours Western science. We're giving value to our Māori tikanga and we're holding it up there saying this is important and we honour and value you as Māori. Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker."