Sage EugenieHon EUGENIE SAGE (Minister of Conservation): E Te Māngai o Te Whare tēnā koe thank you. Can I congratulate the Transport and Infrastructure Committee for the huge amount of work that they have done on this bill. I wasn't a member of that select committee but my colleague Jan Logie was. About a quarter of the submitters had quite significant concerns about Subpart 2 I think of the bill which is the part concerned with where clubs may be dealing with surplus venues that the code wants and the provisions around how particularly those smaller racing clubs the smaller racetracks—Mr Greg O'Connor mentioned the Charleston racecourse no longer in existence—how that whole transfer process works.I notice in the bill that the select committee has completely rewritten clause 26 and some of the subsequent clauses to recognise the concerns of particularly smaller communities where their racetrack is used for a number of other events. In Kaikōura for example Seafest takes place there. In Kūmara the Coast to Coast race uses the Kūmara racecourse. So the committee has done a very good job I think in responding to submitters' concerns and putting in place a number of criteria that the Minister has to consider before making a recommendation for an Order in Council which would transfer surplus" assets like a racecourse from the club to the code.The Messara report recognised that there needs to be some rationalisation in the industry but there has been concern that these significant hearts of the community in some areas could be in the interest of efficiency in the interest of rationalisation transferred to the code to the detriment of the community. So that is a very comprehensive list now of criteria and also just the way the select committee has changed the process. The Minister for Racing must appoint a reviewer before recommending an Order in Council—a person with appropriate experience. And the cost of this whole exercise of considering whether a venue should be transferred to the code must be met by the code rather than the club concerned. And yes it is noted that some clubs don't have their own racecourses—they still organise meetings at other racecourses but the work that the select committee has done on reshaping this bill the comprehensive recommendations in the report back and the many changes are really an example of select committees working really well to take on board the concerns of submitters.The Green Party is reluctantly supporting this stage of the bill—cautiously I think is a better word—because of these changes that have been made and also because of the dialogue we had with the Minister for Racing in the early stages about strengthening the harm minimisation provisions in the bill. One of the TAB New Zealand's functions is to look at the whole development of products or when they're developing new products to look at how gambling harm is going to be minimised and what measures are going to be put in place to do that. So the requirement too to have on the TAB board people who've got an understanding of problem gambling and how you minimise harm is quite critical and the fact that we have regulations which go through some specific processes to minimise gambling harm. So that's been a significant improvement in the bill from the start but really do commend the work of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee and Jan Logie.The Green Party's support for this bill will not stop us continuing to campaign to have a ban on greyhound racing—that was outside the scope of this bill but as we've seen with recent media coverage nearly 300 greyhounds were put down in 2019 because they couldn't be rehomed. The greyhound racing code is one of the codes covered by the bill but the fact that Aotearoa New Zealand is one of only eight countries in the world which still allows greyhound racing speaks to an inadequate attention to this fundamental animal welfare issue.The other key issue is that with this tension in the racing industry between the bigger venues with more sophisticated facilities and better tracks those tracks will often be harder. That puts more risk to the horses going on those because of the harder surfaces. So we really want to encourage the industry to continue to look at how it can improve animal welfare particularly for the horses and the Green Party support for this bill is because it does not prevent us continuing to campaign for an end to greyhound racing in New Zealand. So we are supporting it cautiously."