McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Mr Chair. It gives me a great deal of pleasure to take the call on Part 2 in the committee stage of the Telecommunications (New Regulatory Framework) Amendment Bill. Just before I get into the issues I wanted to talk about it occurs to me that if we were a more populated country with much more friendly terrain we wouldn't need this kind of complicated legislation to ensure that those of us who live off the line can in fact access some of the modern conveniences of the world. I'm one of those people who's in the privileged position—and the Minister in the chair Kris Faafoi just a minute ago was talking about it. I'm sure it was in Part 1 but he was talking about people just like me who can't access 111 and I hope people never have to access 111. But for a while I couldn't because I actually lived in one of those places that had no communication like that. It is a challenge for us in New Zealand and so consequently we need these pieces of—and I guess deregulation of the industry in the early days caused the need for this type of activity to be undertaken and this type of legislation to be passed to protect those people who do have challenges accessing services. The copper network's another thing of course but we won't go into that here. One of the things that interests me about this type of legislation—and it is quite complicated—is that it was put in place as a result of a whole lot of understanding of the costs of the industry and how those services are then provided as a result of that cost. It puts in place a whole lot using all sorts of things like input methodologies basically to give us a better understanding of where the costs lie and how those services can then be accessed by those people who provide us with services from phone lines to all the modern telecommunications—you can even run the television set off those services nowadays—and that of course to large parts of New Zealand is very important. The other really interesting thing about this type of legislation is that it enables people in a country like New Zealand to operate from all sorts of parts of New Zealand that historically you never would've considered running a business from and that's because technology has taken such huge advances I suppose and it has taken over a lot of what we historically either wouldn't have been able to do in parts of New Zealand or wouldn't have thought of being able to do in parts of New Zealand. So I think that legislation like this becomes really important in diversifying our economy and enabling us to do things in parts of New Zealand that we otherwise wouldn't have been able to do. The farming community of course it's very important to that community because nowadays you can run some sorts of modern industries—in fact you could run one sitting right here Mr Chair. We could sit right here and run a business from here using technology—everything from turning on irrigators to heaters to whatever. So it's really important that we have these Acts of Parliament that then manage those networks and the electricity network is exactly the same—or not exactly the same but it's equally as important that it's regulated and legislated for too because otherwise we would never get services provided to some parts of New Zealand that are very important to us. It's really interesting when you look at the diversity of New Zealand's population and the places that we now live in and do business in where 15 or 20 years ago it wouldn't have been considered and that's because of these enabling bits of legislation that then encourage the provision of services into those areas that are very important. So these sorts of things whilst they are quite complicated I think they are necessary and I think that across the Parliament we all recognise the necessity of these pieces of legislation like the Telecommunications Act. I certainly think it's worth supporting. I think that Ministers from both of the last two Governments have done a pretty good job of getting this to the post and I hope that it successfully moves its way through Parliament in the next day or two. That's my lot Mr Chair.