McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker. It gives me a great deal of pleasure to speak to the Earthquake Commission Amendment Bill in its second reading. I unfortunately didn't get the opportunity to participate in the select committee process but none the less I'll have an opinion as I usually do. Interestingly I live in a house that had the chimneys bowled off it in 1931 by the Napier earthquake. They didn't learn because it got bowled again in 1942 by the Wairarapa earthquake—Dr Duncan Webb: How old were you then? IAN McKELVIE: —can't believe that can you—and not a cent of that was covered by the Earthquake Commission because it wasn't there. None the less the Earthquake Commission is one of those gems that we have in New Zealand—and I guess ACC is another example of a gem that we have in New Zealand—that is hugely valuable to our society and to our community. One of the interesting things about the Earthquake Commission is that if it wasn't here we'd probably find it extremely difficult to get private insurance for earthquakes—we'd find it extremely difficult to get private insurance for a lot of things probably—because it gives the insurance companies the certainty that they require to participate in our market and anyone who tries to insure anything other than a house in Wellington will have found in recent times that that's not that simple. I guess—as I pointed out in the debate on the last bill—it could become more and more difficult to collect the money that's required to run these things if we were to run it on an insurance-rated base because as I stated earlier more and more people are not insuring. More and more people are finding it difficult to get insurance and so eventually we might not get the cover we require to ensure that these bits of legislation are covered and that things like the Earthquake Commission are covered by these things in the future. I don't think that's an issue at the moment but it may well become one in the future. I think lifting the cap is eminently sensible. I think removing the cover for contents is also sensible and it probably should never have been in place. Also Stuart Smith made some really interesting points which I tend to agree with and I think that at some stage in the future that will inevitably be considered in the course of this bill. As I said earlier also I spent a lot of my life involved in the insurance industry and have looked at a lot of these things from an insurance company perspective not necessarily from a Government or a public perspective. I think that his point he made around the point that insurance companies may well be better to administer this thing from start to finish was sensible. I also think that they are in a much better position to manage this. They have the infrastructure and the people in place to do it and I think the first Christchurch earthquake most certainly proved that in most cases they were better equipped to deal with these issues than the Earthquake Commission was. So I like the ideas that Stuart Smith raised in the course of his speech—I think they do have a lot of merit. We do of course live in one of the most fragile parts of the world from the perspective of events whether they are storms or earthquakes. You could well call it the Shaky Isles. As Dr Seuss once said Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one." and they come pretty quick in New Zealand so things change from day to day and change very rapidly. So I do think this is a good start to bring this piece of legislation up to speed and I certainly support that. But as I said I do think there's the opportunity for us to review these things further and no doubt it will—like a lot of other things we have to do in this country—be reviewed pretty frequently because we do seem to have these events. Of course it was only last week that this place shook a fair bit and so they come pretty quickly. So I've got a great deal of pleasure in commending this bill to the House. I look forward to the debate on Stuart Smith's proposal in the committee of the whole House stage and we'll see how it goes. Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker."