White HelenHELEN WHITE (Labour): Thank you Mr Speaker. First of all I want to acknowledge the work that my colleagues in Auckland have done over the concern over the budget cuts that are proposed by our council. There's actually been a lot of work on this during the recess to support our councillors and to bring to the public attention the issue about wellbeing in our community and how important it is that the budget reflects those priorities in Auckland. We held a forum and it was really well attended and got that message out there as to what's important and what the basis of local government is.I wanted to talk about today the new role I have as the Labour list MP based in Mt Albert. It's a place that I live and one of the issues that has been really big in that community is obviously the impact of the floods in Auckland. I saw that myself because I live there. I woke up in the place I live and it was in fact a lake below my house. I had three people in my house who were refugees from that flood because they'd been flooded out. My colleagues David Parker and Jacinda Ardern were both impacted directly and they're in the same suburb. I know that David Parker got in and worked really hard in his own area because one of his neighbours had been flooded out. He did the hard work of actually repairing that basement. I know that Jacinda Ardern turned up to the local cafe in her gumboots and got in and helped. Her own street I know well is one of the areas which is really subject to flooding. It's been subject to flooding for a very long time. I've lived there for 34 years so I know. It's an area that's got a lot of State housing in it and those houses get flooded regularly. This was the worst I've ever seen. That housing is going to be rebuilt and it will be rebuilt mindful of the flood risk. So actually the pipes that are going in the ground are the pipes that the Labour Government is funding. There is $3.8 billion worth of funding in that infrastructure area and it goes into the pipes in the ground; it goes into the infrastructure. Then we build the houses that actually will be resilient in that situation.We can see that that's happened in places like Hobsonville and Stonefields where the houses were built with this in mind and they fared much better in the floods. But right now in Mount Albert there's a lot of areas that we need to be very careful about because the price that people paid was very real. There were dramatic slips. There was obviously a lake in my garden and those kinds of things are fun to engage in for a few minutes but then you realise that you've got sewage that's going into that water and people are playing in the water. So it is a very big and real risk. I was really impressed that in that period with the engagement that I got from people like Ginny Andersen who had just become the small-business Minister we went to those businesses that were massively impacted. She saw what was going on. But we also engaged with the leaders in that community. So the response that came out was actually well supported by evidence and understanding of what was going on. Thus there was $5 million worth of support by 8 February. That was just days after that flood—$5 million to small businesses—and that was available to those small businesses. It involved things like mental health support for those impacted and advice on how to run a business given what had happened—the catastrophe to those businesses. So those were real things that came out of real grounded understanding of what was going on on the ground.I just want to spend the last few minutes acknowledging how terrible it was and how stressful it was for people because there have been so many catastrophes and we have such a good reason to focus on some of those other catastrophes. But nobody has forgotten what happened in those areas of Auckland during those floods. They are not forgotten. The support continues and I wanted to say that even today there was an announcement about tax relief for flood-affected businesses in the North Island. That will give people relief with regard to the money that is paid by insurers so that they're not paying tax on money that will rebuild their businesses. That's this Government: it's grounded and it's doing its job.