Williams PotoHon POTO WILLIAMS (Minister for the Community and Voluntary Sector): Thank you Mr Chairman. Thank you very much. I'm a member of the Economic Development Science and Innovation Committee ably chaired by Jonathan Young—and I thank you very much for the collegiality we have within our select committee. We've done some interesting work we've asked for some interesting briefings and I think a lot of the work we've done has contributed to our overall knowledge of the importance of economic development in terms of recovery.When we're thinking about recovery from COVID for example we can't really go past the infrastructure spending that this Government has put into place. Part of that is the additional $3 billion for infrastructure spending. I want to focus on a very small proportion of that and the importance of taking a slightly different approach. In my home patch of Christchurch East I have a suburb that was particularly devastated by the impacts of the earthquakes nearly 10 years ago. I have to say that I have a very parochial and particular group of people who are very clear about what they see as important in terms of recovery from the earthquakes. What we've been able to secure in this term of Government is actually a different way of doing things where we see infrastructure as not just the build of physical infrastructure—it's not just about the $400 million that's going into supporting schools for example; it's not just about the rebuilds of hospitals and the like—but it's also about social infrastructure.What I want to talk about is an announcement that we made today about a collective group of community facilities in the suburb of New Brighton and how we have through the COVID-19 response fund been able to support nine initiatives in a collective to be funded. Now why that's important is that my area had been triply disadvantaged: of course devastated during the earthquakes difficult to rebuild and there was a piece of legislation—the Greater Christchurch Regeneration Act—which should have supported the rebuild of my part of town. However the specificity around New Brighton was removed when the bill itself was going through select committee in the previous Government. So New Brighton which is a very special and significant and iconic community in Christchurch which could have had specific legislation put—that was removed.But what we have been able to do with the $3 billion build fund is allocate $7 million to New Brighton. What that does for those nine community groups is staggering. The Eastern Community Sport and Recreation for example has 1500 children which turn up on a Friday for sports and part of the build is going to be able to finish off this multi-sports canopy which they will be able to use as an all-weather sports facility particularly for netball. Also as part of our social infrastructure we've got a refurbishment of the New Brighton football club. Now these things don't sound big to us across the Chamber but for my community they are big. Completing the builds of the South New Brighton and the New Brighton surf club; Guardians of Rāwhiti which will actually build a butterfly garden; the bridge hub South Brighton which is a community and performance space which will happen in New Brighton; and Waka Ama—what we are able to do is secure the Waka Ama site to make sure that the gear that our paddlers use is able to be secured we are able to fence it and we are able to put lighting there.These are small but very significant pieces of work and they came together as a collective of community groups. They put in a bid to the infrastructure project and they were successful. It just goes to show that there is more to this Government than just the big announcements that that side of the House keeps telling us to announce that actually the small the niche the bijou projects actually can have a potentially great impact.