Reti ShaneDr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's a pleasure to speak to this bill. The legislation as we've heard that was enacted in 2013 effectively did three things: one close family members of the disabled were to be unpaid; two those who were not close family members were to be paid—to be paid at the minimum wage level; and three as we've heard there was no recourse to the Human Rights Act or the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. Now there were a number of reasons supporting the thinking the information and the circumstances at the time. We're now seven years later. There are new sets of information new circumstances a new Government and new party leaders. This is a proposal to repeal the legislation and certainly this is the option that this bill has taken and it's on the table. Now the regulatory impact analysis (RIA) for the funded family care package describes a range of options. It says we could do nothing. We could repeal but replace section 70E of Part 4A. We could repeal put a litigation bar in and a compensation framework. The fourth option was repeal no litigation bar and a compensation framework and the fifth is to repeal in full. Now there are two important time periods for this bill. Prior to 2013 there is potential litigation risk but the advice through the regulatory impact assessment is that the Limitation Act will apply so there's probably no fiscal risk to that. The risk then becomes litigation from 2013 through to the date of repeal. Again the RIA suggests that that is somewhat unknown and unbounded but could possibly be up to $170 million. The RIA recommends two approaches—either repeal in full or repeal with a litigation bar which says fundamentally you could not take litigation from 2013 through to the time of repeal. I'll make several comments. The first is that under the regulatory impact assessment repeal is predicated on Budget 2019 providing enough funding for the proposed changes. Now we've heard that a full repeal option could have a litigation risk of $170 million but Budget 2019 only allocated $32 million. So I think there's some alignment there as to what the RIA says is almost a caveat on this bill progressing: that it must be funded in 2019—in the last Budget not in the Budget coming forward. The second point I want to talk to is the departmental disclosure statement point 2.3.1. page 5: did the RIA Team in … Treasury provide an independent quality assessment of [the Ministry of Health's internal RIA]?" The answer is no. This is an unbounded unknown for a large sum of money. I would strongly suggest Grant Robertson and his Treasury quality assurance team or they're a panel actually who have the responsibility for externally assessing internally generated RIAs—I'd strongly suggest to Grant Robertson please could he bring his team to the table and offer an opinion on this. The second issue I want to raise from the departmental disclosure statement is point 3.7.: "Have the policy details [being] given effect by this Bill been otherwise tested or assessed in any way to ensure the Bill's provisions are workable and complete." The answer to that is no. I'd suggest that's another piece of work that hopefully will be in front of the select committee before we even get to it. I want to conclude then by saying we should always have an open mind and be prepared to at least consider to review legislation no matter what flavour brought it into the House. We expressed concerns yesterday about the polytechnics becoming subsidiaries and having less of a voice to critique and criticise the Government under the provisions of parent-subsidiary in the Companies Act. I would bring this to this House in this discussion also that we should have concerns where we might not be able to openly discuss legislation that we've introduced and say "Huh new circumstances and new people. Maybe we need to relook at it again." and I think it's in that context that this side of the House is saying exactly that. New people new circumstances seven years later—let's look at this again and see if we can make some sense of it. So in that context you're hearing our team saying that we're supporting this through to select committee and we look forward to the discussion there. Thank you."