McDowall JamesDr JAMES McDOWALL (ACT): Thank you Mr Speaker for the opportunity to rise in the third reading of this bill. It's been an interesting night and I obviously stand on behalf of ACT to continue to support this bill at third reading.The scope of this role for all its power and all its abilities is rather narrow. I think it does need some improvement over time but the urgency of that is not necessarily there. We've got time to look at it over the coming months—the next Government which is a bit odd given we're doing this under urgency right now. So does the role have sufficient teeth? Probably not but that may help to contain the powers and the influence. Therein lies the question I think. If it was in place at the time of the incident that we've been talking about would it have meant that the defence force would have provided sufficient information? I don't think that question has been quite answered.I still have concerns around the independence of this role. How can that be maintained? You know I understand there are expectations in the bill—clause 9—but none the less I think it's very difficult and it may be hypothetical but it's very difficult to foresee a future Minister in whatever Government having that respect to maintain that.The grey area that I raised in the committee stage I think that is something that does need to be addressed pretty quickly by the person in this role because that's happening right now. As members have noted these are very rare occurrences that we know of where things are going wrong but there are in fact theatres where New Zealanders are involved in. Will they be looking at that? Will they not be looking at that? We got some clarity but perhaps not all that sufficient.It would have been good I think for the defence force to do a bit of internal discussion with the personnel. Obviously there were submissions to the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee but it would have been good to look internally I think and actually ask what people thought of this and what the barriers are that they face or they feel they face in reporting incidents that may happen. That would have been good in designing the exact role.The jurisdictional side of this is interesting. Again it goes back to: how much teeth does this have? It was going to be one of my follow-up questions before I got stopped but will information gathered by the inspector-general—obviously it's got a lot of confidentiality around it. Can that then be used in prosecutions? I think there's again a bit of a grey area there around what is restricted and what isn't.So I think with the time that the Government and future Governments can have developing this there may be some opportunity for scope change where members of the defence force can perhaps utilise this role to make complaints of internal issues not just operational issues but areas where they can see that things need to be improved. Maybe it's the houses falling down and getting mouldy maybe it's all the reasons behind the attrition rates and the other issues that the National Party and ourselves have raised. So you know we hope as I said in the second reading that this role is successful but not busy because if it's busy then things are going wrong and it would make you question retrospectively: have there been things going on that we haven't been made aware of? So with that with some hopeful optimism we commend it to the House. Thank you.