Dyson RuthHon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): I am delighted to speak in the second reading of the Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill which has been returned from the committee that I have the privilege of chairing the Government Administration Committee. I want to acknowledge the Hon Gerry Brownlee who is mustering this bill through the House but more importantly I want to acknowledge the Minister of Civil Defence the Hon Nikki Kaye. She has put a tremendous amount of work into this legislation. She worked hard in listening to what the committee said as we considered the submissions on it. I know that she will be tuned in listening to this debate now. I look forward to her being back in the House for the Committee stage and the third reading. I hope that she is making a speedy recovery. It is a big challenge that she is facing in terms of her health but we are doing good work that she started and I think she will take a bit of kudos from that. So the intention of this legislation is to really update the civil defence legislation. It has been very response focused very command and control. Although that is appropriate for the immediate times after a civil emergency what this bill seeks to do—and I think it has taken some quite good lessons from the situation that we faced in Christchurch through our sequence of earthquakes—is move more from response to recovery. As Paul Foster-Bell just noted this bill is part of a wider review of the different levels of response that might be needed. We were a little frustrated at the committee that we could not look at the whole package because it is really important that they are consistent but I hope that the next stage of the review and the next legislation is referred to our committee as well so that we can consider what we learnt during the deliberations on this bill and what we might put into the next bill. We made a lot of changes and I want to commend in a rare moment of cross-party recognition the National members of our select committee. They took the submissions seriously. They took the views of the Green Party and Labour Party members seriously and I think we worked really collaboratively to get a much better outcome. Some of it is not quite how we wanted it perhaps at the end and in the Committee stage we still might have some Supplementary Order Papers that we table but I hope we do not. We might just keep talking to each other and end up with a bill that is agreed across all of Parliament. I think that would be good in many circumstances but particularly if we are looking at a response to a civil defence emergency situation. This is the new legislative framework for emergency response. It has got very clear mandates for roles and responsibilities. It supports a seamless transition from the response to the recovery and it creates a permanent legislative authority to assist the Crown in reimbursing local authorities—actually more importantly to give local authorities the confidence that the Crown will pay up. Local authorities in an immediate situation are required to pay out quite a lot of money and this new authority that we are using in this bill will give city councils and territorial local authorities the confidence to know that in the end the Crown will pay out. We thought that that new authority would cause quite a lot of debate. It was far less contentious than we imagined during the first reading of this bill and I am sure that other members will comment on that during the Committee stage and the third reading. I have to say that despite the best efforts of the officials to guide us to be comfortable with the quite strong ministerial powers that were in the original bill we remain quite uneasy. We are not interested in giving Ministers powers that they do not need and certainly after the Christchurch experience powers were used for purposes other than what was originally intended. We have seen in Christchurch for example over 300 heritage buildings demolished. This was not because they were unsafe which was the intention of demolition orders in the original Christchurch earthquake recovery legislation but because—can I give the House an example. The Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery at the time Gerry Brownlee wanted to widen Manchester Street so had a demolition order put on the Majestic Theatre. That heritage-listed building has gone so that we have a wider street. It was clearly outside the powers that were intended when this Parliament debated the earthquake recovery legislation. We were specifically clear on the powers of demolition—the powers to override individual property owners' rights let alone heritage listings. So when this bill came to our select committee we looked at ministerial powers really closely. I think that now through the amendments that we made at the committee we have got the balance a lot better. I mentioned in my introductory comments that large-scale responses are not covered by this legislation. I understand that things sometimes need to be done in parts because often a comprehensive review will take longer and it would be preferable to have some parts of it implemented. This part of the review is being implemented but I just want to put on record again that I want to make sure that we have consistency across the different stages of the review because otherwise we will have what is the worst thing in response to an actual disaster and that is confusion about roles and responsibilities. We need to make really sure that communities are really clear about their roles and responsibilities that the Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management officials are really clear and that in the middle are territorial local authorities city councils and district councils. A very interesting part of the bill was the debate around proposed new section 57A. The committee members all agreed that the content of that section was not clear. There was no debate about that. The debate came as to what to do about that. Those on our side of the table thought that we could make it clearer and those on the other side of the table thought that because it was unclear we should remove it. That is not my preferred option and I really think that we could have worked a little bit harder to get the wording right and clear. So we now do not have the strategic recovery plan provision in that section of the bill. It has been removed. Again I would offer the National members the opportunity to think further on that and see whether or not they would like to take the opportunity during the Committee stage to see whether we could do just a little bit more work and get that right. I mentioned earlier about the permanent legislative authority. We were really concerned that this was a mechanism that was not common that really overrode quite a lot of other existing provisions but we got very sound advice from Treasury about the appropriateness I guess of that mechanism and how it would give both central government and local government confidence about who was responsible for paying for what in response to an actual disaster. I think again if you want to look at the Christchurch example the Christchurch City Council has still been arguing quite recently about the various responsibilities of post-quake financial liabilities. This gives that clarity. I should say to the local authorities that it also is a message from Parliament that we have confidence that they will expend funds only as they are necessary. We do not have any fear that we will suddenly get a bill from a local authority for expenditure on things that it did not need. In conclusion can I just say that the quality of submissions and the quality of advice and discussion from officials has made what started off as a very good bill—and again I commend the Minister for the way she engaged with people who were involved right from the hierarchy of Civil Defence through to leaders in the community. The Hon Nikki Kaye deserves credit for the original legislation. But we made through the submission process listening to the officials and working together a very good bill even better. That is what Parliament should aim for every time. I think that as a result of this we can have confidence that our communities will not be left out of responses from Civil Defence—they will be able to play their part—that local authorities will not be usurped by the Civil Defence hierarchy and that we will all be able to do our part to respond to these situations. People in Canterbury felt left out. The volunteers were not able to contribute. We heard that very strongly. Our local authority the Christchurch City Council as well as the Waimakariri District Council and the Selwyn District Council felt as though they were just going along for the ride and did not have any role in important decision-making. As a result they contributed less to the response than they could have if they had been involved right from day one. So I think we have learnt a lot from things that happened. They were errors in hindsight but at the time they were done with the best intentions. I think we have made a good bill even better and I look forward to its further progress in the House.