SpeechTONI SEVERIN (ACT): Thank you Madam Speaker. I stand on behalf of the ACT Party to support this bill the Accident Compensation (Maternal Birth Injury and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. The first thing I would really like to do is to thank the submitters. We had over 800 submitters and many of these were women that had traumatic experiences while giving birth. And the stories that we heard from there are just horrific because of the amount of treatment that they were unable to access. Also listening to women that had given birth overseas with one child and then came back to New Zealand and had their second child and just the total way they were treated and how these injuries had occurred. Also the other sad reality we heard from these women that have had a child and they are now not even considering having second or third children because of the traumatic birthing injuries that have occurred.Next I would actually really like to thank the ACC officials for listening to all these submitters; actually looking at the list and hearing what these ladies had to say due to their births being traumatic experiences; and adding many injuries to this list. However again as the Green Party said there's always going to be a line—what is actually an injury and then what is actually part of. And it gets very very difficult because there was also the consideration of that grey area between medical and ACC. However we are very glad to know that the ACC will be holding a three-year review instead of a five which they gave us the options. However again as we mentioned at the Education Workforce Committee which we worked really well with we insisted that we will have a briefing paper put forward to the next Parliament to suggest that they have a review every year. As we all know we also can miss things and we want to make sure that we don't miss these horrific injuries that can occur to these women.Now what we also believe from the original is around 85 percent of women in New Zealand may experience this. You know this a huge number and it's quite sad to think how many women are currently carrying birthing injuries which will not be covered because they were not going to go back. So it would be very nice to see if there is some way within the ACC bill that some of these women may be able to prove injury that they may want to look at—how to get some treatment. We do want women to be able to have more children and if they're carrying an injury now what is the likelihood that they're going to do it again?So I would really like to see that. Yes I know that we haven't fully costed this because I think the biggest thing of all was we actually do not know how many women will be claiming. I know that they estimated back at the beginning it was around 17000 to 18000 would benefit from this bill. But I am guessing it's going to be a lot larger than that since we have increased the number of injuries to that list. And also it is good to see that the mental health side of a traumatic birth will be looked at as well because there's also some very interesting stories that women have told us with that.But the other thing is that everybody is also talking so much about the greatness of the maternity birth injuries but there are also matters in this bill. Again lowering the threshold from 6 percent to 5 percent for hearing loss. But there's also one bit in five of the other clauses that are here that still concerns me: raising the board from eight to nine saying that they need broader representation.Again I look back. Last year we had three appointments put on to this board. So I'm pretty certain we should have had good representatives back then when they were appointing these three new appointees. And also within this bill there are seven other little technical things that help also around assisted dying for children that parents do assisted dying for. So this is great. We're moving it into our modern world which is forever evolving. And we've got to make sure that we are covering people and making sure that they have the access to good care. The biggest thing of all is that I still think there's much more that we have to look at at ACC. It's a 50-year-old Act—it's 50 years old. Things change so rapidly in this modern world: technology and treatments within the hospitals. We may have to start looking at how we reform ACC and how we can move it into the times. There are things that we could be probably doing a lot better than what is being done now to help people with their injuries be it a maternal injury or a work injury or a sporting injury. We need to keep looking and moving forward instead of necessarily looking at something that is 50 years old which is ever so slightly younger than me. And I'm pretty certain that for kids that are born today there'll be totally different new things. So hopefully we can look at this bill and improve it even more for the better. Or we just start writing something new that fits our modern times so that everyone is looked after. Now also in the bill with the other five policy changes there's a clarification in clause 8 around section 30 clarifying the test of work-related gradual process diseases or infections covered and restoring the more climate-friendly test that applied before 2010. Of course this was around the changes that the National Party did. However we also heard from the firemen's association around cancers. I know that the ACC say that yes it would be picked up but there are still so many different questions around that around the firemen especially also volunteers that sometimes don't receive the same coverage. So there's something there that we still need to improve on and have a look at because we need the firemen and women that look after us and especially the volunteers within New Zealand because there's a lot of small rural communities and we have to make sure that we're looking after them or anyone—first responders—that may attend to something that could end up causing them problems down the track. I would like to commend this bill to the House. And once again I would like to thank all the women and also all the experts that submitted on this bill. I commend this bill to the House.