Simpson ScottSCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): It is a great pleasure to rise and take a call in the second reading of the Financial Assistance for Live Organ Donors Bill in the name of my friend and colleague Christopher Bishop. I want to join with others across the House this evening who have roundly and rightly congratulated Chris Bishop on this bill having being drawn from the ballot on the work that he has personally done to steer it through the House to this stage—particularly the diligent work that he did in preparation of the bill coming to the Health Committee—and then on his nurturing and harbouring of the changes that were made at select committee which clearly have made what was already a very good bill into a much better bill and one that the House can be particularly proud of I think.Often people who are not part of this parliamentary process find the nature of a member's bill and the way a member's bill is drawn quite an unusual process. Many of our constituents often have their eyes slightly widened when they understand and are told that it is literally a lottery—that there is a tin with numbered marbles for each bill in there and that there is a process it goes through where somebody literally puts their hand into the tin and takes the marble out. I think this process is one of the vaguely quirky but wonderful almost eccentric niceties of our parliamentary system that can occur. Often bills get drawn out that for some reason are highly politicised and very contentious but every now and again something comes out of that tin—the draw is made the lottery marble is plucked out and something really really good for Parliament and for all New Zealanders pops out of the member's bill system. This is one of those occasions.I have had the privilege of sitting on the Health Committee now for several years and Julie Anne Genter who is a new member to the committee highlighted that in the recent few weeks she has been on the committee she has had an opportunity to see how the committee works collegially. That has been my experience over the last several years including back to the time when Dr Paul Hutchison was chairing it in the last Parliament—a very very very good former chair—and the current chair is doing an equally good job.This is a bill that when it got to the select committee was not without some hurdles. It actually involved some thought and policy development that was probably not originally conceived of by the author of the bill who was actually Michael Woodhouse right back in its formative stages some time ago. But as we got it at the select committee we came reasonably quickly to the conclusion—aided and assisted by Mr Bishop's careful guidance—that we could go further than the bill originally wanted us to go and that actually compensating people who were so generous of spirit and soul as to literally donate their organs for the good of another human being deserved something better than just 80 percent recompense in terms of their time recuperating and recovering from their donation of an organ. It did not I think take the committee much convincing to decide that moving and extending that 80 percent to 100 percent was a very worthwhile step.What it did was it took the officials and then the policy rationale quite a bit of juggling around to get to that point because the original premise for 80 percent was based on an ACC calculation. The ACC calculation is based on a premise that the person is in some way ill or has had an accident and actually by definition a person who is donating an organ is not ill. They are not sick so why would you treat them in the same way using the same financial basis the same kind of financial formula? Actually one of the multiple barriers to organ donation was this issue of compensation; we got to a point in the select committee where pretty quickly committee members agreed with that. Then we worked our way through the bill with officials advice from the Ministry of Health and a range of other very good advisers to come to the point that we have.Heaven knows there are multiple barriers to donating organs. As others have said this evening we have got a very low rate of organ donation in New Zealand. We could do an awful lot better. When people donate an organ to another New Zealander not only is it a very good thing for the person receiving the organ but it actually has a fiscally positive benefit for taxpayers—all of us. There is some real real benefit. It just seems to be completely perverse to somehow penalise those people who are generous enough to donate an organ and then let them suffer not only the physical effects of having donated the organ—and then recuperating and recovering—but also a financial hit. That just does not make sense.So this is a bill that has quite deliberately come to a point of cost neutrality for donors. Equally there was a little bit of discussion about whether we should go beyond 100 percent compensation. We decided against that in the end because just as 80 percent did not seem fair at more than 100 percent there is the potential for perverse financial outcomes as well. I think that we do not want to lose that generosity of spirit that goes with donation. I do not think you would want to have a situation where potentially—and I just say potentially—people would be using as a consideration in their decision to donate an organ the fact that there might be some kind of financial advantage for them. I do not think we would want to go there. We discounted that option pretty quickly and got to a point where the sweet point for this legislation was 100 percent compensation for donors' time recovering from the operation that was required for them to donate an organ.This was I think a really really good example—and often we say it in the House. We say: Oh gee this select committee process is a good process because it means that legislation comes out of a select committee better than it went in." But this is absolutely a textbook example. Probably in years to come—I suspect that students who study parliamentary procedure maybe when they are looking at parliamentary process will look at this glittering career that lies ahead of Chris Bishop and will say: "Here was his first member's bill and this is what he did." This bill in the process of it and the outcomes that process has achieved has I think the potential to probably enter into the annals of academic writing that will be carried on. It will be looked back on with great affection over the years as a textbook piece of legislation.Hon Member: Jumped the shark.SCOTT SIMPSON: Ha ha! Chris Bishop can rightly be pleased with this. It is the beginning of what I think will be a very good legislative career for him.I want to just make a comment before I sit down about a fellow by the name of Andy Tookey. Andy Tookey has been campaigning around this space of organ donations for years. I had an opportunity to spend some time with Andy way back in 2002 I think it was when he first started on this personal crusade. He sent a petition to Parliament which actually ended up not achieving very much and was very frustrating for him. Later in about 2005 or 2006 I think it was he did some collaborative work with the then National Party list MP Dr Jackie Blue. They worked on another bill that again did not achieve the outcome that they were looking for. Andy has made this a personal campaign which he can be very proud to have been part of over a long number of years and I really just want to acknowledge his contribution to this bill.We still have a number of very significant hurdles to organ donation. It is my fervent hope that by passing this legislation we will have removed one of the major financial barriers which is one of the many hurdles. It is my hope that in some small way—because this is not a silver bullet; this will not actually fix our organ-donor rates—it does help. It is a very good piece of legislation and I think that not only Chris Bishop but the whole House can be pleased with the outcome that we appear to be heading towards. I commend it to the House."