Tuiono TeanauTEANAU TUIONO (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of the Greens to take a call on the Fire and Emergency New Zealand (Levy) Amendment Bill. First of all I want to acknowledge the workers—I acknowledge the firefighters. Over the past few months Green MPs have been going out and visiting different fire stations. I myself visited the fire stations in Whanganui Newtown my home town of Palmerston North and Auckland and the stories I heard were very concerning. It was very concerning to hear about the breadth of the work that our firefighters are doing. They do a whole lot more than just fighting fires. They're among our first responders. They're the first to respond at medical events car crashes and other traumatic situations and increasingly flood events because of climate change. So I hope that Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) is listening to their calls for better pay and conditions and that they hire more firefighters get proper equipment and offer health insurance to firefighters and also provide help and psychological wellbeing for firefighters including those diagnosed with occupational cancers. When I went and visited the Palmerston North fire station I was shocked to see the condition of the gear. One of the firefighters took me out and showed me the truck. The gear was falling to pieces and this was something that had come up at all of the fire stations that I'd visited. He had this compressor hose connected to the fire truck and he said to me Do you know what? We've got to keep this thing going 24 hours a day because this truck has got to get out that door and to the fire within minutes because if we don't get there that house could go up in flames." This is the immense pressure that many of our front-line firefighters are facing. This is the pressure that they're under so it's really important for us to acknowledge that. We will be supporting this bill to at least the select committee. We do have a number of concerns. I do take the point about the efficiencies and inconsistencies and making sure that we don't waste money and making sure that that stuff is streamlined. That will help to give some clarity for the levy and that's a good thing. That will give clarity right across as well so I do want to acknowledge that. This bill follows two other recent FENZ bills that relate to its levy on insurance policy holders which presents the primary source of funding for FENZ activities. The 2017 bill revamped the Fire and Emergency structure in Aotearoa and the 2019 bill delayed the commencement of its new levy regime to allow the insurance industry more time to prepare. The levy rates are prescribed in regulation by the Minister. This bill makes amendments to the new process for calculating and collecting the levy to reduce administrative complexity and that's a good thing. It supports stability—another good thing—and it ensures that the levy complies with its funding principles in the principal Act and if you go through that you can read what those are. This includes narrowing the scope of collection to fire damage insurance previously covered by material damage physical loss and technical amendments. Possibly our primary concern is that in the context of the national fire strike action and the conversations that we have heard as well we would not support the proposed principles narrowing the levy scope and then being justified to use tighten funding for FENZ as well because actually they need more funding. So I think this is something that needs to be brought up in select committee or if Government members could give us some clarity about what that implementation will look like that would be good for front-line workers and it would be good for insurance companies as well because it gives us that clearer direction of what's going to happen here as well. That detail is good because as I said earlier fire stations are underfunded. They are under-resourced. Ends are not being met which is very very stressful for the workers. It's very stressful for the workers and of course it's stressful for their families as well. We've got to remember that our firefighters and our first responders are also our parents. Some of them are parents and some of them are grandparents uncles aunties and so on and so forth. So what we do here impacts entire communities. Part 3 of the Fire and Emergency New Zealand Act set out the levy framework for Fire and Emergency. It is an insurance-based levy which means that insurance policy holders are charged a levy based on the type and amount of insurance that they have. In most cases insurance companies and insurance brokers calculate and collect the amount of levy to be paid to Fire and Emergency and that's just part of the functions of it. Part 3 of the Act sets out several matters related to the bill. These are the types of insurance contracts that must pay a levy the value of property to be used as the basis for calculating the levy and funding principles for the levy system. One of the key changes made by the bill—and it makes some sense to me; I'm not an insurance policy expert but it's clear enough to me—is around calculating the key on the sum insured in an insurance contract for fire damage. This change will require the levy to be calculated from the sum insured in an insurance contract rather than the existing approach which is to calculate the levy based on the amount insured. The amount insured has an unclear meaning when applied to insurance contracts in practice so having that cleared up would be one of those things about getting rid of the inefficiencies within the current system. So I'd support that going ahead. Another provision is about charting the levy on contracts of insurance for fire damage. This change will ensure that only contracts for insurance covering physical loss or damage from fire will need to pay the levy. So contracts covering physical loss or damage from fire will need to pay the levy instead of the current approach for any insurance contract covering physical loss or damage from any other source. Probably the concern I have here is that when we talked to our firefighters in the different fire stations—and Green MPs did that right across the country—what we found was that the actual firefighting aspect of their job is just around about 40 percent. So if the main levy is about trying to get it—I'm tracking the funding here—from fire damage then into the levy and then into paying for the services will that appropriately cover all the different things that they do? We're talking about them being first responders to car crashes and first responders to medical events and they are responding more and more to flood damage as well so I think we need to have more discussion about that particular provision and whether that stuff will carry through directly or whether that's being handled and done in a different way. So we will be supporting this bill to select committee but there are a large number of concerns or a number of concerns—I wouldn't say that they are large. But I think it's really important for the Government members to give us some clarity about that and a process in which we can have these discussions in the select committee because that will give clarity both for front-line workers and their families as well and for all of us. So we will be supporting this bill. Thanks Madam Speaker."