Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. The community voluntary and tangata whenua sector otherwise known as the charities sector is incredibly diverse: from universities to toy libraries marae committees to large iwi charitable trusts coast guards sports clubs community gardens to large national service organisations. And in 2021 New Zealanders gave more than $4 billion to the country's 28000 registered charities. And the overall income brought in by these organisations is far higher than that: more than $21 billion a year which is comparable to the value of the country's dairy exports—interesting in terms of the Government's willingness to listen to this sector in comparison to their willingness to listen to the dairy sector. This sector employs about 145000 people. It's massive. And more than that 200000 of us are volunteers within these organisations. The Green Party has really long-held relationships and huge respect for this sector and we want a future where community wellbeing and local ecosystems are enhanced by a strong independent tangata whenua community and voluntary sector. So as part of our vision for achieving that we've had the policy of limiting the focus of charities' oversight to registration and associated tax issues and to resource sector-led initiatives for education and capacity building within the sector. That policy has come out of our relationship with people working across the sector and what they've said they need. And it's not this bill. We know that the sector while contributing massively to our society and economy is woefully underfunded and historically undervalued by Government. Governments have I think a tendency to treat the sector as either just a nice little thing that it pats on the head at times patronisingly or that it treats the sector as a cheaper version of Government a way to get things done on the cheap where Government then comes in and monitors and tries to control that delivery. That as you can imagine undermines the actual brilliance of the sector which is its ability to respond to community needs which they are closest to to actually harness the relationships in the community to achieve change that has been identified by that community. Government's approach has absolutely undermined that and it also undermines the democracy that's inherent in those organisations and that approach is inconsistent with Te Tiriti o Waitangi. There have been concerns about governance across some parts of the sector. That is true. And while research has called for Government to investigate providing sufficient remuneration for provider governance boards and risk committees so providers might have access to specialist expertise to support an increasingly complex environment and risk management I note that that is a very different approach to this one which is a compliance tick-box approach. I also want to acknowledge that the community has identified governance as a challenge at times and has initiated their own programmes to be building capability in a strength-based way. I just wanted to too acknowledge that—like being at a launch of a research report around the barriers for banking for this sector last night—they've had to fundraise and go to J. R. McKenzie Trust and the Todd Foundation to get funding to do that research because actually Government hasn't supported them to be able to do the research to advocate for their own needs and instead has been spending time on bills like this about increasing compliance rather than letting them lead the work. We supported this bill on first reading as we took the Government's talking points—that this bill would reduce compliance costs and increase appeal rights for the sector—on face value. But then we read and heard the submissions that told us that we'd got that wrong that the Government was not portraying or delivering on what the community was asking for. And the majority of the sector opposed this bill. If the majority of the dairy sector was opposing legislation in this House we would be having a very different conversation to the one that we are having today. And I think that that is a signal of disrespect in itself. The big picture of the sector's opposition is that this bill speaks to the Government not understanding the needs of the sector and prioritising all the wrong things. Speaking to people with real expertise on this topic last night they were frankly struggling—they were telling me that they just couldn't understand why the Government was refusing to listen to them and their knowledge and just going ahead. They did not hear in any of the Government's responses to the specific issues an actual explanation of the motivation behind it or the explanation about why the community's concerns weren't valid and that they were up for that conversation but it had never happened. The sector desperately wants a Government that will support it support it to keep making the incredibly important impact for our whenua and our whānau and hapori and there's so many ways that they do it. They really want the support to be able to do more and are clear that the way the system is operating now is holding them back and that this bill will just embed that problem and in fact make it worse. In more detail their opposition to this bill hinges on several points. One while reportedly reducing compliance costs this bill actually adds another level of compliance by requiring organisations to review their governance procedures every three years. While it can absolutely be argued that current law requires those responsible for governing charities have a fiduciary duty to know the rules and act in accordance with them that should actually be enough of a prompt—that we don't need to duplicate that in terms of this piece of legislation. This bill will now require organisations to start reporting on that work and that brings up the natural questions of how it will be measured whether they've done that. Will it just be a tick box and what is the value of that and if it's going to be more than that then actually how is that sense of partnership and not more Government kind of judgment and scrutiny of a sector that just actually wants to be enabled rather than monitored? And what will be the consequences for agencies where they don't do that? We've also heard that it's missing the fact that so many organisations have gone through a lot of scrutiny in terms of their governance procedures in the last few years through COVID because they've had to adapt through these times and that really the sector as a whole is moving towards Te Ao Māori models of working and very strength-based. Again this sits in opposition to that by being a kind of a compliance regime which is very different and undermines the culture of those organisations.The second concern is the definition of officer in this bill cuts across many organisations' well-considered governance and management split rules and settled practice. Government's management split has long been an area that the sector has been trying to provide education on trying to resolve some longstanding problems and this actually just muddies all of that work that they've been doing. The Department of Internal Affairs acknowledge that expanding the definition of officer will reduce sector independence. They acknowledge that but argue that charities still get to choose who they want. Again it's not consistent and it's not consistent with a lot of the rhetoric we've previously heard. Also this absolutely entrenches a practice that is not in legislation of Charities Services being able to conduct charitable purpose reviews. That's at the heart of why the sector has been calling for that first-principles because that has not been working to be able to support their independence and their work. And in fact we in this legislation are embedding that. It's deeply problematic and there are more problems with this. But at the heart of it the Government should be listening and enabling our community not monitoring it.