Tirikatene RinoRINO TIRIKATENE (Labour—Te Tai Tonga): Malo e laumalie Mr Assistant Speaker. Warm Tongan greetings from the member for Te Tai Tonga. I am pleased to speak in support of this Canterbury Earthquakes Insurance Tribunal Bill. It is eight years to the day since we had that initial quake on 4 September 2010 which started the series of seismic events which have totally transformed and affected the whole Canterbury region. As is customary I note all those difficulties that families have gone through but in particular I also think of the fatalities as well. In particular Mr Doocey was talking about Kaiapoi—that's our home pā where I come from—and the whanaunga that we lost in that. So āpiti hono tātai hono rātou te hunga wairua ki a rātou tātou te hunga ora ki a tātou tēnā koutou tēnā tātou katoa.[So let the connections be made the spirits remain amongst themselves and the living now turn to the living greetings greetings to us all.]I am pleased to speak in support of this bill. I think what we've heard this afternoon is a glass half-full glass half-empty debate but I'm pleased that all of the parties of this House are in support of this bill at its first reading because this is fulfilling a promise that we made. I want to commend Minister Little and Minister Woods for their work in bringing this bill to the House. What we're doing here is we really want to get to the completion of the tail of outstanding unresolved insurance claims which are affecting so many families across the Canterbury region. I too deal with cases of whānau that are still in suboptimal situations within their houses whether it's draughts or uneven living conditions and the like. So this is a means for us as a Parliament to actually put a mechanism in place whereby we can deal with these cases and make sure that they can be resolved. Eight years is a long time. Eight years—and then the subsequent events that happened later—is a long time for families to be under the stress and the difficulties that they have faced in dealing with these insurance matters. This bill puts in place a user-friendly type process. We are putting in place a tribunal process. It's an inquisitive process. It's not adversarial. It provides options from case management conferences to fully funded mediation. So it is tailored to ensure that those policyholders if they so choose can elect to go down and use this tribunal process to ultimately get to a resolution of their insurance claim. So we are wholeheartedly in support of that. Yes there will be issues I guess as have been raised in the debate so far and I'm sure the Governance and Administration Committee will be carefully going through all of those issues. I'm sure submitters will be raising those and many others because we want to make sure that we get this as right as we can. Certainly if there are little tweaks that can be made as long as we're improving the ultimate outcome which can ultimately lead to the resolution of these claims then I think that's what we should be doing as parliamentarians. So I acknowledge the contributions that have been made. Ultimately this is taking action because the overhang has just been lasting too long. Families and policyholders want resolution. They have been worn out. I know many that have been just simply worn out by the whole process and have given up and maybe they've settled for something suboptimal. But this is a process for those remaining claims so that people are able to confidently at their own election access a range of different processes to ensure that they can get to the outcome that hopefully will bring finality to the matter. And then of course—it is just an option—there are always the courts that we have to deal with the more complex issues and the more I guess litigious issues that only courts can examine and can adjudicate upon. So this is just merely putting in a mechanism of a specialist tribunal and a range of different avenues which a policyholder can elect between. The aim is as has been mentioned speed flexibility and of course being cost-effective as well because eight years of seeking legal advice and being at war with insurance companies whether it's the Earthquake Commission or others is not cheap. I'm sure a lot of expense has been outlaid in that intervening period. So that's we want to achieve with this legislation. We want to eliminate that tail and deal with all these cases and ultimately the outcome that we want is for those policyholders to reach finality with their claims. It may be to their satisfaction or it may not be but at least this is a mechanism whereby it can come to a conclusion and they can move on with their lives. With that I commend this bill to the House.