SpeechDr EMILY HENDERSON (Labour—Whangārei): In contrast to the last speaker Penny Simmonds I rise with great enthusiasm and confidence in the direction that we are now taking. I want to begin first by acknowledging and congratulating the disability community's activists who have brought us to this point. I note with some sadness that in fact it was back in 2017 that the Access Alliance came to all of the parties in this House and asked them to sign up to this sort of accessibility legislation. Let me tell you which parties agreed to do so. Labour agreed to do so—everyone in fact except the party facing me except the National Party. So it is a little rich to hear from the member opposite that we are failing to give voice and to give representation to the disability community from the one party in this House who refused to sign up to this legislation. This is a day of celebration and I want to also acknowledge and celebrate Minister Sepuloni who did so much of the work in setting up the ministry and I want to acknowledge and congratulate our first Minister of the new ministry—Whaikaha - Ministry of Disabled People—Minister Williams. I also want to commiserate with Angie Warren-Clark who is in fact the chair of the Social Services and Community Committee lucky enough to be in a position to investigate this bill. She is unfortunately stuck in the hellhole of Montreal! She has however texted me to ask me to say to you Madam Speaker that she is so delighted to be chairing the select committee—not at the moment she is not; I am the Acting Chair—to create the best legislation we can for our disability community. She asked me to say: We really want to support the disabled community to participate in the submissions process." Therefore it gives me particular joy to have heard Minister Williams comment about her support for a longer process for submissions. In social services we have spent some time investigating issues where we have wanted the voices of the disability community to come forward—and similarly we have wanted the voices of other groups who often struggle to access places like Parliament including young people. We have a history in the last year of experimenting with ways and means to increase the accessibility of our submissions process and we will be delighted to take that experience further and to try to make our process even more accessible as we go. So thank you to the Minister for facilitating us to do our job properly.The real fundamental kaupapa of this bill is "Nothing about us without us". And thus this bill does two things. The first is that it sets up this advisory committee whose job is to give recommendations to the Minister as to where the barriers are and what to do to remove them. Now the committee as is set out in the bill will be nominated by a community nominations panel and a Māori nominations panel both of whom are charged to make their nominations from within the disability community itself to make sure they access across the range of the disability community and also that they include whānau and caregivers so that their voices are also heard. "Nothing about us without us" is the watchword. But you see we cannot begin to set regulations and deadlines and all of those important things that will come until we actually know what the community want and they themselves are going to need something to help them get there. And that is data. Unless we have the data as to what is going on out there we are not going to be able to enable them to give those recommendations. Thus the other crucial part of this bill is an information-gathering power because the sad fact is that too many Governments in the past have failed to gather the data. We are rectifying that fact.That is set beside the very strong processes for accountability for the annual review of how we are doing and where we are up to from the committee; the strong administrative support they're going to get from the department itself; and finally the five-year annual review of this piece of legislation so that when we are ready to go to deadlines and regulations we will be able to. These are all parts of what is an extremely progressive extremely worthwhile bill and I commend it to the House."