Wall LouisaLOUISA WALL (Labour—Manurewa): Thank you Madam Chair. We had an extensive process as others have commented on and I too want to acknowledge the collegiality across the House in terms of this bill. I just want to reiterate the purpose of the Act which is to protect the health and safety of members of the public by ensuring health practitioners are competent and fit to practise their professions via their scopes of practice but also to ensure professional competence. I want to highlight that in our contribution to the definition of professional competence it actually centres around the cultural competence aspect because of what came through from many of our submitters. We had 49 and all of the regulatory bodies submitted—there are 16 of those. They made it really clear that actually their commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi and their commitment to ensuring that they as regulatory bodies were competent in giving effect to the Treaty were incredibly important. So you'll see in section 118(i) in new clause 27(1A) we have added that it must include standards that will enable—and I quote—effective and respectful interaction with Māori)". I highlight that because that was a standard contribution across all those regulatory bodies. I think there's a growing recognition of the importance of cultural competence within clinical practice and that historically we haven't emphasised that as we might have or as we should have. In fact if you have medical competencies but don't have the cultural competencies to engage and interact with those patients that Dr Reti outlined then actually you become really ineffective. So as an addition to this bill I want to acknowledge that we were really clear in supporting the regulatory bodies' call for that specific inclusion. But in saying that it didn't actually diminish our regulatory bodies or our professionals from also engaging with other New Zealanders—new New Zealanders—and having Pacific competencies having Asian competencies. But at the heart of it was actually ensuring that the people who were receiving the services received those services in a way that upheld their culture. So I actually think it's quite a big deal us including that in the bill and that's why I've chosen to highlight it. The other aspect of the work that we did was in terms of the workforce data and we were really clear that we thought the collection of workforce data was incredibly important. Another aspect of that that we have included as an amendment to the bill is the requirement to include ethnicity and gender. The reason that we did that again was to ensure that our regulatory bodies were fit for purpose going into the future and that there were opportunities for many of our medical practitioners. I just want to highlight for people who don't know that in terms of the 16 regulatory bodies they span chiropractic dental dietician medical midwifery nursing occupational therapy optometrist osteopathic pharmacy physiotherapist podiatrist psychologist and psychotherapy. So what we're now saying is that within each of those specific sectors who provide medical services to the people of New Zealand from our perspective the workforce that provides that service is incredibly important. So the requirement now to also report against gender and ethnicity I think will provide an impetus for some of those professions to look at how they are representative and what they can do to encourage not only more women into their professions but also more Māori more Pacific and more Asian. The reason we've highlighted that was the relationship to cultural competency. It's not only individuals having cultural competency but the professional bodies and the professions themselves needed to have cultural competency and how do you demonstrate that? You actually demonstrate that through your workforce. So for me the relationship now between our focus on cultural competency and ensuring that we collect that data is going to make sure that we have a fit for purpose workforce which is absolutely the intention of this piece of legislation. So well done us—we did that as a committee and so I want to acknowledge that. Thank you."