Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill

on behalf of the Minister of Civil Defence: I move, That the Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Government Administration Committee to consider the bill. At the appropriate time I intend to move that the bill be reported to the House by a date that is 6 months from the day the bill receives its first reading. This bill will amend the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act 2002. It will make a significant difference for communities across the country hit by our most frequent emergencies: those of small to moderate size, often created by the impact of floods, storms, and natural hazards. This bill is about helping communities get back on their feet more quickly after an emergency.

When there is an emergency over time the focus switches from response to recovery, and we need to better manage that transition. Historically most attention has been given to preparing for and responding to an event. However, as we have seen in the Manawatū-Whanganui region following the severe storm in June, the clean-up and the recovery phase can involve a huge amount of work. The new legislation will give clarity to those leading this work and help ensure it can be carried out as swiftly and effectively as possible. It will do this by providing the appropriate authority for those directing, coordinating, and managing the recovery. Strengthening the statutory framework for recovery from emergencies is one of the top priorities for the Minister of Civil Defence. By beefing up the legislative framework for recovery we will help communities recover from small to moderate emergencies more quickly and in better shape.

“Recovery” is defined in clause 4 of the bill as “the co-ordinated efforts and processes used to bring about the immediate, medium-term, and long-term holistic regeneration and enhancement of a community following an emergency”. Recovery activities broadly mean those carried out under this legislation or any civil defence emergency management plan after an emergency occurs including the assessment and ongoing monitoring of the needs of the community affected by the emergency and the co-ordination and integration of planning decisions, actions, and resources. This includes measures to support the regeneration, restoration, and enhancement of communities across the four environments, these being the built, natural, social, and economic environments, and the cultural and physical well-being of individuals in their community. This also includes measures to enable community participation in recovery planning and new measures to reduce risks from natural hazards and build resilience.

In October the Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery introduced the Greater Christchurch Regeneration Bill. Whereas that bill needs to target a specific set of circumstances, the Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill needs to provide a flexible, adaptable, and scalable framework that is applicable to the consequences of any future emergency. Recovery needs to begin on day one of the response to an emergency, but it can be complex. It involves many parties, many resources, and difficult decisions. With the current lack of legislative clout or provisions for recovery we have been running a system that has often relied on goodwill and relationships to get things done.

This bill creates a framework that will better support recovery management to ensure that it is timely, effective, and focused. It provides authority and a stronger mandate for those directing, coordinating, and managing recovery. The bill conforms to the core civil defence emergency management principles of acting locally, coordinating regionally, and supporting nationally, which support local devolution. It also includes better managing the transition once the response is dealt with to move into a greater focus on recovery. It does this while ensuring a principled approach for the use of extraordinary powers. Once the legislation is enacted we will see a legislative mandate for recovery managers, a requirement to plan and prepare for recovery in advance of an emergency, and powers to support the transition into the initial recovery through the transition notice mechanism. The bill also establishes a permanent legislative authority for the Government’s financial assistance to local government for eligible response and recovery costs.

I want to briefly touch on some of the key features of the legislation. The first relates to recovery managers and planning for recovery. The bill establishes the role of national recovery manager and allows the Director of Civil Defence and Emergency Management to delegate certain functions and powers to the national recovery manager. It allows the national recovery manager to provide national and additional support to a civil defence emergency management group if the recovery is beyond the capability and capacity of the group to manage and coordinate. It requires each civil defence emergency management group to appoint a group recovery manager and alternative persons for the role and establishes powers of delegation for group recovery managers. It enables a civil defence emergency management group to appoint a local recovery manager at their discretion, disestablishes the role of recovery coordinator provided for in the Act, and requires that civil defence emergency management groups prepare strategic recovery plans to complement those currently required in group plans.

The next highlight is that the bill enables civil defence emergency management groups to better transition from response to recovery. Currently the response powers available under a state of emergency cease when a state of emergency ends. During the transition phase, after the response ends, diversion of resources to business as usual can threaten the ability to fully recover from an emergency. This is not just an issue of getting things done quickly. It may impair the ability to recover in the longer term or may destabilise what was achieved during the recovery. That transition phase is critical.

The bill creates transition notices, and these will provide a defined subset of emergency powers to support the transition from response into focused recovery. There will be two types of transition notice: local and national. This is consistent with the principle of devolution to local authorities and offers the ability to appropriately and proportionately target the use of powers to a particular event. Just as a national state of emergency is very rare, the issue of a national transition notice is also likely to be very rare. A range of criteria will be taken into account when issuing a transition notice: the area affected by the emergency; whether the focus of activities is moving from response to recovery, including but not limited to whether a state of emergency is about to be terminated; and whether it is reasonable and necessary in the public interest to invoke extraordinary powers to manage, coordinate, and direct immediate recovery activities so as to ensure a timely and effective recovery in the long term.

A local transition notice could also be put in place by a mayor or an elected representative of the local authority, or a person of appropriate authority appointed in advance by the civil defence and emergency management group and chosen group members. The Minister may also put in place a local transition notice where he or she considers one is necessary but the local authority or civil defence and emergency management group has not issued one. The Minister of Civil Defence could also issue a national transition notice. This is consistent with their ability to issue a state of emergency declaration under the Act, but I also want to note that a Minister has never declared a state of local emergency under the Act, so I think it is unlikely that the Minister would ever need to issue a local transition notice.

In some cases emergencies will generate such impacts of sufficient severity that the recovery may be very challenging initially but the safety of public and property is not in immediate danger and so no state of emergency might be declared. In these situations the Minister of Civil Defence’s approval will be required before a local transition notice could be issued. The Minister will need to have regard to whether invoking the powers associated with a transition notice is in the public interest and is necessary or desirable to ensure a timely and effective recovery. These safeguards are in addition to the usual public notification requirements.

A transition notice should exist only as long as it is necessary to carry out vital and immediate recovery activities that could not otherwise be achieved during the transition phase. The maximum duration for the notices would be 28 days for local notices and 90 days for national notices respectively. The suite of powers proposed in the bill that will be available under a transition notice have been adapted from those available during a state of emergency, but, given the different demands of response and recovery, the powers are not as extensive. The powers would be able to be used only for the purpose of supporting recovery activities during the transition and must be proportionate and exercised only to the extent reasonably necessary for the public interest. Examples of situations where these powers would make a material difference to recovery include where recovery managers need to prevent people from entering land that has subsided or that may be at risk, or, for example, to conserve limited fuel resources in an isolated community. The powers would have the ability to impinge on property rights, so they come with a range of proposed safeguards. Protections against the misuse of powers will be provided by the independence of the decision maker, the procedure to be followed, the test set out above, the right of judicial review, and the availability of compensation.

Another key aspect is compensation. The Act’s current compensation sections have been extended in the bill to cover transition notice periods. Finally, the bill extends the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act’s liability sections to provide protection from liability for people who carry out activities in good faith during a transition notice period. Separate to the purely recovery-focused aspects of the bill, the bill also establishes permanent legislative authority for Crown reimbursement to local authorities for certain response and recovery activities. A permanent appropriation better recognises the Crown’s commitment to reimburse eligible response and recovery costs, provided that relevant longstanding criteria that Cabinet has agreed to are met in claims that the local authority submits. The appropriation would provide sufficient flexibility—

I am sorry, but the Minister’s time has expired.

Labour will support this bill’s referral to the select committee. In principle, we consider that the objectives of this bill are sound. Nothing is more important than keeping our families and communities safe. Our civil defence services must be ready to respond effectively to any emergency, and we must all be prepared for emergencies before they happen. I do not think anyone would disagree with that.

The four Rs, as they are described—risk reduction, readiness, response, and recovery—are the backbone of our civil defence planning, and with effective coordination and integration, they should provide robust protection and preparation for civil defence emergencies. They look good on paper, but we have to make sure that they work in practice.

Civil defence people do important work and put themselves into some very difficult, and sometimes dangerous, situations after an emergency. We have got to make sure that they have appropriate powers and abilities to do their job correctly. As I said, we will support this bill’s referral to the select committee.

We do have some concerns about the scope of the new powers and as to how robust this bill will be when put into practice. I note that this is the first of two bills signalled by the Minister of Civil Defence, Nikki Kaye, and my remarks relate to some of the notes of caution and the signal that there are areas that do not appear to be covered under this proposed legislation.

This is the first major amendment to the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act 2002. Therefore, it should provide an opportunity to overhaul the 2002 Act using recent case studies of disasters requiring a civil defence response. However, the legislative review from which this bill was born had a mandate to look at emergency recovery only. I referred to the four Rs. Well, this is only one of them, the last one: recovery. Certainly, emergency recovery was an area that needed addressing. However, we feel that taking just one component of this framework runs the risk of undermining the purpose of the original 2002 Act and may make it difficult to implement in practice. Recovery planning and training is vital, but it also has to work alongside the other three components and not in isolation. So a wider review of that current legislation should take place in order to provide holistic and clear legislative support to local government, alongside the other three Rs.

We support the inclusion of the national and local transition periods and the effort to make the move from the response phase to the recovery phase more cohesive. But when the response phase is already hindered, as was the case in Dunedin in June, the implementation of a local or a national transition period will be futile for short-term recovery.

We also support the establishment of a permanent legislative authority in managing Crown financing and reimbursing of civil defence emergencies. The “PLA”, as this is called, we hope will be fair and equitable in the allocation of Crown funding for emergencies. For example, it took 2 days for the Government to announce an initial cash injection of $250,000 for Whanganui in June with a further $2.6 million pledged 2 months later. By contrast, it took 2 weeks for Dunedin to receive a $100,000 cash injection from the Government—the only one that it would receive in the ongoing recovery effort. On the surface, the two events may not be comparable. However, the regional context is very different for both the areas, and the tendency for condensed, low-lying housing in the South Dunedin area has meant that the social cost of those June floods has been absolutely devastating. Those costs have been estimated for insurance purposes to be well over $30 million, but the true social costs will never be known because there is no counting those.

So what happens when current legislation fails, and what will this bill really do to ensure that those failures are remedied? I think those are really important questions for the select committee to answer and to look at some real case studies—I know there are a number of them. As the Minister Amy Adams, who spoke before me, mentioned, core civil defence and emergency management principles are to act locally, coordinate regionally, and support nationally. But what happens when local authorities do not act? What happens when they miscalculate the enormity of a disaster and refuse to declare a local state of emergency?

In the case of the Dunedin floods, the four Rs failed. The risk was not reduced, the city was not ready, the response was woefully inadequate, and the recovery is ongoing and costly. Local government had been provided with multiple warnings of the flood risk in South Dunedin due to a high water table. We have the recent report from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment that provides really solid evidence for that and there certainly was solid evidence available to the public and to local government before that, yet nothing was done to reduce the risk.

So what was the oversight there? The city was not ready. Local civil defence authorities were left floundering for evacuation points and volunteer bases, with notes from the first briefing of the emergency operations centre saying that the question was: “Where do we assemble people in South Dunedin?”. It was left to a local marine search and rescue group to set up a volunteer base at St Kilda, and I personally had to call the Minister of Civil Defence at midnight to put pressure on her to get some kind of response. That was not her fault. That was the issue that was not being addressed for South Dunedin in Dunedin at the time by local authorities and by civil defence.

Most of all, the response effort was woefully inadequate because no state of emergency was declared in Dunedin on 3 June. In response to my request as to why a state of emergency was not called in South Dunedin, Dunedin civil defence responded that at no time did emergency services indicate that the situation was beyond their capabilities. On that day alone, the fire service received 289 calls compared with 20 calls in total the previous Wednesday. It was so stretched that its multiple incident procedure policy had to be activated. That is triggered only when the communications end is not able to cope with the workload and it may necessitate the reduction of fire service responses to incidents. The police, fire, and ambulance services had all units committed at peak time during that flood event. To top it off, Dunedin civil defence closed its operations at 11.30 p.m. despite more than 30 of the most vulnerable citizens residing at a local rest home having to contend with constant sewage leaks and power outages. And on and on it went.

The response from local civil defence authorities fell markedly short, and this set back any meaningful recovery efforts. Had a local state of emergency been declared, the story would have almost certainly been different, but it was not, and South Dunedin is still suffering because of it.

The Dunedin floods story shows that although the four Rs legislative framework might look good on paper, in practice it is another matter, so more effort is needed to ensure that local government is both supported and held to account for its work in emergency management. Although it is good that the recommendations included in the regulatory impact statement have been included in this bill, their effectiveness is significantly reduced if the four Rs model is not working as a whole. It is all very well to have robust recovery measures, but if the local response falls short, then they are in essence meaningless. In considering this bill at the select committee these matters need to be taken into account.

It is my pleasure to take this short call on the Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill, which is being referred to the Government Administration Committee. I think that as we move towards the adjournment for this year, this bill is another example of the Government streamlining and beefing up a framework of civil defence legislation to solve real problems that are faced in New Zealand and to work towards building more resilient communities.

As the Minister said earlier, this bill is focused on moderate events that usually occur with our extreme weather conditions, such as the Manawatū floods and those floods in Dunedin talked about by the member opposite, Clare Curran. In particular, it is focused on the recovery work—the recovery phase of these emergency events. In particular, what this bill does is it establishes recovery managers and gives them powers, duties, and a role to deal with that transitional phase between first response and recovery, and a mandate to manage and coordinate that recovery, which is often an expensive phase and often takes some time. It gives an ability to work through that recovery phase expediently and efficiently.

As such, transition notices are one such tool, and as part of those transition notices the legislation gives recovery managers the opportunity to prevent people from entering on to land or into areas that may or could be dangerous, in order to, obviously, preserve human life. The second thing that the legislation allows the recovery managers to do is to conserve fuel. Fuel consumption in isolated communities, accessibility and getting to and from that isolated community, is important. Finally, shoring up dangerous structures where those structures could pose a danger to human life or other property is a very important tool in dealing with the recovery phase. As I said before, recovery takes time and it is often expensive, and we need to give our people on the ground the tools to work through the recovery phase as swiftly as possible. These tools allow us to build more resilient communities when these moderate events are faced, to work through them and get through them expediently. With that, I commend this bill to the House.

I am delighted to take a call on the Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill at this peak viewing time, in parliamentary terms. I want to begin by commending the Minister for this bill—not only the Minister in whose name it is, the Hon Nikki Kaye, but I actually want to particularly commend the Minister who spoke to this bill. I watched the Hon Amy Adams after the September 2010 quake in Canterbury, and both in her own electorate in our region and in this House she portrayed what had happened in a way that touched people around the country, and that is important to do. Sharing—I do not go on about it because their eyes glaze over, but people did need to know the impact of that.

I watched the Hon Amy Adams lead thinking and recovery in her own electorate, and I often reflected that she would have been an excellent Minister of Civil Defence, had that position not already been taken, to lead the overall recovery. So I want to genuinely commend the Minister for the work that she did at the time. I think she understands what is needed in this legislation from her own experience but also because she is a bit of a thinker on policy and structures. As my colleague Clare Curran said, Labour will be supporting this bill’s referral to the select committee.

Civil defence is one of many areas where I believe we should have a whole-of-Parliament agreement as much as possible. It does not apply to everything. There are some fundamental differences between the values and the aspirations of members in this House. Otherwise we would all be in the same party, and I just cannot imagine that happening. But in the civil defence space, it would be great if the select committee could be as open as possible, hear as many views as possible, and be given the support of the Minister in whose name this bill is to make significant alterations.

I have seen, increasingly, and to my frustration, select committees not having the independence and robust debate and decision-making powers that they have had in the past, but being entirely dominated by the Minister’s decision on which way any particular policy call should go. I think that is a major negative in the progress of this Parliament. When I first started in Parliament, which was some time ago now, select committees had much more ability to make their own decisions and be genuinely independent of a Minister. That is, sadly, not the case now. So I would encourage the Hon Amy Adams to use her powers of persuasion and talk to her colleague the Hon Nikki Kaye to see whether she can get her to give the select committee a bit of independence so that we can come back with the best possible legislation, not something that is entirely driven by bureaucrats and where the decision is made by the Minister.

In my view, this bill should be about the four Rs that are at the heart of civil defence—that is, risk reduction, readiness, response, and recovery—and that is where my first concern lies in this bill. It deals with only one of those four Rs and, frankly, the strength of one of the four is not a quarter. It is much weaker than that because it needs the entire package to make any one of the components work. If you do not have strong risk reduction, strong readiness, and a strong response you will not have a strong recovery, but here this bill is talking about just the final R, which is the recovery. It has missed out what I think are the three most important components.

We saw that in Canterbury. My colleague has described what the response was like in Dunedin to the floods. Other members have had natural disasters occur in their home areas as well. If you do not have a community structure that is resilient, where community members know each other and have the capacity to support each other through natural disasters, then the end product—the one that we are talking about in this bill—will be weaker. But nowhere in this legislation does it go to the heart of those other three components. So that is my first big concern: it is fundamentally flawed because it does not deal with what I consider are the most important things. Without those other Rs you cannot have a satisfactory recovery.

The scope of the new powers caused concern for me. We have watched in Canterbury wartime powers being used in non-wartime situations. Sometimes we wish the Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery had used them to the betterment of good people, but he did not, and other times we wish he had not used them when it suited him, and he did. So any extraordinary powers, or any powers that you would think were outside the normal range of acceptability, we will certainly be looking at with very close scrutiny.

The final point I want to make is that Labour is concerned about how robust this bill will actually be when it is put into practice. This is the first major amendment that we have had to the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act. Three years ago there were some minor amendments to the Act, but this is the first major amendment to the Act. I do not think that it is being done on the basis of looking at the complete picture from start to finish. It feels to me as if our civil defence response is still too Wellington-driven, too bureaucracy-driven, and not enough related to what happens on the ground in our communities, which is the first response starts if those other three Rs that I mentioned are addressed, and they are not in this legislation.

There are a lot of other good things in this legislation, and I am not being critical of the bureaucrats from Wellington who did the actual drafting of it. I just do not think they are as connected with communities that have been through natural disasters, as would give the best possible picture. So they are competent and able, they have done a good job in drafting this, but I think their scope has always been too narrow.

I missed the referral that the Minister mentioned in her contribution to the House, but I understand from the contribution made by Sarah Dowie that this bill is going to be referred to the Government Administration Committee, which I am privileged to chair. We look forward to that. We have had reports from the Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management over the last couple of years and they have been really interesting, but this is the first time we have had the opportunity to actually discuss how its reviews and its reports are to be reflected in legislative change, so I am looking forward to that opportunity.

I hope we get a lot of submitters. I would certainly invite people from around the country—obviously from my own region in Canterbury and from South Dunedin, where they have just been through the floods. I know that another presiding officer, Chester Borrows, has had significant flooding in his electorate. Other members will have as well. So I would ask members to leave this House tomorrow evening, as we finish, with the thought in their mind that they will know good people in the community who could make a contribution to this bill, and to invite them over their summer break to write a submission.

I am sure our committee will be generous in terms of time. We will not want the submissions in the middle of January. Our committee will be respectful of people having the right to have a holiday, but we would like to hear from people who have been through experiences that will help other communities be able to respond to them better and be able to recover in a quicker and stronger way.

Nothing is actually more important in New Zealand than ensuring that our families and our communities are as safe as possible. I have no doubt that every single member of this House shares that view, and that is what we want to do with this legislation. I do believe that the Minister should reflect on whether the scope of the bill could be expanded to make sure that those other three Rs are addressed, because otherwise I think we run the risk yet again of having a top-down imposition in a civil defence emergency situation that undervalues the contribution that the community can make and that, therefore, frustrates it and makes its recovery slower.

Everyone is well aware of Sam Johnson and the Student Volunteer Army and the amazing work they did in our region following the September 2010 and the February 2011 quakes particularly. When Sam and others from the student association went to civil defence and offered to help, they were told on day one: “There’s no place for volunteers in this. This is an emergency.”

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 10 p.m.