Fire and Emergency New Zealand (Levy) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Fire and Emergency New Zealand (Levy) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

I would first like to take this opportunity to commend all those involved in battling the Tasman fires and ensuring our community’s safety and well-being. The response to these fires also showed the benefit that Fire and Emergency New Zealand—a modern, unified fire and emergency service—can deliver. Fire and emergency services have become our first defence against the effects of a changing climate, responding to flooding, landslips, and bigger and more intense wildfires.

The bill amends the Fire and Emergency New Zealand Act 2017, which I will refer to as the FENZ Act. The FENZ Act reformed the law relating to fire and emergency services, bringing together rural and urban fire services to form a single organisation: Fire and Emergency New Zealand, or FENZ. The bill’s amendments all relate to the levy-based system to fund FENZ.

The bill amends the commencement date for sections 80 to 140 of the FENZ Act. These sections provided for a new levy-based system. They are due to come into force by 1 July 2019, while a transactional regime currently applies. The levy system is implemented by insurers and brokers. Insurers and brokers would need to make considerable changes to their systems before sections 80 to 140 come into force. It has become apparent that these changes will not be able to be made before 1 July 2019. This bill therefore changes the backstop commencement date for sections 80 to 140 to 1 July 2021, with the ability for this to be brought forward by Order in Council.

Further to this, I intend to table a Supplementary Order Paper at the committee of the whole House stage which amends the commencement date to 1 July 2024. The 1 July 2024 date will allow time for a first-principles review of the funding model for FENZ. Funding FENZ through a levy on property insurance is largely a carry-over from the previous fire services regime. This model of funding has some weaknesses, such as: property owners who choose not to insure are able to free ride as they do not pay a levy but still benefit from FENZ services, charging a levy on insurance can increase insurance costs and can reduce the incentive for people to properly insure their properties, and levy collection is complex to administer for insurers and FENZ levy income may become uncertain as the commercial insurance market evolves. Shifting the date out to 1 July 2024 will prevent the need for further amendment to the FENZ Act if a new funding model is to be implemented for FENZ. It also ensures that FENZ will remain funded for the duration of the review.

I would like to thank the Governance and Administration Committee for its constructive consideration of this bill. I would also like to thank the 10 submitters on the bill, particularly those who made time to make oral submissions to the committee. The committee has recommended amendments to the bill in response to some of the issues raised in submissions. The Government supports these recommendations, and amendments have been made to reflect them.

Under current policy settings, public museums and galleries pay a levy on insurance for their collections. This bill will exempt the collections of cultural heritage bodies like public museums, art galleries, whare taonga, and archival institutions from 1 July 2019. This exemption applies to items or collections that these cultural heritage bodies exhibit or conserve to enable public education, public enjoyment, or the preservation of the items. The exemption doesn’t extend to their buildings, and the institutions must be non - profit-making and open to the public. This measure will ensure that institutions which are guardians of items of significant cultural value, many of which are irreplaceable, aren’t charged a levy out of proportion with their likely need for FENZ services.

The committee recommended amending clause 8 to insert a definition of “cultural heritage bodies” for the purposes of the levy exemption. The definition of cultural heritage bodies requires museums, whare taonga, archives, and art galleries to meet a list of relevant criteria. The committee also recommended that archives and cultural heritage items be defined to provide greater clarity around what institutions to which the exemption will apply. The exemption was set to come into force when the new levy regime was implemented. Now that the implementation date of the new levy regime has been deferred, exempting collections held by cultural heritage bodies from 1 July 2019 will achieve the Government’s policy intent straight away, despite the delay in implementation.

My Supplementary Order Paper will also exempt the New Zealand Defence Force from a levy. This exemption recognises the significant contribution the New Zealand Defence Force makes to fire services in the community. The committee recommended amending clause 5 to insert a new subsection (4A) into section 141 of the Act, which empowers the making of levy regulations. This subsection provides for a minimum four-month lead time from when levy rates are set to the date on which they come into force. This will give insurers certainty around when they will need to implement changes to levy rates.

I am pleased that this bill is continuing to progress through the House. It will allow us to make sure that our fire services are appropriately funded for the very important work they do to keep our communities safe. Again, I would like to thank the select committee for their efforts and commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. First of all, I would also like to acknowledge all the firefighters, women and men, who have been contributing to this country, particularly in the recent incidents in Nelson with the fire, floods, and different incidents which they respond to. I want to thank all women and men, paid and volunteers, for their contribution and the services they provide to us.

We will be supporting the second reading of this bill, but definitely, as the Minister of Internal Affairs has just mentioned that she will be introducing a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) in the committee stage, we will go through that SOP and see what the Minister is proposing with those changes.

When we were in the select committee process, we did ask the officials: is there any other proposal which is being considered or not? The answer was: “We don’t know if there is any other proposal; we are working on this.” That’s a little bit disappointing, because if that process was in place, we should have been informed about it. We could have gone through the select committee process, which was very comprehensive and thoroughly discussed this bill. As you can see, the submitters were very few but the quality of the submissions was quite high. Five oral submissions were heard under the leadership of the chair, Brett Hudson, and other members also provided a lot of input in this consideration. I think that was very important, that if there was something coming up, the select committee should have been informed about it, but it was not informed, and now, suddenly, we hear from the Minister that there will be an SOP to change this regime. This is a bit of a disappointment.

In the Governance and Administration Committee, there were a few recommendations made by the committee to report back, and I would like to touch upon them. The exemption to the public collection was made because we know that people have interest in artefacts and things which are in archives, and, proportionately, they would have to pay a lot of levy for this service to ensure that the insurance for these archives and artefacts is not affected. That’s why this exemption was given.

Clauses 40 to 140 in the Act, which were supposed to come into force from 1 July 2019, provided the new levy regime. Insurers and brokers will implement the regime, but they will first need to make considerable changes to their systems. That is why the committee decided that the implementation of these clauses may be changed to 1 July 2021. It was also proposed that if they are to be commenced before 1 July 2021, the Order in Council can change that date.

As I was mentioning, the public collections are exempted from this, and the Minister just mentioned that in the SOP she will be proposing, the Defence Force will be also exempted from this levy. I think that is a welcome step, and we know that the Defence Force are also always available to help the people of this country.

There was another discussion that once the levy is finalised and approved by Cabinet, how much time should be given to the insurers to implement that? Originally, it was proposed that it should be three months from the finalisation of such levies, but the committee discussed that and it was proposed that it should be a minimum of four months instead of three months. That is a reasonable time for the insurers to implement their upgrading of their software and the policies.

The committee also recommended amending clause 5 to insert a new subsection (4A) into section 141 of the Act which empowers the making of levy regulations, and that is because the levy can be changed every two to three years, as is appropriate for the Minister to consider. It is very important that we have to give them the lead-in time so that they can implement it.

I think, overall, this bill is a good bill, but now we have got a new situation where a Supplementary Order Paper will be introduced by the Minister. But meanwhile, in the second reading, we will be supporting this bill. Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker.

Thank you very much, Mr Assistant Speaker. I stand to support this bill, but what I would like to say is what a pragmatic Minister. You know, there was an issue identified. It was going to take insurance companies and insurance brokers longer to actually get their systems sorted to allow them to implement this in a way they could do without causing a whole lot of grief, and so what she did was she came back to Parliament and said, “We like the structure of what we’re doing, but we just need a little bit more time. We need to make sure that Fire and Emergency New Zealand is well funded”—it just makes sense; pragmatic—“but give us a bit more time so we get these systems right.”

You know, it’s an absolute pleasure, working with the Hon Tracey Martin. She does things well and she drives through change that really matters. Of that, there is no doubt whatsoever, and, of course, it is important that the Fire Service—well, it’s not the Fire Service any more, is it?—that Fire and Emergency New Zealand are well funded.

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: Fire and Emergency New Zealand—but they still provide a service.

That’s a very good point that the Hon Ruth Dyson mentions. You know, we tend to think of the fire service as men and women who fight fires, but they do a hell of a lot more, and as an MP with quite a rural rump, I know the fantastic work that men and women—mainly volunteers, as Mr McAnulty was—do. Mainly volunteers spend a spend a lot of their time—time they could be spending with their families—actually out there, helping the community. In fact, they are integral to the health and well-being of our communities, and I salute them.

I suppose the importance of Fire and Emergency New Zealand was clearly highlighted and probably no more so than during the 15 March terrorist attacks, when 40 firefighters and personnel helped in the comms centre. Their service and help was invaluable in ensuring that everything possible was done to help victims and their families, and I thank them for their service.

I do commend this bill to the House. It’s a pragmatic solution to an issue that arose, and, once again, good on the Hon Tracey Martin for making change that matters and getting us under way and just making it happen. Good on her.

I rise in support of the Fire and Emergency New Zealand (Levy) Amendment Bill as it has been reported back from the select committee—

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: Which select committee?

—which is the best select committee in Parliament, Ms Dyson—the Governance and Administration Committee. It’s the hardest-working, with the best results, but, you know, I want to be bit modest at least.

To echo the comments others have made about the services that our Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) people provide the length of New Zealand, it’s just outstanding, not only in the recent Nelson-Tasman fires, of course, and the horrific incident in Christchurch on 15 March but, actually, every day. Every day of the year, we have FENZ personnel, whether they are paid or volunteers, responding to structural fires, rural fires, and other incidents such as accidents on the road and many other first responses. They perform an enormous service for New Zealanders.

They deserve to be recognised for that, and they deserve to be properly funded for that. That’s why we had no problem supporting this amendment bill as it was introduced and worked on through the select committee. It would have been great if the industry and officials had been able to settle on the new levy rates in time for the original go-live date, if you will, of 1 July 2019. But, cognisant that they were unable to do that, we were happy to support an idea that would allow a two-year extension for them to work through the intricacies, because it is a matter of intricacies and nuances and scenario modelling to understand how a setting in one area may have some flow-on impacts in areas. We were seeking to make the funding through insurance as equitable as it can be through that model.

I’d like to acknowledge and thank officials for their work on this bill in select committee. They listened to submissions. They listened to committee members, who quite forcefully—quite forcefully—articulated some of the views.

We re-articulated some of the views that submitters had made, and they came back with a revised lead-in time for rate changes. They also came back—our drafters. The Parliamentary Counsel Office don’t get a lot of mention in this House, but they came back with an exceptionally good way of drafting the exemption for whare taonga and museums—what they call the cultural heritage bodies. It was so much better, because the easy way to do it would have been to just list a series of institutions and businesses and museums as being exempted, which would have required Parliament to make changes anytime there was an addition or deletion to that list. Instead, they put the effort in to come up with I think a very pragmatic and a very good definition that allows the intent and for change over time to be realised in a way that wouldn’t require Parliament to be passing further amendment bills.

But I just want to finish by touching on the paper that was tabled at the end of our consideration which was from the Minister, noting an attempt to extend and delay further the new levy’s—whatever that levy might be—go-live date so that she could review the funding models from a first-principles basis, because that was already done. It was done by the Government and the officials before the original bill was introduced.

We took the opportunity to ask officials what had changed, and there was no principle-based change to require another look at this. In fact, they hadn’t changed their views on how the funding should be done at all. They entered this amendment bill’s select committee stage believing that a levy-based model was the best model, and right up to the point until the Minister issued this letter to the select committee, they still believed that that was the best and most appropriate funding model. Instead, New Zealand insurance payers and also the insurance industry are going to be left with up to two further years of delay while the Government gazes at its navel a bit and tries to redo the work that’s already been done—trying to somehow create gold out of a base metal—when the work of the trade-off of understanding what the equities and inequities of each option might be, the distortions that one option might introduce over another, and why the Government and officials in the previous term settled on the levy-based model as being the best of the options that were available.

So we’re almost certainly going to arrive back at the same point, but meanwhile levy payers will have up to an additional two years of paying what appears to be—according to the annual review that was recently tabled in this House—an overcharge, because through the fire levy, the accounts for FENZ have grown a great deal quicker than anticipated and expenses haven’t risen in line with those. So the very simple deduction is that people are paying too much today on their levies, and—here you go—this could actually go on not just for one or two more years but for up to four years. I think that’s an absolute travesty for hard-working Kiwis who are looking to make ends meet while they fly in the face of rising grocery bills, a higher cost of living through higher petrol taxes, and, of course, also potential capital gains taxes and any other tax the Government might be thinking of imposing.

So, actually, this is not a trivial matter. It’s not a trivial matter to simply say, “We’ll take an extra two or three years to have another look at potential funding models.”

I’ll leave just one salutary message for the insurance industry, who I believe had something to do with bringing about this relook at the funding model, and that is to be careful what you wish for, because you might not get what you like. I draw their attention to the New Zealand First speeches on the first FENZ bill, where they all said that they felt that the levy model was wrong and that, instead, it should be funded through compulsory third-party insurance. I can tell members this and I tell New Zealand this: the insurance industry—the Insurance Council and their members—are not going to support the idea of compulsory insurance, where they are legally forced to provide insurance to people who don’t meet any risk profile that they would normally accept.

So I leave them with this message. They may appear on the face of it to have got a wee pause that they would have liked, but they’d better be a bit careful about what they end up with.

None the less, we will support the bill as it has emerged from select committee. We reserve our position on the bill in the committee of the whole House stage.

Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. Look, I was in a really positive mood until about three minutes ago. There’s just so much here to discuss, but, first of all, can I thank the Governance and Administration Committee—remember, the kūmara doesn’t talk about its own sweetness, but, as I’m a member of the committee, I’ll have to just talk a little bit about it. Well done to Governance and Administration, but can I just reiterate the words of Minister Nash, who spoke about the hard work that Minister Martin did in shepherding this piece of work through Cabinet.

💬 Hon Kris Faafoi: Hard-working Minister.

Hard-working Minister. Look, it’s short and sharp, and I think he’s summed it up really well.

I didn’t know much about the restructure until the self-appointed fire officer for the Wairarapa, none other than the “Commander McAnulty”, took me through some of the ins and outs of the outstanding piece of work here. It’s so outstanding because it’s so simple, and that’s what’s being spoken about in the House this afternoon. For an organisation that has been serving Kiwis for 150 years, and intends to do that for another 150-plus, this is the right structure to move it forward.

I was fortunate enough that when this came through it was the international volunteer firefighters’ day not long after, and I managed to visit the two fire stations within the electorate and two on the border, and what I saw there was a whole lot of men and women who were absolutely, literally pumping to serve and to educate—more than fight fires these days, I found out. It’s a little different to the role that some of them may have come into in the service or in Fire and Emergency New Zealand when they first started, but now a big education component forms part of their role.

The one aspect I’d like to talk about more is the exemption around those public museums, art galleries, and whare taonga, because that’s quite crucial. The example that Minister Nash used previously was around Te Papa, and that lit my ears up to say, “So what would the impact be?” For them, it would have seen their levy go from $3 million to $4.5 million—that’s a 50 percent increase. I’m really proud that with our creative capital arts hat on, we were able to say, “Look, these are the sorts of things that will be exempt. These are the sorts of services that are important.” But, more than that, these entities can’t afford it, and in the compromise there had obviously been some work undertaken to ensure that those entities were going to be exempted.

I heard what the submitters said. They were certainly proud of the work that had been done. Can I just reinforce the previous speaker, Brett Hudson, before he got a little negative—but that’s understandable on a Thursday afternoon. He was confused in what bill he was talking on.

💬 Kieran McAnulty: That’s why he fell off his bike.

He fell off the truck—the fire truck—maybe. Look, they did come back with some slight amendments and some feedback on what had been proposed, and that’s made this all the better. Can I say, this is really one of those bills that really shouldn’t be here, because it’s just fixing something up, but it is, and it’s going to do a great job. I commend this to the House. Kia ora.

I just want to start by acknowledging the hard-working—extremely hard-working—Governance and Administration Committee. I’d like to acknowledge the chair, Brett Hudson. I think this is the third bill this week from the—

💬 Kieran McAnulty: Name dropper.

And the deputy chair. I think this is the third bill this week I’ve spoken on that’s come back from the hard-working select committee.

I’d also like to pay tribute to the hard-working and excellent work that our fire and emergency services do across our communities and across the country. In the role as the MP for Clutha-Southland, I’m fortunate enough to visit many of these organisations. They’re wonderful people, and they actually do a lot more than just attend fires: they assist police, they help ambulance services, search and rescue, attend car crashes, and, quite often, they’re actually the centrepiece of many rural communities—they’re the glue that holds them together—and it also gives rural people an opportunity for social interaction.

They have changed a lot over the last 50 years. It’s not a matter for turning up to fires now. They have to have weekly training nights. When they attend fires, they then have to go the next day to clean down the gear. So there’s a lot more that they do compared to back in the day. They’re often the ones that go rushing towards dangerous scenes when everyone else is flying the other way. I’ll never forget, last December I called the fire service. There was an out-of-control bushfire down the road, and I can still feel the sense of relief when I saw them coming towards me.

In New Zealand, we have a proud history of our Fire Service. This legislation that we’re discussing today dates back to the 1970s. As I’ve mentioned, the firefighter’s role has changed a lot since then. We need a fire and emergency service fit for the 21st century and that recognises all of those services that I spoke about briefly before. We need structure in the law to reflect that. In 2017, Parliament passed the legislation—the Fire and Emergency New Zealand Act—to enable us to better support them and their services. For those reasons, I commend this bill to the House.

E Te Māngai o Te Whare, tēnā koe. The Green Party is very pleased to support the Fire and Emergency New Zealand (Levy) Bill. We also recognise that, with her proposal to table a Supplementary Order Paper to extend the commencement date in order to enable a review of the funding mechanisms for Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ), Minister Martin is, again, highlighting this Government’s commitment to ensuring that our critical fire and emergency services—which we saw, obviously, in action in the Tasman fire, mobilising very quickly. There was an extensive effort to get those fires under control and to protect the communities.

The fire and emergency services need to have a very secure funding basis. And, of course, the levy, which this bill deals with, has been the traditional way of doing that—that levy that falls on people when they’re paying their insurance. But that does have a number of shortcomings. It does allow for free riders, in terms of benefiting from fire and emergency services without contributing to the cost of those services. So it’s not necessarily equitable. It has led to some quite significant increases in costs for some of our cultural institutions, like Te Papa. So allowing time for a proper review of how we fund this critical part of ensuring that communities stay safe, to me, is really, really sensible, because the Government wants to ensure that we move to a funding model that is stable, that is universal, that is equitable, that is predictable, but that also has some flexibility in it. Of course, no one option will meet all of those criteria, but we can potentially do better than the insurance-based model that we’ve had to date.

So I’m sure that that review will look at just what the options are here: how do we really improve the funding model? This bill—by changing the commencement date—is giving more leeway for that to happen. But I think the response—in terms of the Tasman fires—was a tribute to the benefits of combining fire and emergency services in one organisation. There’s been a huge amount of effort that’s been put into creating a single organisational culture, ensuring that everyone works well together, and I, and so many other New Zealanders, are very grateful for the work of FENZ. So I commend this bill to the House. I’m very pleased to support it.

Fire and Emergency New Zealand, or FENZ, was established on 1 July 2017. The purpose of that was to better meet the needs of New Zealanders. So, basically, we have evolving or changing needs for emergency services. Now, the new, unified entity is based on forty organisations with 14,000 people—so a very large workforce. And we can see the benefits now, as we have seen in FENZ’s response to the Nelson-Tasman fire.

Now, under the Fire and Emergency New Zealand Act, a new levy system is supposed to take place on 1 July 2019—this year. It has become clear that this date will not work and therefore we need to somehow postpone or delay the commencement of that particular new regime. So that’s the purpose of this particular bill. So this bill—all the amendments—are related to the new levy-based regime, the system.

Now, we understand the Government is planning to introduce a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) at the committee stage extending the date of commencement of the new levy-based system until 1 July 2024, so we’ll see what’s going to happen there. But at this stage we support this postponement or delay because we believe that is more practical. Of course, the Governance and Administration Committee received about 10 submissions; six of the submissions made comments about this particular amendment relating to the postponement of the commencement date. All of them supported this particular amendment. The committee, of course, unanimously supported this amendment. Now the question is: what will happen after this? So at this stage, we will support this bill, and at committee stage we’ll see what’s going to happen for that SOP. Thanks.

This is a split call. Five minutes—Greg O’Connor.

Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. Again, as many of the previous speakers have discussed, fire is a big part of our lives and certainly the fire services now known as Fire and Emergency New Zealand are something that will touch us all at some stage. I know in my own electorate, I have three volunteer fire brigades and some professionals there, and I did get some idea of how some of the costs are incurred. The Newlands Volunteer Fire Brigade—of which there are several members who work around this building; fine men and women that they are—when the call went up to go to Nelson earlier this year, they were there. They were on the ferry, they were down there with their very nice machine, and when they came back they were persuaded to leave it down there. Much to their chagrin, when it arrived back it had been slightly bastardised—I think that’s a parliamentary word—and they were required to replace several bits while the machine was there without them. But replace them they did and they are now back, the fine group of young men and women they are, ready to protect their community of Newlands.

That just gives some idea—in fact, just sitting right next to me is a former member of the Wairarapa or Masterton volunteer fire brigade. Again, it just shows the calibre of the people that are out there protecting us day and night and prepared to come to our assistance. That same pragmatism that those young men and women, and some older men and women, do display is being displayed with this legislation, because here we have before us—and, again, the Hon Tracey Martin is to be congratulated.

There was an issue. Clearly, when you get a major change—and, again, some of the speakers before me have spoken about the new Fire and Emergency, the merging of rural fire services, and that has not been a situation that has happened without some angst, some considerable need for reorganisation. Those of us who have been involved in mergers and reorganisation will know that there are always a few unforeseen consequences of that—costs, etc. And that’s left the insurers just a little—of course, with the whole levy change having to rearrange the way they collect their levies, and this is what this legislation is about: to ensure that they get the time to do what it is they need to do.

Of course, again, being a pragmatic Minister, it was also while doing that it’s been apt—the bill was always intended to exempt museums, public art galleries, and whare taonga, and rather than keep them in the current system until the law changes either next year or by 2021, it was really rather pointless continuing the levy on those three types of buildings. So again, in a magnificently pragmatic manner, the levies on those three buildings are now going to be lifted. They are places, again—as we talked about fire being part of our lives, as are museums, art galleries, and, for a certain part of the community, whare taonga. So again, a pragmatic piece of legislation that will benefit a pragmatic group of young men and women—and older men and women—who look after us, and so I have no hesitation in commending this to the House.

Lawrence Yule—five minutes.

It’s my pleasure to take a short call on this bill at this stage, and in doing so I also reiterate what other members have said. I have the utmost respect for our men and women in New Zealand, young and old, that are firefighters, whether they’re volunteers or in the professional brigade.

Many of you may not know about the transition to get to where we got to in 2017. It did involve some significant amalgamations of local authority forces, who principally supplied rural fire services, with a professional service. I was quite heavily involved in my former role in getting to that point, and it is not surprising to me that we are asking for some more time for the insurance industry to adapt, because what has fundamentally happened is we have changed the way fire and emergency services are funded and we have, at the same stage, put a new onus on the insurance industry to look at what is funded and what is not.

But in this very short call I wish to make, I do want to acknowledge one point, and the Hon Ron Mark will probably be aware of it. When you look at how you fund fire and emergency services, there are really only three ways. The first is through an insurance-based product, the second is to a direct levy somehow on to the household, or the third is through local authority rates. And all those options have been looked at. They were all looked at in 2017 and before. While we’re happy to support what’s being proposed at this stage, I think there’s going to be a very serious conversation around the committee of the whole House to look at why those options were looked at in 2017 and we’ve arrived at this option.

It is a surprise to me to hear from the Minister the Hon Tracey Martin that she’s seeking to extend things out to 2024. All these issues were looked at before. None of them are perfect. But despite the lack of perfection, the insurance-based model was chosen as being the best, and I’d very much doubt that in the next stage of the committee of the whole House we’re going to see another model. I think we need to be careful, as a previous colleague of mine has just said. We need to be careful what we ask for, because I know that if you ask local authorities in New Zealand as to whether they want to be responsible for the funding or new rating of fire and emergency services on top of their rates, when they are not accountable for the service themselves, you’re going to get into a very interesting conversation. Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker.

For over 150 years, fire service organisations have protected our communities from fire. Now, they’ve taken many different forms, but they’ve evolved as the requirements upon them from their communities have also evolved and thus today we’ve heard many references to the fact that the New Zealand Fire Service is now Fire and Emergency New Zealand. Now, when this merger of the urban and rural fire services was first mooted, I was a little sceptical because I was fully aware of the longstanding tradition of both services and I was concerned about how they would merge together to continue their provision of service. I certainly wasn’t concerned about the professionalism of the service and the people that volunteer their time and their commitment and also those that are career firefighters. That was never in question, but the structural changes were a concern.

I don’t necessarily hold those concerns now, but what is clear—and the reason why we’ve had to bring this bill in—is that it is a complex change that we’ve seen. It is one that reflects the changing requirements of Fire and Emergency New Zealand, for we know that firefighters do not just deal with fires; in fact, structural fires are a small percentage of many brigades’ call-outs. It could be fires on a farm or in a forest. It could, and I regret to say, be a car accident or dealing, particularly in small communities, with death, including suicides.

So as the requirements on Fire and Emergency New Zealand continue to evolve, so does the need to ensure that the funding mechanism that we have in place for that service is up to date and fit for purpose, and so good on the Minister for bringing this particular bill forward.

I do not share the concerns that have been raised on the other side of the House, because I know that any concerns will be ironed out as the parliamentary process continues.

💬 Brett Hudson: Overconfidence.

I note that Brett Hudson from the other side of the House—who dragged on a fair bit in his speech, I’ve got to say. It could be, perhaps, that he knows his time in this House is limited, so every time he gets up to speak he may as well make the most of it. I imagine that is the case.

I do not share his concern that there is a chance that the levies are taking too much money from people, because I know through my time at the fire brigade that when we—it was urban brigade then; I never served under Fire and Emergency New Zealand, not when it was fully implemented, anyway. We’d go to a forest fire and we’d join up with our rural brigades right around Wairarapa, and these rural brigades wouldn’t have the adequate gear. Some didn’t have enough boots. Some had a truck that was possibly older than the member sitting to my right, Greg O’Connor—and if you can’t pick it up at home on the cameras, that’s quite old, ladies and gentlemen. The point is that if we are going to—oh, no, actually, I withdraw that comment, because the members on the other side are just as old as you. I apologise.

The point is that we have brigades—predominantly volunteer brigades—in our rural areas who are committing themselves 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in quite possibly some of the most deadly and dangerous situations, and they do not have adequate provision of gear. Now, I know there’s been a lot of effort going into that, but I do not share the concerns raised by the previous members around the levy being too high at this stage. I think this is a marvellous bill. It needs to happen. It’s pragmatic. I’m pleased that so far all the parties in this House have indicated support, but I think that as we move through this process, any concerns will be addressed quite easily.

Touching—touching—from Kieran McAnulty. A touching faith—touching faith—in the Government. This side of the House, not so much—not so much. I think the fears that were expressed by Lawrence Yule over a funding mechanism yet to be determined, and his fears on the impact on local community, are well founded. I also share and endorse the comments of Lawrence Yule, who should know a thing or two about local government and the impact of Government policies in terms of added costs to ratepayers. We—I can guarantee this to the House—will be keeping a very close eye on what Minister Martin brings through in terms of a funding model towards 2024. We will have a very, very close interest, unlike the touching—touching, touching—trust of the list MP based in Wairarapa. Thank you.

Tēnā koe, Madam Assistant Speaker. Look, I don’t wish to labour the point, but I want to thank many of the members across the House for their contributions. If I can add something, it’s an admiration of how brave the Minister Tracey Martin is. As she mentioned in her speech in this, the second reading of this bill, she will be introducing a Supplementary Order Paper, which no doubt will cause some robust debate in this House.

Everyone in this House knows that when you undertake—when one undertakes; sorry, Madam Assistant Speaker—a first-principles review, you’re looking at something very significant here. You want to be able to give it the time where, I’m sure, members of the public and other people relative to the Fire and Emergency New Zealand sector will be able to make a contribution to bring their voice to the debate. She’s already set out the deadline, or the time line, in front of us for that piece of work, and I admire how brave the Minister is to take on such a challenge.

A first-principles review of legislation is something one doesn’t take on lightly, and I hope that isn’t missed on members right across this House. So I want to acknowledge her and, of course, share the acknowledgments of the House in praising the fire and emergency services across this country. I look forward to seeing this bill continue on into the House. As one member has already previously mentioned, it’s taken some time to come this far already. I remember in the last term of Parliament, we debated a significant change in Fire and Emergency New Zealand, and it’s important that we continue to do the good work. I look forward to being part of a good Parliament that will make sure that this bill goes through the test that it deserves.

Bill read a second time.